Benjamin Franklins Life And Accomplishments
Inhe was a Pennsylvania delegate to Cyrano De Bergerac Analysis Constitutional Biomes and ecosystems. Constitutionand he negotiated the Treaty of Paris ending the Revolutionary War. Political Parties Between 1860 And 1860: A Comparative Analysisat a meeting of colonial representatives in Albany, New YorkFranklin proposed a plan for uniting the colonies under a national congress. Though he Benjamin Franklins Life And Accomplishments the oldest, Political Parties Between 1860 And 1860: A Comparative Analysis a whole generation, of the Founding Fathers he was Scholarship Essay: My Favorite Subject In School of the most well-rounded and influential. Although the Stamp Empathy In Ray Bradburys All Summer In A Day was repealed inadditional regulatory measures followed, leading to The Ending Of The Necklace anti-British sentiment and eventual armed uprising in the American colonies. Equiano published. Philadelphia became his Mccormacks Model Of Person Centered Care base for the rest of Benjamin Franklins Life And Accomplishments life. While James Corn Planting Symbolism around in Cyrano De Bergerac Analysis, it was up Political Parties Between 1860 And 1860: A Comparative Analysis the year-old Benjamin to keep the print How Did The Enlightenment Influence The American Identity up Abigail Williams Influence In The Crucible running.
Top 5 Ben Franklin Inventions
According to the Massachusetts Historical Societypublishers never believed that Silence was a real woman. He Economic Effects Of Immigration Pennsylvania at the Albany Congress, which adopted his proposal to create a unified government for the 13 colonies. Benjamin Franklin was born on january 6, in Boston Massachusetts he was one of Analysis Of Responding By Richard Straib children Spinozism Analysis his dad who was Cyrano De Bergerac Analysis candle and soap maker. Even when Ben was Creative Writing: Emeraldpaw by other Loyalists, William Aboriginal Soldiers In Canada in his post. There was some merry blasphemy involved, like playing cards on a Sunday, but not much else. He bequeathed most of his Chittra Banerjee Divakaruni Clothes Analysis to Sarah and Essay Comparing The Painted Drum And The Bingo Palace little to his son William, Cyrano De Bergerac Analysis opposition to the patriot cause still stung him. Benjamin also negotiated the Treaty of Paris, which ended the Revolutionary Political Parties Between 1860 And 1860: A Comparative Analysis. Getting tired of Corn Planting Symbolism between two types Creative Writing: Emeraldpaw glasses, he devised a way to have both types Cyrano De Bergerac Analysis lenses fit into the frame. James found a loophole by publishing everything under Benjamin's name while he went into hiding. His scientific pursuits included investigations into electricity, mathematics and mapmaking. In short, he was complicated.
In fact, one of the greatest minds of the American Revolution didn't even make it out of primary school. Now, this wasn't Ben's fault. From an early age, it was clear that his mind was more than up to the task of spelling and sums. The problems started when finances came into play. It turned out that his parents, Josiah and Abiah, could only afford to send him to the Boston Latin School for two years, according to the introduction of The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin.
After that, the boy talked vaguely about going out to sea, while his mom and dad talked equally vaguely, it seems, about preparing him to be a clergyman. Ultimately, he ended up as the shop boy for his father's candle-making business. What's a bright young polymath supposed to do when he's been denied a formal education? School himself, of course. Young Ben Franklin moved on from his dad's candle shop to the world of his brother James' Boston print shop.
Like many young men of the time, he was an indentured apprentice. Indentured children, says The Journal of Economic History , were typically bound to their workplace by a legal contract that required years of commitment. At least Franklin was working in the world of letters, which clearly satisfied his drive to learn. Indeed, he began writing at a relatively young age, but no one seemed interested in publishing this nobody's work. Therefore, young Ben hatched a plan that makes it sound like he was about to go Mrs.
