Ben Franklin's World

Declaring independence on July 2, 1776, was only the beginning.

To actually become a nation, the United States needed something else: foreign allies, international recognition, and the credibility to negotiate as an equal among the world's great powers.

Five days after Richard Henry Lee introduced his famous Virginia Resolution, the Continental Congress appointed a committee of five — John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, John Dickinson, Robert Morris, and Benjamin Harrison — to figure out how to achieve international recognition. The result was the Model Treaty: a document we almost never discuss today, but one that Adams considered his most important cont...

On July 4th, 2026, the United States marks 250 years since the Declaration of Independence announced a new nation to the world. But how well do we actually know the document we're celebrating?

Most of us can recite "We hold these truths to be self-evident," but how many of us have read all 1,337 words, and traced the argument the Declaration actually makes?

Danielle Allen, the James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University and author of Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality, reveals how New Hampshire's desperate need for a...

When we picture the American Revolution, we picture battles. But for the men and women who actually lived and fought in it, the Revolution was also a job with mess rotations, night watches, short rations, and children underfoot.

Historians Eugene Procknow, Gabriel Neville, and Thomas Sobol pull back the curtain on everyday military life during the War for Independence. They discuss how the armies were structured, what soldiers actually ate, what camp followers endured, and how soldiers found humanity amid grinding hardship.

You'll hear about a Black Continental soldier who had eaten nothing but bread...

Most of us learned the same story: During the winter at Valley Forge, George Washington's army suffered and endured. Ragged soldiers huddled together in frozen huts and gnawed on shoe leather for food.

But what if that story is mostly myth?

Military historian Ricardo Herrera, author of Feeding Washington's Army: Surviving the Valley Forge Winter of 1778, reveals what was really happening during the winter of 1777–1778.

Valley Forge wasn't a place of frozen inactivity, it was a hub of military operations. The army's survival depended not on virtue and willpower alone, but on the ar...

When David George lay sick with smallpox in Savannah during the Revolutionary War, he faced three possible outcomes: death, re-enslavement, or freedom.

Greg O'Malley, Professor of History at UC Santa Cruz, follows David George across six decades and three continents, from enslaved Virginia to the Muscogee Creek nation, and from British-occupied Georgia to Nova Scotia to Sierra Leone, in his new book, The Escapes of David George: An Odyssey of Slavery, Freedom, and the American Revolution. It's a story that will change how you think about what the Revolution actually delivered, and for whom.

Greg’s...

She fled on horseback in the thick of war. Her six-year-old son rode with her. The white tailor at her side would pass, when anyone asked, as her husband.
Her name was Sarah. She was one of tens of thousands of enslaved people who self-emancipated during the American Revolution, and one of the many women earlier histories barely noticed.
In this Revisited episode, Karen Cook-Bell, author of Running from Bondage: Enslaved Women and the Remarkable Fight for Freedom in Revolutionary America, recovers their stories.
We learn how Lord Dunmore's 1775 proclamation reshaped the landscape of resistance, why...

Thomas Jefferson's draft of the Declaration of Independence contained 28 grievances against King George III — not 27.

The final grievance, the one Congress cut before signing, accused the British king of waging cruel war against human nature by trafficking enslaved Africans across the Atlantic, forcing slavery onto unwilling American colonists, and then inciting those same enslaved people to rise up and kill their enslavers.

Did King George III and the British monarchy actually bear responsibility for slavery in the 13 colonies? Or was Jefferson's grievance a strategic sleight of hand — an attempt to pin a uniquely American system onto...

On July 5, 1852, Frederick Douglass stood before the Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society and asked one of the most searing questions in American history: "What, to the slave, is the Fourth of July?"

To answer Douglass's question, we have to go back to the Revolution itself; to the choices Black Americans made in wartime, to the ways they read, used, and interrogated the Declaration of Independence, and to the alternative celebrations they created when the Fourth of July felt like someone else's holiday.

