Ben Franklin's World

When we think about the American Revolution, the French Revolution, or the Haitian Revolution, we think about the ideals of freedom and equality. These ideals were embedded and discussed in all of these revolutions.

What we don’t always think about when we think about these revolutions are the objects that inspired, came out of, and were circulated as they took place. 

Ashli White, an Associate Professor of History at the University of Miami in Florida, joins us to investigate the “revolutionary things” that were created and circulated during the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions with details from her book Revolutionary Things: Material Culture and Politics in the Late Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World.

Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/390

Complementary Episodes

🎧 Episode 124: James Alexander Dun, Making the Haitian Revolution in Early America

🎧 Episode 136: Jennifer Van Horn, Material Culture and the Making of America

🎧 Episode 164: The American Revolution in the Age of Revolutions

🎧 Episode 165: The Age of Revolutions

🎧 Episode 177, Martin Brückner, The Social Life of Maps in America

🎧 Episode 306: The Horse’s Tail: Revolution & Memory in Early New York City

🎧 Episode 319: Cuba: An Early American History

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Early North America was a place that contained hundreds of distinct Indigenous nations and peoples who spoke at least 2,000 distinct languages. In the early sixteenth century, Spain began to establish colonies on mainland North America, and they were followed by the French, Dutch, and English, and the forced migration of enslaved Africans who represented at least 45 different ethnic and cultural groups. With such diversity, Early North America was full of cross-cultural encounters.

What did it look like when people of different ethnicities, races, and cultures interacted with one another? How were the people involved in cross-cultural encounters able to understand and overcome their differences?

Nicole Eustace is an award-winning historian at New York University. Using details from her Pulitzer-prize-winning book, Covered with Night: A Story of Murder and Indigenous Justice in Early America, Nicole will take us through one cross-cultural encounter in 1722 between the Haudenosaunee and Susquehannock peoples and English colonists in Pennsylvania.

Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/389

Complementary Episodes

🎧 Episode 080: Liberty’s Prisoners: Prisons and Prison Life in Early America 

🎧 Episode 171: Native Americans, British Colonists, and Trade in North America

🎧 Episode 220: New England Indians, Colonists, and the Origins of Slavery 

🎧 Episode 264: Treaty of Canandaigua

🎧 Episode 356: The Moravian Church in North America

🎧 Episode 362: Treaties Between the US and American Indian Nations 

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Happy Fourth of July! 

We’ve created special episodes to commemorate, celebrate, and remember the Fourth of July for years. Many of our episodes have focused on the Declaration of Independence, how and why it was created, the ideas behind it, and its sacred words: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

This year, we examine a different aspect of the Declaration of Independence: the man behind the boldest signature on the document: John Hancock.

Brooke Barbier is a public historian and holds a Ph.D. in American History from Boston College. She’s also the author of the first biography in many years about John Hancock, it’s called King Hancock: The Radical Influence of a Moderate Founding Father.

Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/388

Complementary Episodes

🎧 Episode 018: Our Declaration

🎧 Episode 129: John Bell, The Road to Concord, 1775

🎧 Episode 141: A Declaration in Draft

🎧 Episode 245: Celebrating the Fourth

🎧 Episode 277: Whose Fourth of July?

🎧 Episode 306: The Horse’s Tail: Revolution & Memory in Early New York City

🎧 Episode 309: Merchant Ships of the Eighteenth Century

🎧 Episode 360: Kyera Singleton, Slavery & Freedom in Massachusetts

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When we think of California, we might think about sunny weather, Hollywood, beaches, wine country, and perhaps the Gold Rush.

What we don’t usually think about when we think about California is the state’s long history of slavery.

Jean Pfaelzer, a Californian and a Professor Emerita of English, Asian Studies, and Women and Gender Studies at the University of Delaware, joins us to lead us through some of California’s long 250-year history of slavery with details from her book, California: A Slave State. 

Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/387

Complementary Episodes

🎧 Episode 014: West of the Revolution: An Uncommon History of 1776

🎧 Episode 067: An Environmental History of Early California and Hawaii 

🎧 Episode 115: The Early American History of Texas

🎧 Episode 139: The Other Slavery: Indian Enslavement in the Americas

🎧 Episode 233: A History of Russian America 

🎧 Episode 277: Whose Fourth of July?

🎧 Episode 312: The Domestic Slave Trade

🎧 Episode 371: An Archive of Indigenous Slavery 

🎧 Episode 384: Making Maine: A Journey to Statehood

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In this special Juneteenth episode, as we honor the emancipation of enslaved African Americans, we delve into the work of those working to preserve slave dwellings across the United States, safeguarding the essential stories these structures embody.

In our conversation, Joseph McGill, the Executive Director and Founder of the Slave Dwelling Project, joins us to share why former slave dwellings are vital to our nation's history and what they reveal about the lives of those who once lived in them.

Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/386

Complementary Episodes

🎧 Episode 075: How Archives Work

🎧 Episode 079: What is a Historic Source?

🎧 Episode 089: Slavery & Freedom in Early Maryland

🎧 Episode 312: The Domestic Slave Trade

🎧 Episode 331: Discovery of the Williamsburg Bray School

🎧 Episode 360: Kyera Singleton, Slavery & Freedom in Massachusetts

🎧 Episode 378: Everyday Black Living in Early America

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The United States Constitution of 1787 gave many Americans pause about the powers the new federal government could exercise and how the government's leadership would rest with one person, the president.

