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Episode: 400 Ben Franklin's world

Author: Liz Covart
Duration: 00:42:42

Episode Shownotes

How do historians define Ben Franklin’s “world?” What historical event, person, or place in the era of Ben Franklin do they wish you knew about? In celebration of the 400th episode of Ben Franklin’s World, we posed these questions to more than 20 scholars. What do they think? Join the

celebration and discover more about the world Ben Franklin lived in. Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/400 Sponsor Links Colonial Williamsburg Foundation Complementary Episodes Episode 114: Karin Wulf, The History of the Genealogy Episode 285: Elections & Voting in the Early Republic Episode 300: Vast Early America Episode 389: Indigenous Justice in Early America Episode 393: Politics and Political Culture in the Early American Republic Listen! Apple Podcasts Spotify Google Podcasts Amazon Music Ben Franklin's World iOS App Ben Franklin's World Android App Helpful Links Join the Ben Franklin's World Facebook Group Ben Franklin’s World Twitter: @BFWorldPodcast Ben Franklin's World Facebook Page Sign-up for the Franklin Gazette Newsletter

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_13
You're listening to an Airwave Media Podcast.

00:00:04 Speaker_03
Ben Franklin's World is a production of Colonial Williamsburg Innovation Studios. It's such a delight to think about Ben Franklin's World for this 400th episode. And first of all, I have to say congratulations.

00:00:16 Speaker_03
It's quite an achievement to make it to this milestone.

00:00:28 Speaker_10
and welcome to episode 400 of Ben Franklin's World, the podcast dedicated to helping you learn more about how the people and events of our early American past have shaped the present day world we live in. And I'm your host, Liz Kovart.

00:00:43 Speaker_10
I feel like this one snuck up on us, but here we are at episode 400. Wow. That's a lot of episodes in our back catalog. And I have to say that most of the episodes over the years, even if they're 10 years old, they stand up pretty well.

00:00:58 Speaker_10
Not only is the history relevant, but even the audio stands up pretty well. So I'm pretty pleased with that. Now to mark our achievement, we're celebrating with an episode inspired by you.

00:01:09 Speaker_10
Earlier this year, when I asked you the question for how you wanted to mark episode 400, you suggested that we ask a lot of different historians about their ideas on a lot of different topics.

00:01:20 Speaker_10
So I kind of mashed your suggestions together and Frankensteined them and came up with two questions to pose a lot of different historians.

00:01:28 Speaker_10
The two questions we're posing are what does Ben Franklin's world, and that's world with a lowercase w, what does Ben Franklin's world mean to you and how do you define this world?

00:01:39 Speaker_10
And what historical event, person, or place do you wish more people knew about in the era of Ben Franklin? From there, I invited many of our previous guests to participate in this episode by answering our questions.

00:01:52 Speaker_10
Now, what's really fun about this episode is that none of our guest historians knew who would be participating and they didn't know what their colleagues were going to say in answer to our questions.

00:02:02 Speaker_10
So I think you're going to find it really fascinating to hear the differences and similarities in all of their different answers.

00:02:09 Speaker_10
I also think you're going to love the everyday people that our different guests highlighted because they'd really like for us to know more about them. Now, before we dive into this fascinating episode, I'd like to take a moment to thank you.

00:02:23 Speaker_10
Thank you for listening and for your desire to know more about early American history. I love this period, especially the American Revolutionary Era. That's my jam. And it's always such a joy to get behind this mic and create new episodes for you.

00:02:36 Speaker_10
Because in each episode, we get to learn something new about early America.

00:02:40 Speaker_10
And we get to meet the historians who do the painstaking work to help us know more about how past peoples lived, how past events took place, and generally, how past societies functioned and informed our present day world.

00:02:54 Speaker_10
Thank you so much for sharing your time with me and for your insatiable curiosity. You have suggested so many different topics over the years, and I know we haven't covered all of them yet, but we're working towards it. So here's to you.

00:03:07 Speaker_10
Congratulations on episode 400. And with that, here's what our guest scholars had to say about what Ben Franklin's world means to them, how they define it, and what and who they wished you knew more about.

00:03:33 Speaker_15
Hi, I'm Adrienne Chastain Wimer, a professor of history at Providence College in Rhode Island. I've authored most recently, A Constitutional Culture, New England and the Struggle Against Arbitrary Rule in the Restoration Empire.

00:03:45 Speaker_15
I'm so happy to celebrate the 400th episode of Ben Franklin's World and the incredible work that goes into this podcast.

00:03:52 Speaker_15
To me, Ben Franklin's world is early America in a very broad sense, a fascinating place where people were figuring out fundamental questions about survival, about cross-cultural diplomacy, about constitutionalism, and about human rights.

