Do you know what time it is?

In early America, this question wasn’t as simple to answer as it is today. Urban dwellers in cities like Boston, Philadelphia, and Charleston often wondered about the time—but few owned their own watches or clocks. So, how did they keep track of the hours?

 In this episode, we dive into the fascinating world of early American timekeeping. Bob Frishman, a horologist—a specialist in clocks and watches—and a scholar of horology, joins us to explore how timepieces and their makers shaped community life and craftsmanship in the 18th century. Along the way, we’ll uncover the remarkable story of Edward Duffield, a Philadelphia clockmaker who wasn’t just a master craftsman but also a close friend and neighbor of Benjamin Franklin.

Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/402 Sponsor Links

• Colonial Williamsburg Foundation
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Complementary Episodes

• Episode 149: Benjamin Franklin in London
• Episode 175: The Revolution in Ben Franklin’s House
• Episode 207: Young Benjamin Franklin
• Episode 244: Shoe Stories from Early America
• Episode 292: Craft in Early America
• Episode 301: From Inoculation to Vaccination, Pt 1
• Episode 302: From Inoculation to Vaccination, Pt 2
• Episode 332: Occupied Philadelphia

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To close out our mini-series on Tea in early America, we’re going to revisit Episode 160: The Politics of Tea. This episode was part of our Doing History: To the Revolution series with the Omohundro Institute in 2017.

In this episode, we’ll revisit how early Americans went from attending tea parties to holding the Boston Tea Party. We’ll also explore more in depth information about how tea became a central part of many early Americans’ lives.

Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/160 Sponsor Links

• Colonial Williamsburg Foundation

Complementary Episodes

• Episode 112: The Tea Crisis of 1773
• Episode 229: The Townshend Moment
• Episode 401: Tea, Boycotts, and Revolution

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During the early days of the American Revolution, British Americans attempted to sway their fellow Britons with consumer politics.

In 1768 and 1769, they organized a non-consumption movement of British goods to protest the Townshend Duties. In 1774, they arranged a non-importation and non-exportation movement to protest the Tea Act and Coercive Acts.

Why did the colonists protest the Tea Act and Coercive Acts? Why did they chose to protest those acts with the consumer politics of a non-importation/non-exportation program?

James Fichter, the author of Tea: Consumption, Politics, and Revolution, 1773-1776, joins us to explore the Tea Crisis of 1773 and the resulting non-importation/non-exportation movement the colonists organized after Parliament passed the Coercive Acts.

Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/401 Sponsor Links

• Colonial Williamsburg Foundation
• Colonial Williamsburg Newsletters

Complementary Episodes

• Episode 112: The Tea Crisis of 1773
• Episode 160: The Politics of Tea
• Episode 228: The Boston Massacre
• Episode 229: The Townshend Moment
• Episode 296: The Boston Massacre: A Family History
• Episode 337: Early America’s Trade with China
• Episode 375: Misinformation Nation
• Episode 390: The Objects of Revolution

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In Episode 401, we’ll be exploring the Tea Crisis and how it led to the non-importation/non-exportation movement of 1774-1776.

Our guest historian, James Fichter, references the work of Mary Beth Norton and her “The Seventh Tea Ship” article from The William and Mary Quarterly.

In this BFW Revisited episode, we’ll travel back to December 2016, when we spoke with Mary Beth Norton about her article and the Tea Crisis of 1773.

Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/112 Sponsor Links

• Colonial Williamsburg Foundation

Complementary Episodes

• Episode 135: Moral Commerce: The Transatlantic Boycott of the Slave Labor Economy
• Episode 160: The Politics of Tea
• Episode 228: The Boston Massacre
• Episode 229: The Townshend Moment
• Episode 337: Early America's Trade with China

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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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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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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

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