As the American Revolution morphed into a world war with the entrance of France and Spain, the diplomatic attempts to settle it became more complex. Europe became a hotbed of diplomatic activity, conducted by both state-sanctioned negotiators and freelancers of various sorts, all with their own agendas for negotiations. There was a series of third-party […]
Quotes about indigenous Native Americans are brimming with paradoxes. Benjamin Franklin praised their martial skills and the political structure of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy yet labeled them “ignorant savages.” John Adams chastised the French utilization of native warriors in the French and Indian Wars while Philip Schuyler wooed Oneida warriors with false promises of equality and […]
On this week’s Dispatches, host Brady Crytzer interviews JAR editor and distinguished historian Ray Raphael on his recent article about “kingly government,” Benjamin Franklin’s greatest fear for the new country. New episodes of Dispatches are available for free every Saturday evening (Eastern United States Time) on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, Amazon Music, and the JAR Dispatches web site. […]
In the beginning, there was Congress. On May 29, 1787, a Tuesday, with delegates to the Federal Convention seated and rules settled, Virginia’s governor Edmund Randolph introduced his state’s vision for the new nation. Article 1 set the stage: “Resolved that the Articles of Confederation ought to be corrected & enlarged” to provide for “common […]
Most stories have a chief villain. The story of the American Revolution is no different. One man stands out amongst all the rest in the minds of Massachusetts revolutionary leaders. James Otis, Samuel Adams, and especially John Adams accused Thomas Hutchinson as being the architect of all the oppressive laws that were being passed by […]
In 1763, the powers of Europe signed the Peace of Paris bringing an end to the French and Indian War. The Kingdom of Great Britain emerged victorious, seizing from France several new territories throughout Canada and east of the Mississippi. But victory came at tremendous cost. The war debt incurred over the last seven years […]
The idea that no one is above the law is a long-held and repeated precept of American constitutionalism. Its roots go back to the philosophical and historical foundations of western political thought. Holding a prominent place in this history is the thirteenth-century English Magna Carta. Although it does not explicitly use the phrase, the document—a […]
TELEVISION REVIEW: Franklin. Directed by Tim Van Patten. Written by Kirk Ellis and Howard Korder. Featuring Michael Douglas, Noah Jupe, Daniel Mays, and Eddie Marsan. Released April 12–May 17, 2024. Apple TV+. Franklin, as a television miniseries, is well done. Rarely do we see this time period—the eighteenth century—televised. This eight-hour program has spectacular production […]
Benjamin Franklin died at his home in Philadelphia at eleven o’clock p.m. on April 17, 1790; he was eighty-four years old. On June 4, Benjamin Vaughan, a doctor, Member of Parliament and friend of Franklin, wrote to the Duc de la Rochefoucauld, another friend of Franklin. In his letter that arrived on June 10, he […]
In George Washington’s Mount Vernon mansion many visitors take note of the key presented by Lafayette to the first American president, formerly used in the Bastille prison in Paris. Few visitors invest much time to look at a tea set on display in the exhibition and fewer still will wonder about who made Martha and […]
It is common for nations to search for heroes to emulate a lofty standard for their citizens. Benjamin Franklin may be unique in that he ascended to the level of apotheosis, not initially from the acclaim of his own countrymen, but from citizens of the country abroad where he functioned as a diplomat.[1] One of […]
On November 16, 1775, Robert Dixon lay dying not far from Quebec. Among the first American troops commissioned by the Continental Congress, he was a sergeant in Matthew Smith’s Company of Thompson’s Rifle Battalion. The previous July, he had walked with his company from the backcountry of Pennsylvania all the way to Boston, a distance […]
The British Library in London, England, houses an internationally significant and relatively understudied copy of Dr. John Mitchell’s renowned 1755 map, renamed and reprinted circa 1775 A Map of the British Colonies in North America. . .[1] This map garnered particular attention due to its use in the 1782 boundary negotiations conducted by the British […]
On March 26, 1772, The Massachusetts Spy ran an unusual item on page 3 of that day’s newspaper: an advertisement for a dramatic performance of The Adulateur at the Grand Parade in Upper Servia. Filling nearly half the page, the notice contained a list of dramatis personae and a couple of scenes from the play. In the […]
We often remember the controversy surrounding the Hutchinson Letters, which inspired many colonists to oppose the provincial government in Massachusetts, by talking about Benjamin Franklin (who found and sent the letters) and Samuel Adams (who helped publish them). Our memory of the letters’ author, Thomas Hutchinson, is often colored by a 1774 print by Paul Revere, […]
John Adams was making his way from Massachusetts to Pennsylvania for a convening of the delegates tasked to craft a response to the Coercive Acts when he and his entourage arrived in Manhattan on the morning of Saturday August 20, 1774. He met that day with numerous dignitaries and dined late into the evening at […]
It is axiomatic that the American victory at Saratoga was, aside from events at Yorktown, the pivotal military event of the American Revolution. The victory set in motion several actions by various parties with self-serving agendas, but it was the manner in which word of the victory was communicated, something today might well be called […]
After the French and Indian War, or the Seven Years War as it was known in Europe, Spain and France began to plan for their revenge against Britain. They had been humiliated by Britain by the terms of that ended that war. They began to rebuild their navies and to train them together with joint […]
“I, A. B.do promise and declare that I will remain in a peaceable Obedience to His Majesty, and will not take up Arms, nor encourage Others to take up Arms, in Opposition to His Authority, shall and may obtain a full and free Pardon of all Treason and misprisions of Treason, by him heretofore committed […]
On this week’s Dispatches, host Brady Crytzer interviews JAR contributor John E. Happ on the commemorations to Benjamin Franklin and the American Revolution that can be seen in Paris. New episodes of Dispatches are available for free every Saturday evening (Eastern United States Time) on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, Amazon Music, and the JAR Dispatches web site. Dispatches can […]