00:04:07 Speaker_15
The person I wish more people knew about is Job Katanonit. He was a Nipmuc teaching pastor at Magincog. He could preach fluently in two languages. He had mastered both indigenous and English carpentry skills, and he escaped captivity twice.

00:04:23 Speaker_17
I'm Philip Reed. I'm an independent scholar, and I'm the author of The Merchant Ship in the British Atlantic and A Boston Schooner in the Royal Navy.

00:04:33 Speaker_17
For me, Ben Franklin's world means the Anglo-American Atlantic world, when both British America and Britain itself face the Atlantic Ocean, not just literally, but in their basic conceptions of their own geography.

00:04:46 Speaker_17
The ocean separated the two, but it also connected them. It was a volatile and violent world, mixing together Europeans, Africans, and indigenous Americans, whether they liked it or not, and forcing them to try to live and to live with each other.

00:05:00 Speaker_17
There were remarkable successes and abject failures. My work highlights the importance of the use of the ocean and the technology people use to travel on it and to exploit its resources.

00:05:12 Speaker_17
The centrality of the Atlantic itself to this world is what I emphasize.

00:05:17 Speaker_19
My name is Catherine O'Donnell and I'm from Arizona State University. Ben Franklin's world for me is a kind of dream. It's the dream of welcoming people into a way of thinking about history that gets us closer to the endless connectedness of the past.

00:05:34 Speaker_19
The chains of causality and relationships that link it all together and link it all to us. So that's the first part of the dream. And the second part is that that unknowability and tangled nature would make people happy rather than impatient.

00:05:50 Speaker_19
This isn't scholars being opaque or difficult. It's scholars being humbled, being astonished. People are welcome to enter this world any way they'd like.

00:06:00 Speaker_19
And they'll find it's all one story and it's a story we can never tell, which means we get to keep talking and reading together. So it's vast, but it's kind of cozy. And who do I wish people knew more about? I kept thinking about different people.

00:06:16 Speaker_19
And this morning I've been thinking about Joseph Plum Martin. So Joseph Plum Martin it is. I would like more people to know of him because when people know of him, they tend to want to know about him.

00:06:29 Speaker_19
Ordinary Courage, the title affixed to his memoir, might have pleased Martin. It's a good title. But Martin knew he wasn't ordinary.

00:06:40 Speaker_19
He knew, and his memoir reminds us, that ordinary, that word, is a fiction we've made up to blunt the strangeness of the fact that the world is made up of people we can't know, but who are as real as we are.

00:06:54 Speaker_19
War is interesting to people, so he draws people in. And his words draw people in to thinking about soldiering both as a cause and as a job, and for the most part, a terrible job.

00:07:07 Speaker_19
Learning about Martin as learning about big things, like the Pension Act of 1818, and long before that, the Articles of Confederation. It's also learning about how one man concedes with resentment for his country, and also desperately want its love.

00:07:24 Speaker_19
Martin is funny and sly and angry, and he's proud of his writing, even as he disavows all education. So I would just say, here's to Joseph Plum Martin and his world, and to Ben Franklin's world, and to its 400th episode.

00:07:46 Speaker_10
Thank you, Catherine. Next, we're going to hear from three scholars.

00:07:50 Speaker_10
The first is David Schmidt, who you might remember from episode 327, when we spoke with David about Ken Burns' documentary, Benjamin Franklin, which, if you haven't seen it yet, you can still watch it on PBS.

00:08:01 Speaker_10
David was a senior producer on that documentary, and presently, he's working as a senior producer on Ken Burns' forthcoming six-part film series, The American Revolution. So David is someone who is really well-steeped in Ben Franklin's world.

00:08:16 Speaker_10
The second scholar is Morgan McCullough, a recent PhD graduate from William & Mary, where she developed a research expertise in early American women's history and material culture, those everyday objects from early America.

00:08:28 Speaker_10
I'm really excited for you to hear from Morgan because she's the scholar who transcribes our episodes and copy edits and fact checks our transcripts. Morgan is a really fantastic editor and she aspires to work in book publishing.

00:08:41 Speaker_10
So if you're a book editor, please be in touch because I'd love to introduce you to Morgan. And the third scholar that you'll hear from is our friend Colin Calloway.

00:08:49 Speaker_10
Colin has appeared in several episodes of Ben Franklin's World, and he's an award-winning historian and professor of history at Dartmouth College who is really well known for his work in Native American history.

00:09:00 Speaker_14
My name is David Schmidt. I don't know there are limits to Benjamin Franklin's World. His vision looked forward and backward, skyward, seaward, and the world over.

00:09:12 Speaker_14
But if I had to give Ben Franklin's world boundaries, I suppose I would suggest the Atlantic Ocean and its watershed through the entirety of the 18th century.

00:09:20 Speaker_14
I wish people today, myself included, could know more about the people whose names are lost to history. That we know as much as we know is a testament to the power of the written language, but literacy was kept from so many.

