;

Benjamin Franklin



  • The Unbearable Whiteness of Ken Burns

    by Timothy Messer-Kruse

    In the context of today's battles over teaching the history of racism in America, the new Franklin documentary unfortunately uses its subject to spin a narrative of national self-correction that ignores historians' attention to conflict and struggle. 



  • The Franklin Prophecy and Antisemitic Forgery for Profit

    by Scott D. Seligman

    Remarks attributed to Benjamin Franklin at the Constitutional Convention calling for the exclusion of Jews from the new nation were concocted by "lifetime anticommunist and antisemitic nutjob" Willam D. Pelley in the 1930s. 


  • Benjamin Franklin, Religious Revolutionary

    by J.D. Dickey

    Surprisingly, however, during America’s first major evangelical revival — the Great Awakening of the 1730s and ’40s — one of its most important figures had little use for religious conservatism. In fact, he wasn’t a preacher at all, but the reform-minded, freethinking Philadelphia printer Benjamin Franklin.