France has an extraordinary way of commemorating the glorious past through landmarks and monuments. Benjamin Franklin had been an off and on resident of Paris living at 66 rue Raynouard, the former Hotel de Valentinoise, in Passy. He was recognized as the first official diplomat and Ambassador of the thirteen American colonies. There is a […]
Algernon Sidney was a seventeenth-century British political theorist, Member of Parliament, and Whig politician who was executed for treason on December 7, 1683, during the reign of Charles II. At his trial, the most incriminating evidence presented by the prosecution was a series of anti-monarchical passages from a seized manuscript of Sidney’s reformist treatise, Discourses […]
It is widely acknowledged that the military alliance between the United States and France, established in 1778, was responsible not only for a number of American victories over the British, but also for the end of the Revolutionary War. While much has been written about this topic as well as the events that occurred between […]
On this week’s Dispatches, host Brady Crytzer interviews best-selling author and historian Nancy Rubin Stuart on what made Benjamin Franklin and Deborah Read’s marriage one of the more unusual among prominent Americans of the Revolutionary era. New episodes of Dispatches are available for free every Saturday evening (Eastern United States Time) on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, Amazon […]
She was neither beautiful nor wealthy. Nor was Benjamin Franklin’s wife educated or intellectual. Nevertheless in 1724 he proposed to Deborah Read while renting a room from her father, the carpenter John Read of Philadelphia. Was it simply youthful passion that attracted him or did the eighteen-year-old printer ask for Deborah’s hand because she had […]
Mit Complimenten Aweissen (put him off with compliments) Arthur Lee, one of the American Commissioners stationed in Paris, was appointed minister to the Prussian Court of King Frederick the Great in the Spring of 1777. He departed Paris on May 19 and arrived in Berlin on the evening of June 4. The next day, he informed […]
Upon the death of his grandfather on May 31, 1740, Frederick William II of the House of Hohenzollern became the King of Prussia. Over the next forty-six years, he pursued two goals: modernizing Prussia and reuniting the lands that had once been part of Prussia. In his youth he received a classical education including exposure […]
There are many, many founding fathers in the story of America’s Revolution and unfortunately only a few are really known to the general public. Yet without those who are less known, there would have been no revolution. One of those men was the official secretary of the Continental Congress, Charles Thomson. He was the sole […]
Benjamin Franklin was a man of many talents and titles. He was a printer, writer, scientist, inventor, politician, diplomat, and philosopher, among other things. But did you know he was also a firefighter? In 1736, Franklin helped found the Union Fire Company of Philadelphia, one of the first volunteer fire departments in America. He was […]
William Franklin, son of Benjamin Franklin, was the last Royal Governor of New Jersey, from 1763 to 1776. He is usually identified in U. S. History texts negatively as an ardent Loyalist and opponent of the American War of Independence. Historian Larry Gerlach offers a different view: “He was one of the most popular and […]
On July 25, 1768, Benjamin Franklin set his friend, Charles-Guillaume-Frédéric Dumas, straight. Dumas, a man of letters who would later serve as an American diplomat in Europe, was interested in settling British East Florida. Franklin informed Dumas that his home in Philadelphia “being near 1000 Miles from Florida”[1] prevented his intimate acquaintance with that region. […]
Silence Dogood, Anthony Afterwit, Fanny Mournful, Caelia Shortface. Dickens’ characters? No. They’re just a few of the many evocative pen names Benjamin Franklin used to wittily present a controversial or libelous issue or two sides of an argument while remaining anonymous. As a sixteen-year-old apprentice at his brother’s paper, the New England Courant, Franklin was privy […]
In the second half of the 1700s, French natural historian Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, formulated what would be dubbed the “New World degeneracy” or the “American degeneracy” theory. His work, Histoire Naturelle, Générale et Particulière, included a vast array of facts about natural history from around the world as well as the Count’s many […]
Late in September 1774 the Continental Congress was in the middle of an ongoing debate on the means that should be implemented to restore American rights. Most of the discussion was around methods of confrontation with Britain, embargoes, and non-consumption activities, as well as the breaking down of British law and order in the colonies. […]
The increasingly turbulent years preceding the American Revolution were fueled by an exchange of laws promulgated by Great Britain to maintain political and economic control over its American Colonies and the reactions of her unruly colonies to those laws. One of the events in the lead-up to the Revolution was the issuance by Great Britain […]
In the early years of the nineteenth century, the founders of the new American Republic were lurching forward from the shockingly successful outcome of their increasingly remote Revolution, and finding themselves immersed in the uncharted waters of nation-building. The political landscape was inflamed by passionate partisanship and varying, often vituperatively expressed visions of what course […]
BOOK REVIEW: The Howe Dynasty: The Untold Story of a Military Family and the Women Behind Britain’s Wars for America by Julie Flavell (Liveright, 2021) In The Howe Dynasty: The Untold Story of a Military Family and the Women Behind Britain’s Wars for America, Julie Flavell offers fresh insight into the Howe family as told from a […]
Speaking on Independence Day, 1821, John Quincy Adams, sixth President of the Unites States and the son of John Adams, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, stated that the Declaration was merely an occasional state-paper. It was a solemn exposition to the world, of the causes which have compelled the people of a small […]
The scribe of the Declaration of Independence—and perhaps the first man to read it in public—was born on March 28, 1736 in Haddonfield, New Jersey. His family moved to Philadelphia eight years later. At the age of thirteen, Timothy Matlack began an apprenticeship under a prosperous Quaker merchant named John Reynell. Looking forward to a […]
