Ben Franklin's World

If you will recall from Episode 331, the Williamsburg Bray School is the oldest existing structure in the United States that we know was used to educate African and African American children.As the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation prepares the Bray School for you to visit and see, we’re having many conversations about the history of the school, its scholars, and early Black American History in general.During one of these conversations, the work of Kevin Dawson came up. Kevin is an Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Merced and author of the book, Undercurrents of Power: Aquatic Culture in the African Diaspora.Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/383 Complementary Episodes🎧 Episode 104: The Saltwater Frontier: Europeans & Native Americans on the Northeastern Coast🎧 Episode 241: Pearls and the Nature of the Spanish Empire🎧 Episode 250: Virginia, 1619🎧 Episode 277: Who's Fourth of July?🎧 Episode 331: Discovery of the Williamsburg Bray School🎧 Episode 347: African and African American Music🎧 Episode 352: James Forten and the Making of the United States REQUEST A TOPIC📨 Topic Request Form📫 liz@benfranklinsworld.comWHEN YOU'RE READY🗞️ BFW Gazette Newsletter 👩‍💻 Join the BFW Listener CommunityLISTEN 🍎 Apple Podcasts 💚 Spotify 🎶 Amazon Music🛜 PandoraCONNECT🦋 Liz on Bluesky👩‍💻 Liz on LinkedIn🛜 Liz’s WebsiteSAY THANKS💜 Leave a review on Apple Podcasts💚 Leave a rating on Spotify Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Within the Declaration of Independence, the founders of the United States present twenty-seven grievances against King George III as they declare their reasons for why the thirteen British North American colonies sought their independence from Great Britain. Their twenty-fifth grievance declares that King George III “is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat [sic] the works of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun.”What do we know about the “Armies of foreign Mercenaries” King George III sent to his rebellious American colonies? Friederike Baer, an Associate Professor of History at Penn State Abbington College, joins us to explore the lives and wartime experiences of the 30,000 German soldiers the British Crown hired and dispatched to North America during the American War for Independence. Frederike is the author of the award-winning book Hessians: German Soldiers in the American Revolutionary War.Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/382 Complementary Episodes🎧 Episode 046: Whirlwind: The American Revolution & the War That Won It 🎧 Episode 048: Dangerous Guests: Enemy Captives During the War for Independence 🎧 Episode 081: After Yorktown🎧 Episode 144: The Common Cause🎧 Episode 147: British Soldiers, American War 🎧 Episode 157: The Revolution’s African American Soldiers🎧 Episode 252: The Highland Soldier in North America🎧 Episode 375: Misinformation NationREQUEST A TOPIC📨 Topic Request Form📫 liz@benfranklinsworld.comWHEN YOU'RE READY🗞️ BFW Gazette Newsletter 👩‍💻 Join the BFW Listener CommunityLISTEN 🍎 Apple Podcasts 💚 Spotify 🎶 Amazon Music🛜 PandoraCONNECT🦋 Liz on Bluesky👩‍💻 Liz on LinkedIn🛜 Liz’s WebsiteSAY THANKS💜 Leave a review on Apple Podcasts💚 Leave a rating on Spotify Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 SlaveryREQUEST A TOPIC📨 Topic Request Form📫 liz@benfranklinsworld.comWHEN YOU'RE READY🗞️ BFW Gazette Newsletter 👩‍💻 Join the BFW Listener CommunityLISTEN 🍎 Apple Podcasts 💚 Spotify 🎶 Amazon Music🛜 PandoraCONNECT🦋 Liz on Bluesky👩‍💻 Liz on LinkedIn🛜 Liz’s WebsiteSAY THANKS💜 Leave a review on Apple Podcasts💚 Leave a rating on Spotify Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 REQUEST A TOPIC📨 Topic Request Form📫 liz@benfranklinsworld.comWHEN YOU'RE READY🗞️ BFW Gazette Newsletter 👩‍💻 Join the BFW Listener CommunityLISTEN 🍎 Apple Podcasts 💚 Spotify 🎶 Amazon Music🛜 PandoraCONNECT🦋 Liz on Bluesky👩‍💻 Liz on LinkedIn🛜 Liz’s WebsiteSAY THANKS💜 Leave a review on Apple Podcasts💚 Leave a rating on Spotify Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 REQUEST A TOPIC📨 Topic Request Form📫 liz@benfranklinsworld.comWHEN YOU'RE READY🗞️ BFW Gazette Newsletter 👩‍💻 Join the BFW Listener CommunityLISTEN 🍎 Apple Podcasts 💚 Spotify 🎶 Amazon Music🛜 PandoraCONNECT🦋 Liz on Bluesky👩‍💻 Liz on LinkedIn🛜 Liz’s WebsiteSAY THANKS💜 Leave a review on Apple Podcasts💚 Leave a rating on Spotify Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 REQUEST A TOPIC📨 Topic Request Form📫 liz@benfranklinsworld.comWHEN YOU'RE READY🗞️ BFW Gazette Newsletter 👩‍💻 Join the BFW Listener CommunityLISTEN 🍎 Apple Podcasts 💚 Spotify 🎶 Amazon Music🛜 PandoraCONNECT🦋 Liz on Bluesky👩‍💻 Liz on LinkedIn🛜 Liz’s WebsiteSAY THANKS💜 Leave a review on Apple Podcasts💚 Leave a rating on Spotify Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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  REQUEST A TOPIC📨 Topic Request Form📫 liz@benfranklinsworld.comWHEN YOU'RE READY🗞️ BFW Gazette Newsletter 👩‍💻 Join the BFW Listener CommunityLISTEN 🍎 Apple Podcasts 💚 Spotify 🎶 Amazon Music🛜 PandoraCONNECT🦋 Liz on Bluesky👩‍💻 Liz on LinkedIn🛜 Liz’s WebsiteSAY THANKS💜 Leave a review on Apple Podcasts💚 Leave a rating on Spotify Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 Complementary Episodes🎧 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 SlaveryREQUEST A TOPIC📨 Topic Request Form📫 liz@benfranklinsworld.comWHEN YOU'RE READY🗞️ BFW Gazette Newsletter 👩‍💻 Join the BFW Listener CommunityLISTEN 🎧🍎 Apple Podcasts 💚 Spotify 🎶 Amazon Music🛜 PandoraCONNECT🦋 Liz on Bluesky👩‍💻 Liz on LinkedIn🛜 Liz’s WebsiteSAY THANKS💜 Leave a review on Apple Podcasts💚 Leave a rating on Spotify Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 REQUEST A TOPIC📨 Topic Request Form📫 liz@benfranklinsworld.comWHEN YOU'RE READY🗞️ BFW Gazette Newsletter 👩‍💻 Join the BFW Listener CommunityLISTEN 🎧🍎 Apple Podcasts 💚 Spotify 🎶 Amazon Music🛜 PandoraCONNECT🦋 Liz on Bluesky👩‍💻 Liz on LinkedIn🛜 Liz’s WebsiteSAY THANKS💜 Leave a review on Apple Podcasts💚 Leave a rating on Spotify Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 REQUEST A TOPIC📨 Topic Request Form📫 liz@benfranklinsworld.comWHEN YOU'RE READY🗞️ BFW Gazette Newsletter 👩‍💻 Join the BFW Listener CommunityLISTEN 🍎 Apple Podcasts 💚 Spotify 🎶 Amazon Music🛜 PandoraCONNECT🦋 Liz on Bluesky👩‍💻 Liz on LinkedIn🛜 Liz’s WebsiteSAY THANKS💜 Leave a review on Apple Podcasts💚 Leave a rating on Spotify Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices