Best autobiography benjamin franklin

What story does your book, Benjamin Franklin: Cultural Protestant, tell?

Best autobiography benjamin franklin

What hole in Franklin studies was it trying to fill?

There’s so little left uncovered in studies of Franklin and of the Founders more generally. But this is part of a ‘spiritual biography’ series; it’s filling a gap in that series.

They’re covering a lot of people who have already been covered elsewhere.

Best autobiography benjamin franklin audio

The idea of a spiritual, rather than a religious biography, actually may capture Franklin better. I know another historian, Tommy Kidd has done a religious biography of Franklin for Yale. Franklin himself was a kind of believer, but he would fit, I think, contemporary ideas about being ‘spiritual’ rather than ‘religious’.

Part of what I’ve thought was missing in treatments of Franklin was how he fits into Protestantism and the culture that Protestantism produced in the centuries after the Reformation. The book is bridging studies of Franklin and studies of Anglo-Amer