Historians Christopher Bonner and Martha S. Jones help us explore what the Fourth of...

The Second Continental Congress voted for independence on July 2, 1776, but it had absolutely no plan for telling the world about it.

Congress sent just one copy of the Declaration to France. It was lost at sea. Printers ran the text however they liked. And the first formal acknowledgment of American independence came not from a European court, but from a Native American chief responding to a verbal translation of the Declaration in the middle of a treaty negotiation.

Historian and Declaration expert Emily Sneff joins us to explore what the Declaration of Independence looked like...

Between 1763 and 1848, revolutions swept across four continents. We tend to remember three of them — the American, the French, and the Haitian Revolutions. But what about all the rest? And what connected them to each other?

In this episode, we're bringing back our conversation with Janet Polasky, Presidential Professor of History Emerita at the University of New Hampshire and author of Revolutions Without Borders: The Call to Liberty in the Atlantic World, and Paul Mapp, Associate Professor of History at William & Mary, who helps us understand why historians are increasingly looking at the American Revolution through an international le...

What if the American Revolution didn't just create the United States, but also created Australia?

Most of us learned about the Revolution as a story of thirteen North American colonies pushing back against a distant king. But this episode reveals something far wilder: a genuinely global war whose consequences rippled across every inhabited continent — reshaping empires, forcing migrations, and planting the seeds of more than a hundred declarations of independence that would follow over the next two and a half centuries.

Joseph Adelman joins historian Richard Bell to explore the American Revolution as a world wa...

In September 1777, just fourteen months after declaring independence, Philadelphia fell to the British Army. For nearly nine months, the new nation's capital was occupied territory.

But what did that actually mean for the people who lived there? 

Not the generals, not the Congress: ordinary Philadelphians who had to decide whether to flee or stay, share their homes with British officers, watch their fences get chopped up for firewood, and figure out which neighbors to trust when it was all over.

In this episode, Aaron Sullivan, a professor of History at Rider University, George B...

The British Army is at your door. They need a room. What do you do?
For thousands of civilians living in cities occupied during the American War for Independence — Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Newport, Charleston, Savannah — this wasn't a hypothetical. It was a reality that upended daily life and revealed a side of the revolution we rarely talk about.
Lauren Duval, author of The Home Front: Revolutionary Households, Military Occupations, and the Making of American Independence, joins us to explore what the War for Independence actually looked like from inside the household. Women who negotiated quartering terms and...

250 years ago, the British evacuated Boston: driven out by cannon that had traveled 300 miles from Fort Ticonderoga. But where did the plan for those cannons take shape?
In this Revisited episode, we return to our conversation with Garrett Cloer, now Program Manager for Interpretation and Visitor Experience at Saratoga National Historical Park, to explore the Longfellow House–Washington's Headquarters National Historic Site in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
This Georgian mansion served as George Washington's home and headquarters for nearly nine months during the Siege of Boston. In this house, Washington forged the Continental Army and plotted the moves that li...

On March 17, 1776, the British evacuated Boston, driven out by cannon hauled 300 miles through winter wilderness from a crumbling fort in upstate New York.

Join Matthew Keagle, Curator at Fort Ticonderoga, as we trace the fort's dramatic history from its French origins in the Seven Years' War, its chaotic capture by Ethan Allen and Benedict Arnold in May 1775, and Henry Knox's legendary expedition to move nearly 60 tons of artillery to George Washington's army. Discover the logistics, rivalries, and resourcefulness behind one of the Revolution's most remarkable feats.

Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/436
 
EPISODE OU...

In January 1776, Thomas Paine told the American colonies to break free from their king. But what was supposed to come next? 250 years later, that question still doesn't have a good answer.
To mark the anniversary of *Common Sense*, we traveled to Lewes, England, the town where Paine lived before he ever set foot in America, and recorded our first-ever LIVE episode inside Bull House, the building where Paine honed his ideas about citizens and their government.

