Can food help us better understand the people and events of the past? Can we better understand a person like Benjamin Franklin and who he was by the foods he ate?

Rae Katherine Eighmey, an award-winning food historian, author, and cook, joins us to explore the culinary tastes and habits of Benjamin Franklin and colonial British Americans with details from her book Stirring the Pot with Benjamin Franklin: A Founding Father’s Culinary Adventures.

Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/221

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Complementary Episodes

• Episode 019: Kenneth Turino, The Colonial Boston Marketplace
• Episode 022: Vivian Bruce Conger, Deborah Read Franklin & Sally Franklin Bache
• Episode 044: Adam Shprintzen, The Vegetarian Crusade
• Episode 135: Julie Holcomb, Moral Commerce: The Tranatlantic Boycott of the Slave Labor Economy
• Episode 169: Thomas S. Kidd, The Religious Life of Benjamin Franklin
• Episode 207: Nick Bunker, Young Benjamin Franklin

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Did you know that one of the earliest practices of slavery by English colonists originated in New England?

In fact, Massachusetts issued the very first slave code in English America in 1641. Why did New Englanders turn to slavery and become the first in English America to codify its practice?

Margaret Ellen Newell, a professor of history at The Ohio State University and the author of Brethren By Nature: New England Indians, Colonists, and the Origins of American Slavery, joins us to investigate these questions and issues.

Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/220

Sponsor Links

• Omohundro Institute
• OI Books (Use promo code 01DAH40 to save 40 percent)
• Denver Meet Up Saturday, January 19, 3:30pm at Prost Brewing 

Complementary Episodes

• Episode 064: Brett Rushforth, Native American Slavery in New France
• Episode 083: Jared Hardesty, Unfreedom: Slavery in Colonial Boston
• Episode 139: Andrés Reséndez, The Other Slavery
• Episode 170: Wendy Warren, New England Bound
• Episode 191: Lisa Brooks, A New History of King Philip’s War

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Inns and taverns played prominent roles in early American life. They served the needs of travelers who needed food to eat and places to sleep.They offered local communities a form of poor relief. And they functioned as public spaces where men could gather to discuss news, organize movements, and to drink and play cards.

Adrian Covert, author of Taverns of the American Revolution, helps us explore taverns and the many roles they played in early American life.

Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/219

Sponsor Links

• Omohundro Institute
• OI Books (Use promo code 01DAH40 to save 40 percent)
• Denver Meet Up Saturday, January 19, 3:30pm at Prost Brewing 

Complementary Episodes

• Bonus: Longfellow’s Wayside Inn
• Episode 112: The Tea Crisis of 1773
• Episode 160: The Politics of Tea
• Episode 161: Smuggling and the American Revolution
• Episode 187: Kenneth Cohen, Sport in Early America
• Episode 200: Everyday Life in Early America

Helpful Show Links

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Have you ever wondered where the Christmas traditions of stockings, presents, and cookies come from?

What about jolly, old Saint Nicholas? Who was he and why do we often call him Santa Claus?

Peter G. Rose, culinary historian of Dutch foodways in North America and author of Delicious December: How the Dutch Brought Us Santa, Presents, and Treats joins us to discuss the origins of Santa Claus and edible goodies such as cookies in the United States.

This episode originally posted as Episode 009.

Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/218

Sponsor Links

• Omohundro Institute
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Complementary Episodes

• Episode 035: Michael Lord, Historic Hudson Valley & Washington Irving
• Episode 121: Wim Klooster, The Dutch Moment in the 17th-Century Atlantic World
• Episode 161: Smuggling and the American Revolution
• Episode 185: Joyce Goodfriend, Who Should Rule at Home?

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How do you uncover the life of an enslaved person who left no paper trail?

What can the everyday life of an enslaved person tell us about slavery, how it was practiced, and how some enslaved people made the transition from slavery to freedom?

We explore the life of Charity Folks, an enslaved woman from Maryland who gained her freedom in the late-18th century. Our guide through Charity’s life is Jessica Millward, an Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine and author of Finding Charity’s Folk: Enslaved and Free Black Women in Maryland.

This episode originally posted as Episode 089.

Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/217

Sponsor Links

• Omohundro Institute
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Complementary Episodes

• Episode 070: Jennifer Morgan, How Historians Research
• Episode 083: Jared Hardesty, Unfreedom: Slavery in Colonial Boston
• Episode 084: Zara Anishanslin, How Historians Read Historical Sources
• Episode 176: Daina Ramey Berry, Price For Their Pound of Flesh
• Episode 212: Erica Dunbar, Research Biography

Helpful Show Links

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What do George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Abraham Lincoln have in common?

They all grew-up in blended or stepfamilies.

Lisa Wilson, the Charles J. MacCurdy Professor of American History at Connecticut College and author of A History of Stepfamilies in Early America, takes us through the creation and interactions of blended and stepfamilies in early America.