00:09:34 Speaker_14
Of people whose names we do know, I wish people today could know more about advocates for change who shared the earth with Benjamin Franklin. People like Absalom Jones and Benjamin Lay, Phyllis Wheatley and Samson Occom.

00:09:48 Speaker_14
I sometimes feel there's a tendency among the living to think themselves better than those who went before. We are not. It's just that it's our turn now, and the stories of those who struggled in their time can remind us to do good work in our own.

00:10:03 Speaker_13
I'm Morgan McCullough, and I transcribe Ben Franklin's world. I think Ben Franklin's world for me is this period around the Atlantic from the late 15th to the early 19th century.

00:10:12 Speaker_13
And what that world has meant to me is it's been this history that's been constantly surprising me. I remember learning in undergrad that Black men and white women voted in New Jersey in the late 18th century, and that's not what I expected.

00:10:26 Speaker_13
And even when this history is really hard, you know, there's disease in indigenous communities and slavery and colonialism. There's also these stories of people and communities who persisted and who challenged those norms.

00:10:41 Speaker_13
And it's really an honor to continue to learn with their stories and to learn that past. who I wish people knew more about.

00:10:48 Speaker_13
So there's this Chickasaw woman, and we don't know her name, but she was married to this guy named James Adair, and he was a British colonist and a trader in the Southeast and Indian country.

00:10:58 Speaker_13
And eventually he writes this book about Native people, and that book, a lot of historians use it today to write about those communities. And at one moment in the book, he says, my wife corrected me. She said, don't get that wrong.

00:11:11 Speaker_13
And so he corrects it. And you have to think that throughout that whole book that he wrote, she was probably doing that a lot. And she was probably doing a lot of translation for James, both literal and cultural.

00:11:22 Speaker_13
And I think that his book wouldn't have existed or been possible without her. And there's a lot of indigenous women like her who we don't know a lot about them in the sources that exist today, but they were definitely there.

00:11:35 Speaker_00
Having written a book on the Indian world of George Washington, it's not surprising that I think of Franklin's world as one that sits between Europe, across the Atlantic, and Indian country, if you like, across the Appalachians.

00:11:50 Speaker_00
It's exemplified by Franklin himself, who, in the middle of the century, printed a whole string of Indian treaties, and who expected, and intended, to sell those treaties in England.

00:12:04 Speaker_00
I also think that perhaps the event that I want more people to know about of this world is the Treaty of Fort Pitt in 1778.

00:12:16 Speaker_00
Franklin, of course, famously was involved in engineering the Treaty of Alliance with France in that year, and people don't usually think of the Treaty of Fort Pitt as another step in the United States taking its place among the powers of the earth.

00:12:38 Speaker_00
If you look at that treaty, it's a very short treaty, but it contains a phrase, a clause, in which the new United States holds out the promise to the Delaware Nation that once independence is secured, the Delaware Nation may lead an Indian state

00:12:57 Speaker_00
with representation in Congress. We can dispute and think what we want about the United States intentions in that, but it leaves lots of questions to think about the enduring presence and power of Native peoples in this world. Colin Calloway.

00:13:17 Speaker_07
This is Kate Cartay. I'm a professor of history at Southern Methodist University. What does Ben Franklin's world mean to me?

00:13:24 Speaker_07
It means the splendid and glorious and dirty and chaotic cities of Philadelphia and Boston and London and Paris in the 18th century. It represents

00:13:37 Speaker_07
the best of what the 18th century had to offer in terms of its intellectual sophistication and its cosmopolitanism.

00:13:46 Speaker_07
And yet, when I think of Ben Franklin's world, I can't help but think about his politicking and his engagement in the seedier and less pleasant sides of the 18th century.

00:13:58 Speaker_07
So his willingness to fight wars against indigenous Americans, his evolution over time, but willingness to engage in slavery, Ben Franklin brings those different aspects of the 18th century together into one world.

00:14:13 Speaker_07
And for me, that's what the 18th century really is. It's the time and place where we see the best and the worst of humanity right next to each other in deep and engaged conversation, in self-conscious conversation.

00:14:26 Speaker_07
If there's one place I can think of that I would wish people knew more about from that era, what comes to mind is the picture of a tavern on the side of a road in backcountry Pennsylvania or North Carolina.

00:14:41 Speaker_07
And thinking of all the people that would have passed through that tavern, indigenous people, enslaved people, poor travelers, rich travelers,

00:14:48 Speaker_07
farmers on the way to market, farmers going to plead debt cases, wealthy speculators going to seek out big pieces of land they could buy.

00:14:56 Speaker_07
I know a lot of historians have written about alcohol and taverns as places where people come together, where political assessments were made, where people tried to gauge political opinion, where newspapers were read.

