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

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• Ben Franklin’s World Twitter: @BFWorldPodcast
• Ben Franklin's World Facebook Page
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In our last episode, Episode 399, we discussed Denmark Vesey’s revolt and the way biblical texts and scripture enabled Vesey to organize what would have been the largest slave revolt in United States history if the revolt had not been thwarted before Vesey could put it into action.

Early American history is filled with revolts against enslavers that were thwarted and never made it past the planning stage. But, one uprising that did move beyond planning and into action was the Southampton Rebellion or Nat Turner’s Revolt in August 1831.

In this BFW Revisited episode, Episode 133, which was released in May 2017, we met with Patrick Breen, an Associate Professor of History at Providence College. Patrick joined us to investigate Nat Turner’s Revolt with details from his book The Land Shall Be Deluged in Blood: A New History of the Nat Turner Revolt.

Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/133 Sponsor Links

• Colonial Williamsburg Foundation

Complementary Episodes

• Episode 016: The Internal Enemy
• Episode 083: Slavery in Colonial Boston
• Episode 091: Rumors, Legends, and Hoaxes in Early America
• Episode 124: Making the Haitian Revolution
• Episode 125: Death, Suicide, and Slavery in British North America
• Episode 336: Suviving the Southampton Rebellion
• Episode 399: Denmark Vesey's Revolt

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Denmark Vesey’s failed revolt in 1822 could have been the largest insurrection of enslaved people against their enslavers in United States history. Not only was Vesey’s plan large in scale, but Charleston officials arrested well over one hundred rumored participants.

Jeremy Schipper, a Professor in the departments for the Study or Religion and Near and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Toronto and the author of Denmark Vesey’s Bible: The Thwarted Revolt that Put Scripture and Slavery on Trial, joins us to investigate Vesey’s planned rebellion and the different ways Vesey used the Bible and biblical texts to justify his revolt and the violence it would have wrought.

Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/399 Sponsor Links

• Colonial Williamsburg Foundation
• Colonial Williamsburg Email Lists

Complementary Episodes

• Episode 052: Early United States-Haitian Diplomacy
• Episode 124: Making the Haitian Revolution in Early America
• Episode 133: Nat Turner’s Rebellion
• Episode 165: The Age of Revolutions
• Episode 190: Origins of the American Middle Class
• Episode 226: Making the State of South Carolina
• Episode 384: Making Maine: A Journey to Statehood
• Episode 390: Objects of Revolution

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This week is Thanksgiving week in the United States. On Thursday, most of us will sit down with friends, family, and other loved ones and share a large meal where we give thanks for whatever we’re grateful for over the last year.

In elementary school, we are taught to associate this holiday and its rituals with the religious separatists, or pilgrims, who migrated from England to what is today Plymouth, Massachusetts. We are taught that at the end of the fall harvest, the separatists sat down with their Indigenous neighbors to share in the bounty that the Wampanoag people helped them grow by teaching the separatists how to sow and cultivate crops like corn in the coastal soils of New England.

In this BFW Revisited episode, Episode 291, we investigate the arrival of the Mayflower and the Indigenous world the separatists arrived in. We’ll also explore how the Wampanoag and Narragansett peoples interacted with their new European neighbors and how they contended with the English people who were determined to settle on their lands.

Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/291 Sponsor Links

• Colonial Williamsburg Foundation

Complementary Episodes

• Episode 104: The Saltwater Frontier: Native Americans and Colonsits on the Northeastern Coast
• Episode 132: Indigenous London
• Episode 184: Thundersticks: Firearms and the Violent Transformation of Native America
• Episode 220: New England Indians, Colonists, and the Origins of Slavery
• Episode 235: A 17th-Century Native American Life
• Episode 267: Snowshoe Country
• Episode 290: The World of the Wampanoag, Pt 1

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After the Seven Years’ War (1754-1763), Great Britain instituted the Proclamation Line of 1763. The Line sought to create a lasting peace in British North America by limiting British colonial settlement east of the Appalachian Mountains.

In 1768, colonists and British Indian agents negotiated the Treaties of Fort Stanwix and Hard Labour to extend the boundary line further west. In 1774, the Shawnee-Dunmore War broke out as colonists attempted to push further west.

Fallon Burner and Russell Reed, two of the three co-managers of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation’s American Indian Initiative, join us to investigate the Shawnee-Dunmore War and what this war can show us about Indigenous life, warfare, and sovereignty during the mid-to-late eighteenth century.

Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/398 Sponsor Links

• Colonial Williamsburg Foundation
• Colonial Williamsburg American Indian Initiative

Complementary Episodes

• Episode 223: A Native American History of the Ohio River Valley & Great Lakes Region
• Episode 310: History of the Blackfeet
• Episode 353: Women and the Making of Catawba Identity
• Episode 367: Brafferton Indian School, Part 1
• Episode 368: Brafferton Indian School, Part 2

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• Ben Franklin's World iOS App
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It’s November, the time of year when we Americans get ready for the Thanksgiving holiday. Although the federal holiday we know and honor today came about in 1863, Thanksgiving is a day that many modern-day Americans associate with the Indigenous peoples and religious separatists of Plymouth, Massachusetts.