Joseph Adelman chairs a panel with scholars Leanne O'Boyle, Nicole Mahoney, and Jeanne Sheehan Zaino as they dig into the...

What would you fight for if you were free but still not equal? In 1777, brothers William and Benjamin Frank answered that question by enlisting in the Second Rhode Island Regiment of the Continental Army. Freeborn men of color, they gambled that military service would earn them what freedom alone had not: equality, land, and a better future.

Historian Shirley Green, author of Revolutionary Blacks: Freeborn Men of Color, Soldiers of Independence, joins us to tell their story. Drawing on genealogical research rooted in her own family history, Green reveals what daily life looked like for free Black...

More than 6,000 Black men—free and enslaved—served in the Continental Army during the American Revolution. Yet their stories remain some of the least told of the war.
In this revisited episode, we rejoin Judith Van Buskirk, Professor Emerita of History at SUNY Cortland and author of Standing in Their Own Light: African American Patriots in the American Revolution, to explore what motivated African American men to fight for the Revolutionary cause, how the Continental Army's policies toward Black enlistment shifted over the course of the war, and what life and service looked like in units like the Firs...

What if the American Revolution was never just an American story?

Historian Ronald Angelo Johnson helps us uncover the deep connections between the American and Haitian Revolutions to reveal how both revolutions emerged from the same Atlantic imperial struggle for empire, racialized power, and war.

Using details from his book Entangled Alliances, Ron will guide us from the Treaty of Paris in 1763 to the Siege of Savannah in 1779, where hundreds of Black soldiers from French Saint Domingue landed on Georgia’s shores—not as enslaved laborers, but as uniformed volunteers ready to fight for American Inde...

What does it take to become a revolutionary in more than one revolution? In this revisited conversation with Mike Duncan, we explore the life of the Marquis de Lafayette—an ambitious young Frenchman who crossed the Atlantic to fight for the American cause and later carried those lessons into the political storms of France. From early idealism to a complicated role in two upheavals, Lafayette’s story reveals how ideas, alliances, and personal relationships shaped the Age of Revolutions.

You’ll hear how Lafayette became close to George Washington, what he learned in America, and why his legacy...

The American Revolution wasn’t just a colonial rebellion; it was a global conflict shaped by European rivalries and high-stakes diplomacy. Without the help of foreign allies like France and Spain, the United States might never have won its independence.

Historian John Ferling joins us to explore the international dimensions of the Revolutionary War. Drawing from his new book Shots Heard Round the World, Ferling reveals how secret aid, political gambles, and naval power from Europe (especially France) influenced the outcome of the war, and nearly derailed it.

John’s Website | Book |
Show Notes: https...

Before Common Sense could ignite a revolution, colonists had to be convinced they shared a cause worth fighting for. So how did Revolutionary leaders turn thirteen very different colonies into “Americans”—and what stories did they tell to make that unity feel real?

In this Ben Franklin’s World Revisited episode, historian Robert Parkinson returns to explore how newspapers and wartime messaging helped forge the Revolution’s “common cause”—and how that campaign leaned on fear, race, and exclusion to build a new national identity.

Rob’s Website | Book |
Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/144
 
RECO...

Thomas Paine’s Common Sense turned a colonial rebellion into a full-blown revolution. But how did one pamphlet move so many minds in 1776—and why does it still matter 250 years later?

To commemorate the 250th anniversary of Common Sense, historian and Director of the Institute for Thomas Paine Studies at Iona University, Nora Slonimsky, joins us to explore Paine’s life, the pamphlet’s explosive impact, and what this revolutionary text still teaches us about democracy, communication, and civic life.

ITPS Website 
Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/403
 
EPISODE OUTLINE
00:00:00  Introduction
00:01:06...

Common Sense didn’t just make an argument for independence—it moved through a world of newspapers, pamphlets, and personal networks that carried revolutionary ideas from one doorstep to the next. So how did political news travel in 1776, and what made print such a powerful engine of persuasion?