00:15:08 Speaker_07
If I could give one thing to our students or to public audiences who are interested in the 18th century, I would give them a bird's eye view into that tavern and have them hear all the conversations and see all the people who walked through in their diversity, in the ways they treated each other with respect, got out of each other's way when somebody needed a seat, when someone spilled a drink, and also the ways they disregarded one another, knocked each other over.

00:15:34 Speaker_07
were rude to one another in ways they spat on the floor and straighten their waistcoats at the same time.

00:15:41 Speaker_12
My name is Terrence Rucker, and I'm a senior historical publication specialist in the Office of the Historian for the U.S. House of Representatives.

00:15:49 Speaker_12
When I think of Ben Franklin's world, it reminds me of the Transformers because there's more to it than meets the eye.

00:15:55 Speaker_12
I knew about a few topics within colonial America and the early republic, but the Ben Franklin's World podcast enabled me to see the United States as one part of the Americas.

00:16:04 Speaker_12
I also learned so much cutting-edge scholarship about slavery in the Americas, especially in the West.

00:16:10 Speaker_12
As a student of the Continental Congress, the Doing History series, episodes 151 through 166, enhanced my understanding about the origins of the United States Congress and its institutional development.

00:16:24 Speaker_12
One subject that I focus on is Congress's role in the territorial expansion of the United States. Consequently, I look at the use of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 over time.

00:16:35 Speaker_12
Some of the effects of the ordinance can be seen with the passage of the Southwest Ordinance in 1790, public land distribution in the Trans-Mississippi West, and the impact of the Mexican Cession in the late 1840s.

00:16:47 Speaker_12
Exploring the origins of territorial policies during Ben Franklin's era would help illuminate how US government officials negotiate with American Indians, answer questions about whether slavery would expand beyond the Southern states, and how these policies affected the actions of presidential administrations through the 19th century.

00:17:06 Speaker_12
I believe that discussing the effect of this act is a topic that will be thought-provoking to the audience of Ben Franklin's world.

00:17:13 Speaker_06
Hi, I'm Serena Zaben, the Stephen R. Lewis Jr. Professor of History and Liberal Arts at Carleton College, and I'm thrilled to have the chance to talk about Ben Franklin's world.

00:17:23 Speaker_06
To me, Ben Franklin's world is the whole messy, uncertain, and exciting world of the 18th century.

00:17:30 Speaker_06
This podcast does such a wonderful job of introducing its listeners to lots of important elements of the 18th century, and especially to the founding of the United States. But if I had to choose just one thing to emphasize, it is this.

00:17:45 Speaker_06
I would like people to understand that in Ben Franklin's world, there was no sharp line between politics and domestic life. Families and politics were intertwined worlds. Politics shaped families.

00:17:59 Speaker_06
They shaped who could marry, who controlled children, and who lived with their in-laws. But families also shaped politics. It's worth remembering that at some points during the American Revolution, the battlefront and the home front were the same.

00:18:14 Speaker_18
Hi, I'm John Bickers. For me, Ben Franklin's world is a world of new possibilities, of interactions between various peoples, nations, and cultures that had never come together before.

00:18:28 Speaker_18
It was a world of endless possibilities and had the potential for so much good, but it was also a world of violence, of unkept promises, of myriads of atrocities.

00:18:38 Speaker_18
The decisions made in Ben Franklin's world, both intentional and unintentional, successful and unsuccessful, have shaped every aspect of our lives today. In a very real sense, we're still living in Ben Franklin's world.

00:18:52 Speaker_18
If I had to choose only one event, person, or place that I wish people knew about, I think it would have to be the Treaty of Fort Pitt. signed in 1778 between the United States and the Lenape, Delaware Nation.

00:19:03 Speaker_18
In fact, it's the first treaty signed by the United States with a Native American nation following the Declaration of Independence. And it's a fascinating document that really speaks to the complexities of the revolutionary era in this colonial world.

00:19:18 Speaker_18
In exchange for supporting the revolution, it promised perpetual peace and friendship with the Lenape Nation. so much so that it even included a provision that the Lenape could join the United States as a 14th state with congressional representation.

00:19:33 Speaker_18
And although that provision was never implemented, again, speaking to some of the failures of this world, it also speaks to, again, this myriad of possibilities.

00:19:43 Speaker_18
that there was a world in which there was a 14th state that was Native-controlled, Native-organized, Native-run. And I think it's a fascinating tree that more people need to study.

00:19:53 Speaker_18
And I think it sets the stage really importantly for Native and American interactions after the Revolutionary War.

00:20:02 Speaker_16
Hello, this is Nicole Maskeel. When I think of Ben Franklin's world, I think of it as a place of stories, some that challenge, some that heal, all that teach us about the contours of the past.