The fact that George Washington would likely serve as the new nation’s first president calmed many Americans’ fears that the new nation was creating an opportunity for a hereditary monarch. Washington had proven his commitment to a democratic form of government when he gave up his army command peacefully and voluntarily. He had proven he was someone Americans could trust. Plus, George Washington had no biological heirs–no sons–to whom he might pass on the presidency.

But while George Washington had no biological heirs, he did have heirs.

Cassandra A. Good, an Associate Professor of History at Marymount University and author of First Family: George Washington’s Heirs and the Making of America, joins us to explore Washington’s heirs and the lives they lived.

Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/385

Complementary Episodes

🎧 Episode 027: A History of Stepfamilies in Early America

🎧 Episode 033: George Washington and His Library 

🎧 Episode 061: George Washinton in Retirement 

🎧 Episode 074: Martha Washington 

🎧 Episode 137: The Washingtons’ Runaway Slave

🎧 Episode 183: George Washinton’s Mount Vernon 

🎧 Episode 222: The Early History of Washington, D.C. 

🎧 Episode 265: An Early History of the White House  

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Article IV, Section 3 of the United States Constitution establishes guidelines by which the United States Congress can admit new states to the American Union. It clearly states that “no new State shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State…without the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress.”

Five states have been formed from pre-existing states: Vermont, Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia, and Maine. How did the process of forming a state from a pre-existing state work? Why would territories within a state want to declare their independence from their home state?

Joshua Smith, the interim director of the American Merchant Marine Museum in Kings Point, New York, and author of the book Making Maine: Statehood and the War of 1812, leads us on an exploration of Maine’s journey to statehood.

Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/384

Complementary Episodes

🎧 Episode 030: Northern New England’s Religious Geography

🎧 Episode 057: Money and the American State

🎧 Episode 098: Birth of the American Tax Man

🎧 Episode 103, James Monroe and & His Estate Highland

🎧 Episode 134: Pulpit and Nation

🎧 Episode 309: Merchant Ships of the Eighteenth Century

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If you will recall from Episode 331, the Williamsburg Bray School is the oldest existing structure in the United States that we know was used to educate African and African American children.

As the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation prepares the Bray School for you to visit and see, we’re having many conversations about the history of the school, its scholars, and early Black American History in general.

During one of these conversations, the work of Kevin Dawson came up. Kevin is an Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Merced and author of the book, Undercurrents of Power: Aquatic Culture in the African Diaspora.

Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/383

Complementary Episodes

🎧 Episode 104: The Saltwater Frontier: Europeans & Native Americans on the Northeastern Coast

🎧 Episode 241: Pearls and the Nature of the Spanish Empire

🎧 Episode 250: Virginia, 1619

🎧 Episode 277: Who's Fourth of July?

🎧 Episode 331: Discovery of the Williamsburg Bray School

🎧 Episode 347: African and African American Music

🎧 Episode 352: James Forten and the Making of the United States

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Within the Declaration of Independence, the founders of the United States present twenty-seven grievances against King George III as they declare their reasons for why the thirteen British North American colonies sought their independence from Great Britain. Their twenty-fifth grievance declares that King George III “is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat [sic] the works of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun.”

What do we know about the “Armies of foreign Mercenaries” King George III sent to his rebellious American colonies? 

Friederike Baer, an Associate Professor of History at Penn State Abbington College, joins us to explore the lives and wartime experiences of the 30,000 German soldiers the British Crown hired and dispatched to North America during the American War for Independence. Frederike is the author of the award-winning book Hessians: German Soldiers in the American Revolutionary War.

Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/382

Complementary Episodes

🎧 Episode 046: Whirlwind: The American Revolution & the War That Won It 

🎧 Episode 048: Dangerous Guests: Enemy Captives During the War for Independence 

🎧 Episode 081: After Yorktown

🎧 Episode 144: The Common Cause

🎧 Episode 147: British Soldiers, American War 

🎧 Episode 157: The Revolution’s African American Soldiers

🎧 Episode 252: The Highland Soldier in North America

🎧 Episode 375: Misinformation Nation

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The vast and varied landscapes of Texas loom large in our American imaginations. As does Texas culture with its BBQ, cowboys, and larger-than-life personality. But before Texas was a place that embraced ranching, space flight, and country music, Texas was a place with rich and vibrant Indigenous cultures and traditions and with Spanish and Mexican cultures and traditions.

Martha Menchaca, a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas, Austin, is a scholar of Texas history and United States-Mexican culture. She joins us to explore the Spanish and Mexican origins of Texas with details from her book, The Mexican American Experience in Texas: Citizenship, Segregation, and the Struggle for Equality.

Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/381

Complementary Episodes

🎧 Episode 037: Kathleen DuVal, Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution

🎧 Episode 115: Andrew Torget, The Early American History of Texas

🎧 Episode 178, Karoline Cook, Muslims & Moriscos in Colonial Spanish America

🎧 Episode 241: Molly Warsh, Pearls & the Nature of the Spanish Empire

🎧 Episode 334, Brandon Bayne, Missions and Mission Building in New Spain

🎧 Episode 358: Charles Tingley, St Augustine and Early Florida

🎧 Episode 371: Estevan Rael-Gálvez, An Archive of Indigenous Slavery

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