This episode originally posted as Episode 027.

Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/216

Sponsor Links

• Omohundro Institute
• Chicago 2019 Meetup

Complementary Episodes

• Episode 150: Woody Holton, Abigail Adams
• Episode 175: Daniel Epstein, House Divided: The Revolution in Ben Franklin’s House
• Episode 183: Douglas Bradburn, Mount Vernon
• Episode 207: Nick Bunker, Young Benjamin Franklin

Helpful Show Links

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We tend to view gay marriage as a cultural and legal development of the 21st century.

But did you know that some early Americans lived openly as same-sex married couples?

Rachel Hope Cleves, a Professor of History at the University of Victoria in British Columbia and author of Charity and Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America, reveals the story of Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake, women who lived as a married couple in Weybridge, Vermont between 1807 and 1851.

This episode originally posted as Episode 013.

Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/215

Sponsor Links

• Omohundro Institute
• Chicago 2019 Meetup

Complementary Episodes

• Episode 004: Thomas Foster, Sex and the Founding Fathers
• Episode 027: Lisa Wilson, A History of Stepfamilies in Early America
• Episode 032: Michelle Marchetti Coughlin, One Colonial Woman’s World
• Episode 120: Marcia Zug, A History of Mail Order Brides in Early America
• Episode 175: Daniel Epstein, House Divided: The Revolution in Ben Franklin’s House

Helpful Show Links

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Was the early United States a “Christian nation?” Did most of its citizenry accept God and the Bible as the moral authority that bound them together as one nation?

Scholars have taken a binary stance on these questions. Some argue that early America was a thoroughly religious place and that even those who didn’t attend church were on the same basic page as those who did. While others argue early America boasted an increasingly secularized society.

Christopher Grasso, a professor of history at William & Mary and the author of Skepticism and American Faith: From the Revolution to the Civil War, challenges and complicates these two ideas by offering a third explanation: the religious landscape of early America was a continuum where many people experienced both faith and doubt over the course of their lives.

Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/214

Seattle Meet Up Details

Sponsor Links

• Omohundro Institute

Complementary Episodes

• Episode 117: Annette Gordon-Reed, The Life and Ideas of Thomas Jefferson
• Episode 127: Caroline Winterer, American Enlightenments
• Episode 134: Spencer McBride, Pulpit and Nation
• Episode 169: Thomas Kidd, The Religious Life of Benjamin Franklin
• Episode 182: Douglas Winiarski, Darkness Falls on the Land of Light, the Great Awakening in New England

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In 1621, the Pilgrims of Plimoth Colony and their Wampanoag neighbors came together to celebrate their first harvest. Today we remember this event as the first Thanksgiving.

But what do we really know about this holiday and the people who celebrated it?

So much of what we know about the Pilgrims and the first Thanksgiving comes to us through myth and legend, which is why Rebecca Fraser, author of The Mayflower: The Families, The Voyage, and the Founding of America, joins us to help suss out fact from fiction.

Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/213

Sponsor Links

• Omohundro Institute

Seattle Meet Up Details

Complementary Episodes

• Episode 095: Rose Doherty, A Tale of Two Bostons
• Episode 104: Andrew Lipman, Saltwater Frontier: Native Americans and Colonists on the Northeastern Coast
• Episode 121: Wim Klooster, The Dutch Moment in the 17th-Century Atlantic World
• Episode 182: Douglas Winiarski, When Darkness Falls On The Land of Light
• Episode 191: Lisa Brooks, A New History of King Philip’s War
• Episode 209: Considering Biography

Helpful Show Links

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How do historians and biographers reconstruct the lives of people from the past?

Good biographies rely on telling the lives of people using practiced historical methods of thorough archival research and the sound interrogation of historical sources. But what does this practice of historical methods look like?

In this final episode of the Omohundro Institute’s Doing History series about biography, Erica Dunbar, the Charles and Mary Beard Professor of History at Rutgers University and author of Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave Ona Judge, takes us into the archives to show us how she recovered the life of Ona Judge.

Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/212

Sponsor Links

• Omohundro Institute
• John Marshall Foundation

Complementary Episodes

• Episode 137: Erica Dunbar, The Washingtons’ Runaway Slave, Ona Judge
• Episode 173: Marisa Fuentes, Colonial Port Cities and Slavery
• Episode 183: Douglas Bradburn, George Washington’s Mount Vernon
• Episode 209: Considering Biography
• Episode 210: Considering John Marshall, Part 1
• Episode 211: Considering John Marshall, Part 2

Helpful Show Links

• Ben Franklin's World Facebook Page
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• Join the Ben Franklin's World Community
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• Ben Franklin's World iOS App
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*Books purchased through this link will help support the production of Ben Franklin's World.

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