00:20:15 Speaker_16
I've always been an avid listener to the Ben Franklin World podcast, but have also discovered that teaching alongside it can be a blast as well.

00:20:24 Speaker_16
Ben Franklin's early world, colonial Boston and its environs, was the first early American world that captivated me.

00:20:31 Speaker_16
The gravestone of an enslaved girl named Cicely, who was a contemporary of Ben Franklin, likely only eight years older than Ben, was the spark that led me to pursue a career in early American history.

00:20:42 Speaker_16
Her gravestone was part of the landscape of my everyday walk from Harvard Yard to Fogel House, just as the Franklin family vault was visible every Sunday that I sat in Park Street Church. But their lives and deaths were contrasts as well.

00:20:55 Speaker_16
She lived a short life of unfree labor, 15 years old at her death, with a grave marker of the only testimony to her existence.

00:21:02 Speaker_16
while Ben's life spanned eight decades and was one filled with exploits that have shaped the histories told about our nation. Cicely and Ben's stories intersected, but they also diverge in important ways along lines of race, gender, and class.

00:21:17 Speaker_16
Lines that still divide and continue to challenge.

00:21:21 Speaker_16
It's these myriad unnoticed people who inhabited the haunts that also surrounded Franklin, who shaped them in important ways, and whose experiences force us to reevaluate the worlds we thought we knew, that continues to pull me back into the place that we know as Ben Franklin's world.

00:21:40 Speaker_11
Hi, I'm Joe Edelman. As a historian who's written about Franklin, the meaning of Ben Franklin's world for me starts with the man himself. He's a great avatar of the 18th century. It seems like he tried everything.

00:21:53 Speaker_11
Trained as a printer, Franklin saw networks and connections as central to his life. When he couldn't solve a problem on his own, he tried to solve it with other people. He was curious about the world around him.

00:22:05 Speaker_11
He explored that world, from traveling the length of the Atlantic coast in North America to the time he lived in England and France. He was by no means perfect, particularly with regard to practicing slavery and his views on gender.

00:22:20 Speaker_11
Like him, we too should be curious about the world of early America. How did people communicate and move around?

00:22:27 Speaker_11
What was life like for people from the most ordinary, which is how Franklin started his life, to the most famous, which is how he ended it?

00:22:34 Speaker_11
And there are few better ways to honor the spirit of discovery and connection than a podcast that explores early America through conversation and community. That's why I think the person you should know more about is Mary Catherine Goddard.

00:22:48 Speaker_11
If you've heard of her, it's probably as the woman who printed the first version of the Declaration of Independence that had all the signers' names on it. But she's so much more. Women in early America were active throughout economic life.

00:23:01 Speaker_11
And as Goddard's life shows, not every woman lived out her life's work through marriage and children.

00:23:06 Speaker_11
After she helped her brother, the printer William Goddard, at his offices in Providence and Philadelphia, she became proprietor of her own print shop in Baltimore.

00:23:15 Speaker_11
There, she published the Maryland Journal and served as the town's first postmistress in the Continental Post Office. Like Franklin, she too was a slaveholder.

00:23:24 Speaker_11
But through her life and her work in publishing, we can learn more about the complexities and contradictions that made up Ben Franklin's world. Congrats, Liz, on 400 episodes.

00:23:35 Speaker_10
Thank you, Joe, and thank you so much for being part of the long 10-year history of Ben Franklin's world. Now, Joe took us into the world of printing.

00:23:44 Speaker_10
As he mentioned, it's quite natural for a scholar of print media in the 18th century to think of Ben Franklin in Ben Franklin's world.

00:23:52 Speaker_10
This thought also occurred to another guest scholar, Marcia Bellisiano, founding director of the Benjamin Franklin House in London.

00:24:00 Speaker_02
What does Ben Franklin's world mean to me and how do I define it? The late author Jim Strodes called Benjamin Franklin the essential founder. I like that designation because he played such a pivotal role in the creation of the American project.

00:24:15 Speaker_02
and of course was the only founder to sign all four documents that created the United States. I think of him as providing the light and the enlightenment, for his contributions mark the 18th century as the age of reason.

00:24:30 Speaker_02
But his world for me also means his impact on contemporary society.

00:24:35 Speaker_02
We take for granted how he influences our lives today, from lightning rods and borrowing libraries to paper currency, perfection of bifocals, and the terms battery and positive and negative charges, the checks and balances of the constitution and a republic if we can keep it.

00:24:54 Speaker_02
And what historical event, person, or place do I wish more people knew about in the era of Benjamin Franklin? Well, that could only be for me as founding director of Benjamin Franklin House.

00:25:06 Speaker_02
It's a workaday Georgian terrace house, its builders perhaps never imagining it would stand for nearly 300 years and Franklin's only surviving residence anywhere in the world.

