Ben Franklin's World

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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The American Revolution was a movement that divided British Americans. Americans did not universally agree on the Revolution’s ideas about governance and independence. And the movement’s War for Independence was a bloody civil war that not only pitted brother against brother and fathers against sons; it also pitted wives against husbands.

Cynthia A. Kierner is a professor of history at George Mason University and the author of the book The Tory’s Wife: A Woman and Her Family in Revolutionary America. Cindy joins us to lead us through the story of Jane and William Spurgin, an everyday couple who lived in the North Carolina Backcountry during the American Revolution and who found themselves supporting different sides of the Revolution.

Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/380

Complementary Episodes

🎧 Episode 085: Bonnie Huskins, American Loyalists in Canada

🎧 Episode 126: Rebecca Brannon, The Reintegration of American Loyalists

🎧 Episode 237: Nora Doyle, Motherhood in Early America

🎧 Episode 325: Woody Holton, Everyday People of the American Revolution

🎧 Episode 330: Brad Jones, Loyalism in the British Atlantic World

🎧 Episode 356: Paul Peucker, The Moravian Church in North America

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Women make up eight out of every ten healthcare workers in the United States. Yet they lag behind men when it comes to working in the roles of medical doctors and surgeons.

Why has healthcare become a professional field dominated by women, and yet women represent a minority of physicians and doctors who serve at the top of the healthcare field?

Susan H. Brandt, a historian and lecturer at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, seeks to find answers to these questions. In doing so, she takes us into the rich history of women healers with details from her book, Women Healers: Gender, Authority, and Medicine in Early Philadelphia.

Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/379

Complementary Episodes

🎧 Episode 003: Director of the Library Company of Philadelphia

🎧 Episode 005: Revolutionary Medicine: The Founding Fathers and Mothers in Sickness and Health

🎧 Episode 116: Disease & the Seven Years’ War

🎧 Episode 174: Yellow Fever in the Early American Republic

🎧 Episode 263: The Medical Imagination

🎧 Episode 273: David Hosack, Botany, and Medicine in the Early Republic

🎧 Episode 276: Benjamin Rush: Founding Father

🎧 Episode 301: From Inoculation to Vaccination, Part 1

🎧 Episode 302: From Inoculation to Vaccination, Part 2

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When we study the history of Black Americans, especially in the early American period, we tend to focus on slavery and the slave trades. But focusing solely on slavery can hinder our ability to see that, like all early Americans, Black Americans were multi-dimensional people who led complicated lives and lived a full range of experiences that were worth living and talking about.

Tara Bynum, an Assistant Professor of English and African American Studies at the University of Iowa and the author of Reading Pleasures: Everyday Black Living in Early America, joins us to explore the lives of four early Black American writers: Phillis Wheatley, John Marrant, James Albert Unkawsaw Groniosaw, and David Walker.

Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/378

Complementary Episodes

🎧 Episode 025: Inventing George Whitefield 

🎧 Episode 083: Unfreedom: Slavery in Colonial Boston

🎧 Episode 118: The Business of Slavery in Rhode Island

🎧 Episode 123: Revolutionary Allegiances

🎧 Episode 166: Freedom and the American Revolution

🎧 Episode 328: Free People of Color in Early America

🎧 Episode 360: Slavery & Freedom in Massachusetts

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2023 marked the 250th anniversary of the arrival of Phillis Wheatley's published book of poetry in the British American colonies.

Phillis Wheatley was an enslaved African woman who, as a teenager, became the first published African author of a book of poetry written in English. 

Ade Solanke, an award-winning playwright and screenwriter, has written two plays about Phillis Wheatley’s life to commemorate the semiquincentennial of Wheatley’s literary accomplishments. She joins us to not only explore the life of Phillis Wheatley, but also how playwrights use and research history to help them create dramatic works of art. Works of art that can help us forge an emotional connection with the past.

Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/377

Complementary Episodes

🎧 Episode 008: The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British America

🎧 Episode 086: Ben Franklin in London

🎧 Episode 123: Revolutionary Allegiances

🎧 Episode 132: Indigenous London

🎧 Episode 166: Freedom and the American Revolution

🎧 Episode 170: New England Bound: Slavery in Early New England

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Colonial America was born in a world of religious alliances and rivalries. Missionary efforts in the colonial Americas allow us to see how some of these religious alliances and rivalries played out. Spain, and later France, sent Catholic priests and friars to North and South America, and the Caribbean, purportedly to save the souls of Indigenous Americans by converting them to Catholicism. We also know that Protestants did similar work to help counteract this Catholic work in the Americas.

Kirsten Silva Gruesz, a Professor of Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, joins us to explore the life and work of Cotton Mather, a Boston Puritan minister who actively sought to counteract the work of Catholic conversion, with details from her book Cotton Mather’s Spanish Lessons: A Story of Language, Race, and Belonging in the Early Americas.

Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/376

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🎧 Episode 047: Emily Conroy-Krutz, Christian Imperialism: Converting the World in the Early American Republic

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

🎧 Episode 170: Wendy Warren, New England Bound: Slavery in Early New England

🎧 Episode 196: Alejandra Dubcovsky, Information & Communication in the Early American South

🎧 Episode 242: Molly Warsh, Pearls & the Nature of the Spanish Empire

🎧 Episode 301: From Inoculation to Vaccination, Part 1

🎧 Episode 318: Ste Genevieve National Historic Park

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

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

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Over the past decade, we’ve heard a lot about “fake news” and “misinformation.” And as 2024 is an election year, it’s likely we’re going to hear even more about these terms.

So what is the origin of misinformation in the American press? When did Americans decide that they needed to be concerned with figuring out whether the information they heard or read was truthful or fake?

Jordan E. Taylor joins us to find answers to these questions. Jordan is a historian who studies the history of media and the ways early Americans created, spread, and circulated news. He is also the author of the book Misinformation Nation: Foreign News and the Politics of Truth in Revolutionary America.

Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/375

Complementary Episodes

🎧 Episode 144: The Common Cause of the American Revolution

🎧 Episode 156: The Power of the Press in the American Revolution

🎧 Episode 207: Young Benjamin Franklin

🎧 Episode 227: Copyright & Fair Use in Early America

🎧 Episode 243:  Revolutionary Print Networks

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The American Revolution and its War for Independence comprised the United States’ founding movement. The War for Independence also served as the fifth major war for European empire in North America.

The fourth war for European empire, the Seven Years’ War, reshaped and redefined Europe’s worldwide colonial landscape in Great Britain’s favor. The American Revolutionary War presented Britain’s European rivals with an opportunity to regain some of the territory they had lost. An opportunity we can see those rivals seizing in the Revolutionary War’s Western Theater.

Stephen Kling, Jr., is the author and co-author of several books and articles about the American Revolution in the West. His latest book, The American Revolutionary War in the West, has served as the basis for a museum exhibit at the St. Charles County Heritage Museum in St. Peters, Missouri. Stephen joins us as our expert guide on our expedition through the Revolution’s Western Theater.

Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/374

Complementary Episodes

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

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

🎧 Episode 041: Canada & the American Revolution

🎧 Episode 051: A History of Early Detroit

🎧 Episode 081: After Yorktown: The Final Struggle for American Independence

🎧 Episode 102: George Rogers Clark & the Fight for the Illinois Country

🎧 Episode 318: Ste. Genevieve National Historical Park

🎧 Episode 372: A History of the Myaamia

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The so-called “March to the American Revolution” comprised many more events than just the Stamp Act Riots, the Boston Massacre, and the Tea Crisis. One event we often overlook played an essential and direct role in the events needed to draw the thirteen rebellious British North American colonies into a union of coordinated response. That event was the Gaspee Affair in 1772.

Adrian Weimer, a professor of history at Providence College, has been researching the Gaspee Affair and what it can tell us about the constitutional balance between the British Empire and its colonies. She leads us on an investigation of the Gaspee Affair.

Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/373

Complementary Episodes

🎧 Episode 112: The Tea Crisis of 1773

🎧 Episode 118: The Business of Slavery in Rhode Island

🎧 Episode 144: The Common Cause of the American Revolution

🎧 Episode 153: Committees and Congresses: Governments of the American Revolution

🎧 Episode 309: Merchant Ships of the Eighteenth Century

🎧 Episode 325: Everyday People of the American Revolution

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Early America was a diverse place. A significant part of this diversity came from the fact that there were at least 1,000 different Indigenous tribes and nations living in different areas of North America before the Spanish and other European empires arrived on the continent’s shores.

Diane Hunter and John Bickers join us to investigate the history and culture of one of these distinct Indigenous tribes: the Myaamia. At the time of this recording, Diane Hunter was the Tribal Historic Preservation Officer for the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma. She has since retired from that position. John Bickers is an Assistant Professor of History at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio. Both Diane and John are citizens of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma and experts in Myaamia history and culture.

Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/372

Complementary Episodes

🎧 Episode 029: Colin Calloway, The Victory with No Name: The Native American Defeat of the First American Army

🎧 Episode 223: Susan Sleeper-Smith, A Native American History of the Ohio River Valley & Great Lakes Region

🎧 Episode 290: The World of the Wampanoag, Part 1: Before 1620

🎧 Episode 291: The World of the Wampanoag, Part 2: 1620 and Beyond

🎧 Episode 297: Claudio Saunt, Indian Removal Act of 1830

🎧 Episode 323: Michael Witgen, American Expansion and the Political Economy of Plunder

🎧 Episode 362: David W. Penney, Treaties Between the US & American Indian Nations

🎧 Episode 367: The Brafferton Indian School, Part 1

🎧 Episode 368: The Brafferton Indian School, Part 2: Legacies

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