As we approach the 250th anniversary of Common Sense, Ben Franklin’s World Revisited returns to Episode 156 to explore how early Americans shared, debated, and embraced revolutionary ideas. You’ll discover how print and networks spread the Revolution, what made Common Sense a publishing phenomenon, and how media shaped politica...

Benjamin Rush was one of early America’s most fascinating figures. He was a signer of the Declaration of Independence, a leading Philadelphia physician, and a thinker who believed that a healthy body was the foundation of a healthy republic.
In this episode, historian Sarah Naramore, author of Benjamin Rush, Civic Health and Human Illness in the Early American Republic, introduces us to Rush as both doctor and political philosopher.

We’ll explore:

British officials had a problem: Their American colonists wouldn't stop smuggling. Even after Parliament slashed tea prices and passed laws to make legal imports cheaper, colonists kept buying Dutch and French goods on the black market.
So what was really going on? If it wasn't just about saving money, what drove thousands of merchants and consumers to risk fines, seizure, and worse?
In this revisited episode, we follow the illicit trade networks that connected colonial port cities to the "Golden Rock,” Sint Eustatius, a tiny Dutch island that became the Atlantic World's busiest smuggling hub.
You'll di...

Think the Boston Tea Party made America a coffee-drinking nation? Historian Michelle McDonald reveals the truth: colonists were already choosing coffee over tea because it was cheaper.

Michelle Craig McDonald, the Librarian/Director of the Library & Museum at the American Philosophical Society and author of Coffee Nation: How One Commodity Transformed the Early United States, explains how coffee shaped American identity long before the Revolution.

You'll hear about Revolutionary-era women storming a Boston warehouse to seize hoarded coffee and sell it at regulated prices. You'll discover why Parliament protected coffee while taxing tea. And you'll...

In the 1820s, American entrepreneurs, engineers, and politicians dared to dream big. They believed they could cut a canal, not through Panama, but through the wild, rain-soaked terrain of Nicaragua. Their goal: To link the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and transform global trade forever.

But what inspired these ambitious "canal dreamers?” And why did they believe Nicaragua held the key to controlling the future of commerce? 

Jessica Lepler, Associate Professor of History at the University of New Hampshire and author of Canal Dreamers: The Epic Quest to Connect the Atlantic and Pacific in the Age of...

As we look ahead to the 250th anniversary—the semiquincentennial—of the Declaration of Independence in 2026, communities and commissions across the United States are asking big questions:
How should we commemorate this historic milestone?
What’s the right balance between celebration and education? And how can this moment bring people together across political divides, generational gaps, and complex histories? 
To explore these questions, I’ve invited my friend, colleague, and Clio Digital Media co-founder Karin Wulf to guest host a special conversation with two people who are leading the way: Gregg Amore, Chair of the Rhode Island 250 Commission...

Each November, we Americans come together to celebrate Thanksgiving, a holiday that invites us to reflect on gratitude, community, and the stories we tell about our past.

But what do we really know about the origins of this holiday? What did the “First Thanksgiving” look like, and who were the people who made it happen?

In honor of Thanksgiving, we’re revisiting our 2018 conversation with Rebecca Fraser, author of The Mayflower: The Families, The Voyage, and the Founding of America. This rich conversation offers a look at the English Separatists or Pilgrims who settled in Massac...

As Thanksgiving approaches, many Americans are gathering to reflect on gratitude, family—and of course—food.

It's the time of year when we may think about the so-called "First Thanksgiving" and imagine scenes of Pilgrims and Native peoples gathering in Massachusetts to share in the bounty of their fall harvests.

But how much do we really know about the food systems and agricultural knowledge of Indigenous peoples of North America? In what ways were the Wampanoag people able to contribute to this harvest celebration—and what have we gotten wrong about their story?

...

What does it take to bring the American Revolution to life?

How can an event that took place 250 years ago be conveyed to us through modern-day film?

Ken Burns and his team worked to answer these questions in their new, epic six-part documentary, Ken Burns’ The American Revolution. Their work promises to deepen, complicate, and transform our understanding of the Revolution over 12 hours of film.