00:25:18 Speaker_02
It's the largest extant artifact related to Franklin and holds England's highest grade one heritage rating.

00:25:26 Speaker_02
Shortly after arriving on Craven Street and his full tenure would last nearly 16 years, working to find a way through negotiation between the interests of the crown in her colonies, planting the seeds of the special relationship between the US and the UK, Franklin wrote something I love to his sister.

00:25:45 Speaker_02
Faithy said, is the ground floor. Hope is up one pair of stairs. Don't delight so much to dwell in lower rooms, but get as fast as you can to the top. For in truth, the best room in the house is charity. His humor ever shines through.

00:26:01 Speaker_02
For my part, he continued, I wish the house were turned upside down. It is so difficult when one is fat to get upstairs. And not only so, but I imagine hope and faith may be more firmly built on charity than charity upon faith and hope.

00:26:16 Speaker_02
However that may be, I think it a better reading to say, raise faith and hope one story higher.

00:26:24 Speaker_02
It's this abiding faith in what we can do with determination as a small independent organization which has led to some significant results with the help of an exceptional team at the house and dedicated volunteers since opening on Franklin's 300th birthday in 2006.

00:26:43 Speaker_05
Mary Beth Norton, retired from Cornell University. My most recent book is 1774, The Long Year of Revolution, published by Alfred Knopf in 2020 and available in vintage paperback. To me, Ben Franklin's world is defined spatially and intellectually.

00:27:03 Speaker_05
It's the Euro-American Atlantic in the 18th century, with special focus on Boston, where he was born and lived as a youth, Philadelphia, where he achieved success in business and science, and London, where he lived for years with an addendum in Paris.

00:27:20 Speaker_05
His autobiography acknowledged the influence on him of Addison and Steele's spectator essays, a key indicator to me of the Anglo-American Atlantic nature of his world.

00:27:32 Speaker_05
The person in Franklin's world I wish more people knew about is Judith Sargent Murray, a resident of Gloucester, Massachusetts, during and after the revolution. She was a counterpart of Mary Wollstonecraft, truly the first American feminist.

00:27:48 Speaker_05
She advocated for improved women's education and wrote an essay titled, On the Equality of the Sexes in the 1770s. Sheila Skemp has written two biographical studies of her, one including a selection of her writings, and both of which I recommend.

00:28:05 Speaker_08
I am Marcus Nevius, Associate Professor of History, jointly appointed to the faculties of the Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy and the Department of History at the University of Missouri.

00:28:18 Speaker_08
I am the author of City of Refuge, Slavery and Petite Marinage in the Great Dismal Swamp, 1763 to 1856, published by the University of Georgia Press in 2020. What is the meaning of Ben Franklin's world to me?

00:28:34 Speaker_08
It reflects a history of momentous change in the 18th century Atlantic world. Put plainly, we often speak of revolution, of an age of revolutions. Ben Franklin's world was exactly that, an age of significant change.

00:28:53 Speaker_08
Having written about an obscure swamp which straddles the border of Virginia and North Carolina at perhaps the twilight of Ben Franklin's life and well into the 19th century, I've turned my attention to perhaps the most important colony in the British Atlantic world in the 18th century, Jamaica.

00:29:13 Speaker_08
I've done so in part because I wrote about the Great Dismal Swamp with the question of Maranaj top of mind.

00:29:21 Speaker_08
And in the story that I rendered in City of Refuge, I learned quite a bit about the way in which enslaved people's resistance and enslaved people's daily lives within slavery characterized the Great Dismal Swamp and the efforts of the many who stood up land and canal companies to extract the swamp's various natural resources.

00:29:46 Speaker_08
I'm presently interested in Jamaica because it allows for me to turn my attention to the subject of marronage more broadly in key ways.

00:29:55 Speaker_08
I'm quite interested in the way in which we can go beyond the slavery resistance binary in some ways by featuring maroons and marronage in the history of the British Atlantic world.

00:30:07 Speaker_08
I'm particularly interested in that world's contests for power and political legitimacy. legitimacy, and cultural preservation. It's these histories that I'm currently studying as I prepare my latest book manuscript.

00:30:23 Speaker_08
Hopefully, I'll be able to accomplish that within the next several years, but it certainly allows for me to bring new attention, perhaps, to Ben Franklin's world.

00:30:34 Speaker_04
This is Kathleen Duvall answering the second question. I wish more people knew about Priscilla Mason. Priscilla Mason was a student at the Young Ladies Academy of Philadelphia after the revolution.

00:30:44 Speaker_04
She graduated in May of 1793, and she gave a graduation speech in which she accused men of holding women back. She said, our high and mighty lords have denied us the means of knowledge and then reproached us for the want of it.

00:31:01 Speaker_04
Being the stronger party, they early seized the scepter and the sword. With these, they gave laws to society.

