Ken Burns’s two-part, four-hour documentary, Benjamin Franklin, explores the revolutionary life of one of the 18th century’s most consequential and compelling personalities, whose work and words unlocked the mystery of electricity and helped create the United States. Franklin’s 84 years (1706-1790) spanned an epoch of momentous change in science, technology, literature, politics, and government — fields he himself advanced through a lifelong commitment to societal and self-improvement.
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Benjamin Franklin: An American Life
by Walter Isaacson
Benjamin Franklin is the Founding Father who winks at us… the one who seems made of flesh and blood rather than marble. In a sweeping narrative that follows Franklin’s life from Boston to Philadelphia to London and Paris and back, Walter Isaacson chronicles the adventures of the runaway apprentice who became, over the course of his eighty-four-year life, America’s best writer, inventor, media baron, scientist, diplomat, and business strategist, as well as one of its most practical and ingenious political leaders.
Young Benjamin Franklin: The Birth of Ingenuity
by Nick Bunker
From his early career as a printer and journalist to his scientific work and role as a founder of a new republic, Benjamin Franklin has always been ab embodiment of American ingenuity. But in his youth, he had to make his way through an often harsh, colonial world where he fought many battles with his rivals, and also with his own wayward emotions in trying to balance virtue against ambition. This volume chronicles that story.
Writings
by Benjamin Franklin
One of 17 children, Benjamin Franklin was born in Boston on January 17, 1706. He ended his formal education at the age of 10 and began working as an apprentice at a newspaper. Running away to Philadelphia at 17, he worked for a printer, later opening his own print shop. As a man of many talents and interests, as a writer, publisher, scientist, inventor, diplomat and politician he authored many works during his 84 years that are collected in this volume.
Autobiography, Poor Richard, and Later Writings
by Benjamin Franklin
This Library of America collection of Franklin’s works begins with letters sent from London describing events and diplomacy preceding the Revolutionary War, political satires, bagatelles, pamphlets, and letters written in Paris where he represented the revolutionary United States at the court of Louis XVI, as well as his speeches given in the Constitutional Convention… including his last published article, a searing satire against slavery. Also included are his shrewd prefaces to Poor Richard’s Almanack with their worldly, pungent maxims and finally, the classic Autobiography, Franklin’s last word on his greatest literary creation–his own invented personality—completely faithful to Franklin’s own manuscript.
Poor Richard's Almanack: Being the Choicest Morsels of Wit and Wisdom
by Benjamin Franklin
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