In many ways, the Enlightenment gave birth to the United States. Enlightened ideas informed protests over imperial governance and taxation and over whether there should be an American bishop. If we want to understand early America, we need to...
On January 10, 1776, Thomas Paine published Common Sense, a fiery pamphlet that transformed colonial protest into a call for American Independence. With clear language and bold ideas, Paine challenged monarchy, championed republican government, and...
What does history have to tell us about how we, as Americans, came to define people by their race–the visual ways we group people based on their skin color, facial features, hair texture, and ancestry? History provides a LOT of answers to this...
This is an episode you’ve been waiting for! Mark Tabbert, the Director of Archives and Exhibits at the George Washington Masonic National Memorial Association and the author of Almanac of American Freemasonry and A Deserving Brother: George...
What has enabled the American experiment in democracy to endure for nearly 250 years? What is it about early American history that captivates peoples’ attention and makes them want to support the creation of historical scholarship and the sharing of...
What do historians wish more people better understood about early American history and why do they wish people had that better understanding? In celebration of the 300th episode of Ben Franklin’s World, we posed these questions to more than 30...
Did you know that imagination once played a key role in the way Americans understood and practiced medicine? Sari Altschuler, an Associate Professor of English at Northeastern University and author of The Medical Imagination: Literature and Health...
We read and hear a lot about money. We read and hear about fluctuations in the value of the Dollar, Pound, and Euro, interest rates and who can and can’t get access to credit, and we also read and hear about new virtual currencies like Bitcoin and...
Historians use archives to create the histories we love to read, watch, and listen to. So we’re going into one archive to investigate how historians use them and to discover more about the religious lives of the Adams Family. Sara Georgini, Series...
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...