But how did Burns and his team make this film? What stories did they choose to tell? And what challenges did they face in telling those stories?

S...

In November 1775, as tensions between the British Empire and its rebellious colonies continued to escalate, Virginia’s royal governor made a radical—and to some, terrifying—proclamation: Any enslaved person who fled a revolutionary enslaver and joined the British Army would gain their freedom.

Known to history as Dunmore’s Proclamation, this single decree changed the course of the American Revolution in the South. It offered a lifeline to thousands of enslaved men, women, and their families, ignited fierce debates about loyalty and liberty, and revealed deep contradictions at the heart of a revolution that claimed to fight fo...

What did it take to end the War for Independence?

When we think of the American Revolution’s final chapter, we think of the Siege of Yorktown.

Between September 28 and October 19, 1781, British forces endured a siege by the Franco-American forces that ultimately led to a triumphant Franco-American victory, British recognition of American independence, and the birth of a new nation.

But the real story of the Yorktown victory is far more layered. It involved international alliances, enslaved people seeking freedom, and years of hardship.

Today, we’re revisiting the events of Octo...

Have you ever noticed how conversations about the American Revolution often center on great battles, founding documents, and famous statesmen?

What if, instead, we explored that world through the eyes—and the hands—of everyday people who shaped it through art?

Zara Anishanslin, Associate Professor of History and Art History at the University of Delaware and Director of its Museum Studies and Public Engagement Program, joins us to uncover the hidden world of artists, artisans, and makers who painted, stitched, and crafted the Revolution into being. Drawing from her book The Painter’s Fire: A Forgot...

What does it mean to be caught between two worlds? Between loyalty and liberty, artistry and commerce, and between the British North American colonies and the British Empire?

We’re revisiting our exploration of the life of John Singleton Copley, one of early America’s most celebrated portrait artists. Copley’s story reveals much about the upheaval of the American Revolution and the choices people made as events unfolded around them.
Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/106
 
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When we talk about slavery in Early America, we often focus on plantations: their large, fertile fields, their cash crops, and the people who labored on those fields to produce those cash crops under conditions of enslavement.

But what about the ordinary objects that made slavery work? The shoes, axes, cloth, and hoes? What can these everyday objects reveal about the economic and social systems that sustained slavery in the early United States? 

Seth Rockman, a Professor of History at Brown University and author of Plantation Goods: A Material History of Slavery, which was a f...

When we picture the early United States, we often imagine a young nation fighting for political independence. But what about economic independence—and what did it take to achieve it?

Historian Lindsay Schakenbach Regele of Miami University in Ohio joins us to explore how manufacturing became central to the nation's post-Revolution identity.

Drawing from her book Manufacturing Advantage: War, the State, and the Origins of American Industry, 1776–1848, Lindsay reveals how the federal government championed industries like firearms and textiles as tools of sovereignty, security, and self-reliance. Tune in to discover:

What if loyalty, not rebellion, was the default position in revolutionary British North America?

It’s easy to forget that before 1776, most colonists identified as proud Britons. They didn’t see themselves as future Americans or revolutionaries; they saw themselves as subjects of a global empire. And in the colony of Georgia, many clung to that identity longer than we might expect.

Greg Brooking, a historian of the American Revolution in the South and a high school history and social studies teacher, joins us to explore the American Revolution in Georgia with details from his book...

When we think of the American Revolution, we often focus on the patriots who fought for independence. But what about the Loyalists—those who chose to remain faithful to the British crown?

In this episode, we revisit a thought-provoking conversation with historian Brad Jones of Fresno State University, author of Resisting Independence: Popular Loyalism in the Revolutionary British Atlantic. Brad challenges the long-held view of Loyalists as passive or fearful, instead revealing Loyalism as a vibrant political identity shaped by faith, governance, and a broader sense of British belonging. 

Listen as we explore: Why the Rev...