Printer and publisher, author and educator, scientist and inventor, statesman and philanthropist, Benjamin Franklin was the very embodiment of the American type of self-made man. In 1771, at the age of 65, he sat down to write his autobiography, «having emerged from the poverty and obscurity in which I was born and bred to a state of affluence and some degree of reputation in the world, and having gone so far through life with a considerable sha ...
In 1700, some 250,000 white and black inhabitants populated the thirteen American colonies, with the vast majority of whites either born in England or descended from English immigrants. By 1776, the non-Native American population had increased tenfold, and non-English Europeans and Africans dominated new immigration. Of all the European immigrant groups, the Germans may have been the largest. Aaron Spencer Fogleman has written the first compreh ...
On March 5, 1681, one day after receiving his royal charter for Pennsylvania, William Penn wrote that he believed God would make his colony «the seed of the nation.» Penn wanted his Pennsylvania to be a land where people of differing languages and customs could live together, where men and women could worship as they pleased, where men could participate fully in their government. Such a land, Penn believed, would indeed be blessed. Beginning w ...
Between the English Civil War of 1642 and the American Revolution, countless British missionaries announced their intention to «spread the gospel» among the native North American population. Despite the scope of their endeavors, they converted only a handful of American Indians to Christianity. Their attempts to secure moral and financial support at home proved much more successful. In The Poor Indians , Laura Stevens delves deeply into the la ...
Judith Sargent Murray (1751-1820), poet, essayist, playwright, and one of the most thoroughgoing advocates of women's rights in early America, was as well known in her own day as Abigail Adams or Martha Washington. Her name, though, has virtually disappeared from the public consciousness. Thanks to the recent discovery of Murray's papers—including some 2,500 personal letters—historian Sheila L. Skemp has documented ...
In this study of the reciprocities binding religion, politics, law, and literature, Debora Shuger offers a profoundly new history of early modern English censorship, one that bears centrally on issues still current: the rhetoric of ideological extremism, the use of defamation to ruin political opponents, the grounding of law in theological ethics, and the terrible fragility of public spheres. Starting from the question of why no one prior to the ...