00:31:08 Speaker_04
They denied women the advantage of a liberal education and doomed the sex to servile or frivolous employments on purpose to degrade their minds, that they themselves might hold unrivaled the power and preeminence they had usurped."

00:31:25 Speaker_04
Now, Priscilla Mason was hopeful. She thought things were changing in 1793. But we really don't know anything about Priscilla Mason except for the speech. And that really shows that things weren't changing all that much for young women.

00:31:39 Speaker_04
They weren't changing enough that she could go on to fulfill her ambitions and enter the professions.

00:31:46 Speaker_03
Karen Wolf, John Carter Brown Library and Brown University. It's such a delight to think about Ben Franklin's world for this 400th episode. And first of all, I have to say congratulations, Liz. It's quite an achievement to make it to this milestone.

00:32:02 Speaker_03
Ben Franklin's world was such a complex place. And I think what it means to me is that we acknowledge that complexity. Franklin himself may seem the ultimate man of rationality, a scientist, a printer, a diplomat, a politician.

00:32:21 Speaker_03
someone who made his way through the world with purpose, but the world that he was making his way through was so complicated and he acknowledged that complication, that complexity.

00:32:34 Speaker_03
He understood its diversity and the challenges inherent in living in a world that's diverse in which people are trying to make the best of sometimes very difficult situations. I think what Ben Franklin's world, the podcast, does best

00:32:47 Speaker_03
is really convey that complexity.

00:32:50 Speaker_03
When I look at the last episodes, even just this year, you know, you think about Nikki Eustace talking about indigenous justice and you think about Jonathan Knapp talking about the Constitution and interpretations thereof.

00:33:04 Speaker_03
It's an incredible array that really represents the fullness of the world that Ben Franklin himself lived in and observed.

00:33:14 Speaker_10
Thank you, Karen. And I'm really glad that you've been a part of this incredible journey that is podcasting about early America. So thank you so much for your support and your help over the years.

00:33:24 Speaker_10
Now, as you've heard, most scholars who study early America define Ben Franklin's world, that world that Ben Franklin actually lived in, as the world of the 18th century British Atlantic. And they aren't wrong.

00:33:35 Speaker_10
This is the world that Benjamin Franklin actually lived in and he interacted with.

00:33:40 Speaker_10
However, my graduate advisor Alan Taylor and my California professors and classmates would never forgive me if I left out the even larger worlds that British North America and Benjamin Franklin were a part of.

00:33:52 Speaker_10
And those are the wider worlds of Indigenous and Spanish North America. And our last guest historian studies these worlds, and he offers a very thoughtful and different point of view from our other guests.

00:34:03 Speaker_09
My name is Esteban Rael Galvez, and I'm the executive director of Native Bound Unbound, where we are creating a digital archive and repository centered on the lives of the enslaved indigenous people across the Americas.

00:34:18 Speaker_09
Ben Franklin looms large in the national narrative and consciousness.

00:34:23 Speaker_09
To quote from the musical of another founding father, Franklin was often in the room where it happened, meaning he was at the forefront of so many of the key events that would define the foundations of what would become the United States of America.

00:34:38 Speaker_09
He was there drafting the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Treaty of Paris, no wonder he was not just the $10 founding father, but the $100 founding father.

00:34:52 Speaker_09
It's hard not to think of that man who counted among his favorite books, Plutarch's Lives, which was based on a key premise that individual endeavor can change the course of history for the better.

00:35:05 Speaker_09
The image I have, however, of Franklin, and when I think of the world that he created, is of a man driven by curiosity, inventive, entrepreneurial, and an unshakable moral compass, at least publicly.

00:35:21 Speaker_09
Though I am not in any way a historian of Benjamin Franklin or early colonial U.S., yet I can imagine that he was not every bit as flawed as other men made of flesh and bone.

00:35:33 Speaker_09
But of all the founding fathers, there is something about him that is just so core to the values that underpin and define the United States.

00:35:43 Speaker_09
When I think of that image of Franklin, though, I actually see reflections of him in some of the old men and women I grew up with in the villages of northern New Mexico.

00:35:53 Speaker_09
including my dad, who loved to read and still does at 97, who values education more than anything, who I witnessed inventing out of necessity, who always absorbs the achievements of those around him, who raises leading questions rather than argue, subtly navigating others toward solutions.

00:36:16 Speaker_09
Even Franklin's calculated diplomacy of what seems endemic to a farmer, who looks to the sky and to the ground, to the seasons, and thinks always of possibilities in the face of changes.

00:36:30 Speaker_09
When I think of the places I wish more people knew about, of course, I think of where I sit today in Santa Fe, New Mexico, known in Franklin's era as a Northern part of New Spain, contemporary Mexico, a place that would be taken in a war of aggression against Mexico less than 60 years after Franklin's death.