What do we know about the Indigenous people the so-called Pilgrims interacted with?

This month, in between our new episodes about Indigenous history, the Ben Franklin’s World Revisited series explores the World of the Wampanoag. The World of the Wampanoag originally posted as a two-episode series in December 2020. This first episode will introduce you to the life, societies, and cultures of the Wampanoag and Narragansett peoples the Plymouth colonists interacted with before the colonists’ arrival in December 1620.

Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/290 Sponsor Links

• Colonial Williamsburg Foundation
• Mass Humanities
• National Endowment for the Humanities
• Omohundro Institute

Complementary Episodes

• Episode 104: The Salwater Frontier: Native Americans and Colonists on the Northeastern Coast
• Episode 132: Indigenous London
• Episode 184: Firearms and the Violent Transformation of Native America
• Episode 220: New England indians, Colonists, and the Origins of Slavery
• Episode 235: A 17th-Century Native American Life
• Episode 267: Snowshoe Country
• Episode 291: The World of the Wampanoag, Pt. 2

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The North American continent is approximately 160 million years old, yet in the United States, we tend to focus on what amounts to 3300 millionths of that history, which is the period between 1492 to the present.

Kathleen DuVal, a Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, asks us to widen our view of early North American history to at least 1,000 years. Using details from her book, Native Nations: A Millennium in North America, DuVal shows us that long before European colonists and enslaved Africans arrived on North American shores, Indigenous Americans built vibrant cities and civilizations, and adapted to a changing world and climate.

Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/397 Sponsor Links

• Colonial Williamsburg Foundation
• Ben Franklin’s World Listener Community
• Colonial Williamsburg Native American Heritage Month Programs

Complementary Episodes

• Episode 037: Independence Lost
• Episode 189: The Little Ice Age
• Episode 223: A Native American History of the Ohio River Valley & Great Lakes Region
• Episode 264: The Treaty of Canandaigua
• Episode 286: Native Sovereignty
• Episode 310: History of the Blackfeet
• Episode 323: American Expansion and the Political Economy of Plunder
• Episode 362: Treaties Between the U.S. & Native Nations

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Ben Franklin’s World Revisited is a series where Liz surfaces one of our earlier episodes that complements and adds additional perspectives to the histories we discuss in our new episodes.

Given the conversation we just had in Episode 396 about Carpenters’ Hall & the First Continental Congress, Liz would like to offer you an episode she produced in 2017 as part of our Doing History: To the Revolution series. Episode 153: Committees and Congresses: Governments of the American Revolution, furthers the discussion we just had about the First Continental Congress by helping us investigate how the American revolutionaries formed governments as imperial rule in British North American disintegrated and the American Revolution turned to war.

“Monday, September 5, 1774. A number of the Delegates chosen and appointed by the Several Colonies and Provinces in North America to meet and hold a Congress at Philadelphia assembled at the Carpenters’ Hall.” 

That statement begins the Journals of the Continental Congress, the official meeting minutes of the First and Second Continental Congresses. Between September 1774 and March 1789, the congressmen filled 34-printed volumes worth of entries.

Join Michael Norris, the Executive Director of the Carpenters’ Company of the City and County of Philadelphia, for a tour of Carpenters’ Hall, the meeting place of the First Continental Congress, and discover more about this historic building and the historic work of the First Continental Congress.

Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/396 Sponsor Links

• Colonial Williamsburg Foundation
• Ben Franklin's World Listener Community

Complementary Episodes

• Episode 001: The Library Company of Philadelphia
• Episode 153: Committees and Congresses: Governments of the American Revolution
• Episode 207: Young Benjamin Franklin
• Episode 229: The Townshend Moment
• Episode 292: Craft in Early America
• Episode 294: 1774: The Long Year of Revolution

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When we think about the American Revolution, textbooks, documentaries, and historic sites have trained most of us to think about American triumphs in battles or events when American revolutionaries overcame moments of despair, when all seemed lost, to triumph in the cause of American independence.

Benjamin L. Carp will help us look at the American Revolution differently. The Daniel M. Lyons Chair of History at Brooklyn College, Ben will use details from his book The Great New York Fire of 1776: A Lost Story of the American Revolution to help us consider the strategic military importance of New York City and its capture by the British Army and how both armies used fire as an instrument of war.

Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/395 Sponsor Links

• Colonial Williamsburg Foundation
• Ben Franklin's World Facebook Community

Complementary Episodes

• Episode 113: Building the Empire State
• Episode 123: Revolutionary Allegiances
• Episode 185: Early New York City and Its Culture
• Episode 306: The Horse’s Tail: Revolution & Memory in Early New York City
• Episode 325: Everyday People of the American Revolution
• Episode 330: Loyalism in the British Atlantic World
• Episode 332: Experiences of Revolution: Occupied Philadelphia
• Episode 333: Experiences of Revolution: Disruptions in Yorktown

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• Apple Podcasts
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• 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