One nice result of the celebrations of October 6, 2023 in Philadelphia was that Roy Goodman put me in touch with Richard Armandi, a long-time Franklinian who is particularly interested in the original locations of Franklin’s printing businesses. The suggestion from Franklin Court is that all of Franklin’s business was housed on that property, which …
Franklin first arrived in Philadelphia on October 6, 1723, and the 300th anniversary is easy to celebrate!
There’s plenty to talk about, so it’s time to start a list.
Some of the better articles on Franklin’s armonica:
The Washington Post today published an exclusive report surveying the works of art in the U. S. Capitol showing slaveholders and supporters of the Confederacy as well as enslaved people. It begs the wearying search for the location of the new line, to be drawn somewhere between the Robert E. Lee statue erected in a …
Keep Thy Shop, a stained glass panel installed in my library/office October 2022 in honor of Benjamin Franklin’s career as a printer. Images edited and screen printed from J. G. Chapman’s engravings for Rev. H. Hastings Weld’s 1849 edition of BF’s Autobiography, texts from Poor Richard, including “Keep thy Shop, & thy Shop will keep …
This book would be fine as a first book on Franklin, because the author starts from not knowing much about him, and touches meaningfully on every fundamental facet of Franklin that I can think of. He goes on to cover his topic very well. Most Franklin fans are not particularly interested in what happened to …
Roy Goodman has introduced me to this wonderful theatrical piece performed at Franklin & Marshall College in 2006. Bravo, Sebastienne Mundheim! Source:White Box Theatre website
From my Goodreads review of Nick Bunker’s wonderful book: Without question, my Book of the Year, so far. One of the best books on Franklin, this takes many episodes one reads right past in his Autobiography (and standard biographies) and goes deeper.The definition of “young” is generous: Franklin is forty years old before this author …
I’m cross-posting my review in GoodReads here of Phillip Goodrich‘s 2019 book, Somersett – Or Why and How Benjamin Franklin Orchestrated The American Revolution. It’s a darn good story, with a lot of lively historical matters presented, but unreliable while asking us to believe all of it. The author spins an engaging tale of a …