00:36:52 Speaker_09
a place that is older than Boston and Philadelphia or any of the 13 colons. Interesting to think that even though places like Santa Fe and Taos were centuries older, Albuquerque was settled the same year that Franklin was born in 1706.

00:37:10 Speaker_09
Of course, I also think of all of the indigenous lands and communities that existed in that era throughout what would become the United States' sovereign settings of communities fighting the expansion of the U.S.

00:37:25 Speaker_09
that was already set in motion in that era.

00:37:29 Speaker_09
When I think of contemporaneous events to Franklin, those I wish others would know about, I think of the Dominguez Escalante expedition of 1776, taken to find an overland route from Santa Fe, New Mexico to Monterey, California.

00:37:46 Speaker_09
I think of the monumental changes Indigenous communities endured during the 18th century, many living at the violent edges of U.S. empire. I think of the Seven Years' War and of Franklin's political cartoon Join or Die.

00:38:03 Speaker_09
I want people to know more about the Iroquois and the Wabanaki confederacies, both influential in the war on the British and the French, respectively.

00:38:14 Speaker_09
I think of the role that indigenous people and Hispanic people from places like Florida and New Mexico had on the American Revolution.

00:38:24 Speaker_09
When I think of Franklin's contemporaries, those I wish more people would know about, I think of those known here in New Mexico like Bernardo Mirai Pacheco, whose life almost completely overlapped that of Franklin's.

00:38:40 Speaker_09
Mieray Pacheco was born in 1713 and died in 1785. He was an artist, sombrero, one of the most prolific cartographers of the time, and like Franklin, proficient across a wide variety of disciplines.

00:38:58 Speaker_09
Of all the governors of New Mexico, certainly there are interesting people like Juan Bautista de Anza, significant to the entire region, including California, but I think most of Tomás Vélez de Cachupin, serving in that role in the mid 18th century, recognized for warring and brokering peace with the Comanches in particular, but also strategically leading resettlement efforts.

00:39:25 Speaker_09
of landless former enslaved indigenous people into communities like that of Abiquiu, which would have a lasting impact upon the social landscape.

00:39:37 Speaker_09
I think of people like Rosa Bialpando who was captured by the Comanches in 1760 in Taos, traded to the Pawnee, and then ended up living in St. Louis, Missouri.

00:39:49 Speaker_09
I could name more figures known here, but my whole life I've been drawn to tell the stories of the marginalized, those people whose lives never made it into history books. who are obscured or erased in the archive.

00:40:04 Speaker_09
Here, while some of these lives emerge whole, most surface in mere fragments, a record in a captive raid, a bill of sale noted among the produce and hooved animals.

00:40:17 Speaker_09
The peripheral subject of a trial proceeding though more often relegated as an object or chattel in a dispute between men. Records written by clerics recording baptisms, deaths and marriages.

00:40:31 Speaker_09
Names and cash shifting based on the whims of men with quills. Among these, I think of my mother's last known matrilineal ancestor.

00:40:42 Speaker_09
Nine generations, tracing each mother to a daughter, down to me, a son, connecting me to Antonia, who first appeared in the 1750 census here in Santa Fe, identified simply with the term India.

00:40:59 Speaker_10
You'll find more information about all of our guests, their past Ben Franklin's World episodes, their books, historic sites, plus notes, links, and a transcript for everything we talked about today on the show notes page.

00:41:10 Speaker_10
BenFranklinsWorld.com slash four zero zero. This is episode 400, which means I've been reflecting a lot on the last 10 years and 400 episodes of this show.

00:41:21 Speaker_10
And although I think about this quite often, I would like to take a moment to thank the Omohundro Institute and our current sponsor, the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, for all of their support over the years.

00:41:31 Speaker_10
They have seen the value in this work and they have paid to not only keep the show going with all the apps and hosting fees and things that go on the production side of the show, but they've also paid me to produce Ben Franklin's World.

00:41:43 Speaker_10
So thank you very much for your support and please check out the Omohundro Institute and the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, both of which are 501c3 nonprofit organizations. Now, if you enjoyed this episode, please tell your friends.

00:41:55 Speaker_10
Friends tell friends about their favorite podcasts. So be sure you tell them about Ben Franklin's world. Production assistance for this podcast comes from Morgan McCullough. Breakmaster Cylinder composed our custom theme music.

00:42:08 Speaker_10
This podcast is part of the Airwave Media Podcast Network. To discover and listen to their other podcasts, visit airwavemedia.com. Finally, happy holidays!

00:42:18 Speaker_10
I have one more new episode for you before the end of the year, so be sure to keep an eye out for episode 401, which will be all about the tea crisis of 1773. Ben Franklin's World is a production of Colonial Williamsburg Innovation Studios.