Ben Franklin's World

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, a...

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 Universi...

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 ...

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 Spring...

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 Afr...

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 semiquin...

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 ...

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 quest...

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 r...

The so-called “March to the American Revolution” comprised many more events than just the Stamp Act Riots, the Boston Massacre, and the Tea Crisis. One event we often overlook played an essential and direct role in the events needed to draw the thirteen rebellious British North American colonies into a union of coordinated response. That event was the Gaspee Affair in 1772.

Adrian Weimer, a professor of history at Providence Colleg...

Early America was a diverse place. A significant part of this diversity came from the fact that there were at least 1,000 different Indigenous tribes and nations living in different areas of North America before the Spanish and other European empires arrived on the continent’s shores.

 Diane Hunter and John Bickers join us to investigate the history and culture of one of these distinct Indigenous tribes: the Myaamia. At the time of...

Long before European arrival in the Americas, Indigenous people and nations practiced enslavement. Their version of enslavement looked different from the version Christopher Columbus and his fellow Europeans practiced, but Indigenous slavery also shared many similarities with the Euro-American practice of African Chattel Slavery.

While there is no way to measure the exact impact of slavery upon the Indigenous peoples of the America...

Happy Halloween! In honor of the 31st of October and All Hallows Eve, we investigate a historical incident of witches and witchcraft in Springfield, Massachusetts in 1651.

Malcolm Gaskill, Emeritus Professor of Early Modern History at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, and one of the leading experts in the history of witchcraft, joins us to discuss details from his new book, The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death i...

Establishing colonies in North America took an astonishing amount of work. Colonists had to clear trees, eventually remove stumps from newly cleared fields, plant crops to eat and sell, weed and tend those crops, and then they had to harvest crops, and get the crops they intended to sell to the nearest market town, and that was just some of the work involved to establish colonial farms.

Colonists did not often perform this work on ...

The Brafferton Indian School has a long and complicated legacy. Chartered with the College of William & Mary in 1693, the Brafferton Indian School’s purpose was to educate young Indigenous boys in the ways of English religion, language, and culture. The Brafferton performed this work for more than 70 years, between the arrival of its first students in 1702 and when the last documented student left the school in 1778. 

This second e...

In 1693, King William III and Queen Mary II of England granted a royal charter for two institutions of higher education in the Colony of Virginia. The first institution was the College of William & Mary. The second institution was the Indian School at William & Mary, known from 1723 to the present as the Brafferton Indian School.

The history of the Brafferton Indian School is a story of power, trade, land, and culture. It’s an Indi...

On September 17, 1787, the members of the Constitutional Convention concluded their work by signing the final draft of their new proposed government. The document they signed was the United States Constitution, which is why the United States marks Constitution Day each year on September 17.

In honor of Constitution Day, we explore the life of a Founder who played a large role in the creation and shaping of the United States Constit...

2020 commemorated the 300th anniversary of French presence on Prince Edward Island. Like much of North America, the Canadian Maritime provinces of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Cape Breton Island, and Prince Edward Island were highly contested regions. In fact, the way France and Great Britain fought for presence and control of this region places the Canadian Maritimes among the most contested regions in eighteenth-century North A...

The Mississippi Gulf Coast was the home of many different peoples, cultures, and empires during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. According to some historians, the Gulf Coast region may have been the most diverse region in early North America.


Matthew Powell, a historian of slavery and southern history and the Executive Director of the La Pointe-Krebs House & Museum in Pascagoula, Mississippi, joins us to investigate and e...