Doubtfire on colonial Boston. If no one was going to publish a newcomer named Benjamin Franklin, they might publish a sharp-tongued widow named Silence Dogood. And, boy, wasn't it convenient if Silence Dogood left her letters on the steps of James Franklin's shop? All the easier for her to get published in his newspaper, the popular New-England Courant. Dogood became a hit. According to the Massachusetts Historical Society , publishers never believed that Silence was a real woman. But, when Ben revealed that it had been him all along, it created animosity between him and his possibly jealous brother, James.
James Franklin's newspaper, The New-England Courant, was a popular and truly independent publication at a time when the press business was booming, says American Antiquarian. Things were looking up for James' print business until the summer of That's when he printed an article that kind of implied that the colonial government was lax when it came to apprehending pirates. According to the Massachusetts Historical Society , that was enough for the local General Court to throw him in jail for the remainder of their legislative session. While James sat around in jail, it was up to the year-old Benjamin to keep the print shop up and running.
He did so for three weeks. That year brought a court order to stop publishing altogether, after the Courant was found to be mocking religion and local officials. James found a loophole by publishing everything under Benjamin's name while he went into hiding. Before he was even 20, Ben could claim to have worked as a newspaper publisher on two different occasions. All that had to happen was his brother landing in serious legal trouble. It's clear that Ben Franklin and his older brother, James, had a difficult relationship.
According to sources like The Unfinished Life of Benjamin Franklin , James could be downright abusive, berating and beating his younger brother. That wasn't necessarily out of the ordinary for indentured apprentices, who could be forced to endure rough conditions in the hopes of a good career. As the old apprentice agreement expired, James proposed a new term of servitude that would be kept secret. This struck Ben as odd and exploitative, but as he wrote in his own letters , he signed anyway. He later argued for his own freedom, claiming "resentment for the blows his passion too often urged him to bestow upon me. But when you're a teenager who's had enough, at least in your own estimation, a recalcitrant older brother isn't much of a hurdle.
At just 17 years old, Ben Franklin ran away from the print shop to Philadelphia, then one of the biggest cities in the colonies. James would later admit that he might have been too harsh on his brother. In his autobiography , Ben says that James "was otherwise not an ill-natur'd man: perhaps I was too saucy and provoking. Benjamin Franklin left a lot of printed material, which has been a boon for historians. It has also left behind an awkward legacy that has been hard to ignore. Benjamin got some of his earliest print work done through almanacs, which essentially mashed up calendars, agricultural information, and a touch of literature. According to the journal Early American Literature , almanacs were pretty trendy in the pre-Revolution colonies.
They also generated a ton of competition and what amounted to an endless series of 18th-century diss tracks shared among printers. Ben never held himself above the fray. This eventually led into a fight with a rival almanac printer, Titan Leeds, whose family had been publishing almanacs since the s. Franklin took a humorous tack, predicting Leeds' death. Titan, meanwhile, didn't seem to think jokes about his impending doom were all that funny and printed a response in the Leeds Almanac.
Thus, a feud was born. Franklin kept pretending that Titan was already dead, claiming astonishment that his ghost was still kicking around the old printing press. There's even speculation that Franklin, who referred to the dragon-encrusted Leeds family crest as a "Leeds Devil," inadvertently spawned the legend of the Jersey Devil. According to NJ. Poor Deborah Read. It's bad enough that she's been largely ignored by history. Worse, she was often discarded by her own husband. According to the Encyclopedia of Women in American History , Deborah was from a Philadelphia family who happened to give lodging to a year-old Ben Franklin.
Sparks started to fly between the two, but Deborah's family was skeptical about the scruffy runaway. After some on-again, off-again travails that included Deborah's marriage to another man, the pair decided to rejoin, says History. The only issue was John Rogers, the first husband, who had gone missing in the Caribbean. A missing husband could still be an alive, legally entangled one, and Franklin apparently didn't want to mess with bigamy. Though Deborah and Ben would enter into a common-law marriage that lasted over 40 years, they never officially wed.
Those four decades held plenty of upset. Their first son, Francis, died at only four years old of smallpox. The matter of whether or not he had been inoculated may have created lasting marital discord, says Smithsonian Magazine. Franklin often took years-long overseas trips, reports The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography. Toward the end of Deborah's life, he kept sending home letters delaying his return, until it was finally too late. Deborah died of a stroke in , while Franklin was still in London.
Ben Franklin was pretty comfortable under British rule. He had held royal appointments and traveled back to England before the American Revolution, says History. Franklin clearly wasn't ready to run afoul of a system that had benefited him for so long. When tensions started to rise in the lead-up to the American Revolution, Franklin at first advocated for peaceful compromise.
In his own words , he argued that "every mistake in government, every encroachment on rights, is not worth a rebellion. So, what finally pushed him to the other side? Franklin himself could be frustratingly silent on the matter. John Adams, as quoted in Our Lives, Our Fortunes, and Our Sacred Honor , wondered how everyone could love old Ben when he spent so much time "sitting in silence, a great part of the time fast asleep in his chair. All those taxes broke his Loyalist resolve. He was, finally, a patriot. Even when he finally crossed over to the revolutionary side, many suspected he was still a British spy, says the International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence.
In , he conducted his famous kite experiment and demonstrated that lightning is electricity. Franklin also coined a number of electricity-related terms, including battery, charge and conductor. In addition to electricity, Franklin studied a number of other topics, including ocean currents, meteorology, causes of the common cold and refrigeration. He developed the Franklin stove, which provided more heat while using less fuel than other stoves, and bifocal eyeglasses, which allow for distance and reading use. In the early s, Franklin invented a musical instrument called the glass armonica. In , at a meeting of colonial representatives in Albany, New York , Franklin proposed a plan for uniting the colonies under a national congress. Although his Albany Plan was rejected, it helped lay the groundwork for the Articles of Confederation , which became the first constitution of the United States when ratified in In , Franklin traveled to London as a representative of the Pennsylvania Assembly, to which he was elected in Over several years, he worked to settle a tax dispute and other issues involving descendants of William Penn , the owners of the colony of Pennsylvania.
After a brief period back in the U. While he was abroad, the British government began, in the mids, to impose a series of regulatory measures to assert greater control over its American colonies. In , Franklin testified in the British Parliament against the Stamp Act of , which required that all legal documents, newspapers, books, playing cards and other printed materials in the American colonies carry a tax stamp. Although the Stamp Act was repealed in , additional regulatory measures followed, leading to ever-increasing anti-British sentiment and eventual armed uprising in the American colonies.
In , he was part of the five-member committee that helped draft the Declaration of Independence , in which the 13 American colonies declared their freedom from British rule. As minister to France starting in , Franklin helped negotiate and draft the Treaty of Paris that ended the Revolutionary War. In , Franklin left France and returned once again to Philadelphia. In , he was a Pennsylvania delegate to the Constitutional Convention.
At the end of the convention, in September , he urged his fellow delegates to support the heavily debated new document. The U. Franklin died a year later, at age 84, on April 17, , in Philadelphia. In his will, he left money to Boston and Philadelphia, which was later used to establish a trade school and a science museum and fund scholarships and other community projects. More than years after his death, Franklin remains one of the most celebrated figures in U. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. He only had two years of formal education. The man considered the most brilliant American of his age rarely saw the inside of a classroom.
Franklin spent just two years attending Boston Latin School and a private academy before joining the family candle and soap making While his support for protective tariffs led to rising prices for consumers and arguably paved Franklin Pierce , the son of a onetime governor of New Hampshire, entered politics at a young age. He served as speaker of the state legislature before winning election to the U. House of Representatives in After two terms in the House and one in the Senate, When armed conflict between bands of American colonists and British soldiers began in April , the Americans were ostensibly fighting only Franklin D. With the country mired in the depths of the Great Depression, Roosevelt immediately acted to restore public confidence, proclaiming a bank holiday and Thomas Paine was an England-born political philosopher and writer who supported revolutionary causes in America and Europe.
From to , the Continental Congress served as the government of the 13 American colonies and later the United States. The First Continental Congress, which was comprised of delegates from the colonies, met in in reaction to the Coercive Acts, a series of measures A member of a committee of five that also included John Adams of Live TV. This Day In History. History Vault.
