Gordon S. Wood - The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin
Here you can read online Gordon S. Wood - The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. year: 2004, publisher: Penguin Press, genre: Art. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:
Romance novel
Science fiction
Adventure
Detective
Science
History
Home and family
Prose
Art
Politics
Computer
Non-fiction
Religion
Business
Children
Humor
Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.
- Book:The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin
- Author:
- Publisher:Penguin Press
- Genre:
- Year:2004
- Rating:4 / 5
- Favourites:Add to favourites
- Your mark:
The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin: summary, description and annotation
We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.
Central to Americas idea of itself is the character of Benjamin Franklin. We all know him, or think we do: In recent works and in our inherited conventional wisdom, he remains fixed in place as a genial polymath and self-improver who was so very American that he is known by us all as the first American.
The problem with this beloved notion of Franklins quintessential Americanness, Gordon Wood shows us in this marvelous, revelatory book, is that its simply not true. And it blinds us to the no less admirable or important but far more interesting man Franklin really was and leaves us powerless to make sense of the most crucial events of his life. Indeed, thinking of Franklin as the last American would be less of a hindrance to understanding many crucial aspects of his life-his preoccupation with becoming a gentleman; his longtime loyalty to the Crown and burning ambition to be a player in the British Empires power structure; the personal character of his conversion to revolutionary; his reasons for writing the Autobiography; his controversies with John and Samuel Adams and with Congress; his love of Europe and conflicted sense of national identity; the fact that his death was greeted by mass mourning in France and widely ignored in America.
But Franklin did become the Revolutions necessary man, Wood shows, second behind George Washington. Why was his importance so denigrated in his own lifetime and his image so distorted ever since? Ironically, Franklins diplomacy in France, which was essential to American victory, was the cause of the suspicion that clouded his good name at home-and also the stage on which the first American persona made its debut. The consolidation of this mirage of Franklin would await the early nineteenth century, though, when the mask he created in his posthumously published Autobiography proved to be the model the citizens of a striving young democracy needed.
The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin is a landmark work, a magnificent fresh vision of Franklins life and reputation, filled with profound insights into the Revolution and into the emergence of Americas idea of itself.
Gordon S. Wood: author's other books
Who wrote The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.
The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work
Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.
Font size:
Interval:
Bookmark:
THE PENGUIN PRESS
a member of
Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Hudson Street
New York, New York 10014
Copyright Gordon Wood,
All rights reserved
Illustration credits appear on pp. 285-86.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wood, Gordon S.
The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin / Gordon S. Wood.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN: 978-1-1012-0090-2
DESIGNED BY MARYSARAH QUINN
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the authors rights is appreciated.
First edition (electronic): February 2003
Making or distributing electronic copies of this book constitutes copyright infringement and could subject the infringer to criminal and civil liability.
THE PENGUIN PRESS
a member of
Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Hudson Street
New York, New York 10014
Copyright Gordon Wood,
All rights reserved
Illustration credits appear on pp. 285-86.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wood, Gordon S.
The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin / Gordon S. Wood.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
MSR ISBN 0-7865-4787-1
AEB ISBN 0-7865-4788-X
DESIGNED BY MARYSARAH QUINN
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the authors rights is appreciated.
First edition (electronic): February 2003
Making or distributing electronic copies of this book constitutes copyright infringement and could subject the infringer to criminal and civil liability.
ALSO BY GORDON S. WOOD
The Creation of the American Republic, 17761787
The Radicalism of the American Revolution
The American Revolution: A History
TO CHRISTOPHER, ELIZABETH, AND AMY
O F MAKING MANY BOOKS there is no end, and with the upcoming tricentennial celebration of Benjamin Franklins birth in 2006, this seems to be especially true of Franklin biographies. But this book is not meant to be a traditional biography of Franklin. It does not contain every event in his long life, nor does it deal with all of his multitudinous relationships and writings. Instead, it is a relatively selective study, focusing on specific aspects of this extraordinary mans life that reveal a Benjamin Franklin who is different in important ways from the Franklin of our inherited common understanding.
First of all, the book attempts to penetrate beneath the many images and representations of Franklin that have accumulated over the past two hundred years and recover the historic Franklin who did not know the kind of massively symbolic folk hero he would become. At the same time it hopes to make clear how and why Franklin acquired these various images and symbols. It tries to place Franklins incredible life in its eighteenth-century context and explain why he retired from business and became a gentleman, why he came to admire the British Empire and sought to become its architect, why he began writing his Autobiography when he did, and why he belatedly joined the American Revolution, and joined it with a vengeance. It seeks to clarify the personal meaning the Revolution had for him and to describe his extraordinary achievements as Americas envoy to Franceachievements that were never fully appreciated by many of his countrymen at the time. It attempts also to account for the way in which the French came to see Franklin as the symbol of America even before his fellow Americans did. Indeed, without understanding Franklins intimate connection with France we will never make sense of the remarkable degree of hostility Franklin faced in the last years of his life from members of Congress and other influential Americans. Even after his death in 1790 the hostility continued, especially as Franklin emerged as the representative American, as the hardworking self-made businessman, for hundreds of thousands of middling Americans in the early decades of the nineteenth century.
This early-nineteenth-century image of Franklin was not the image of Franklin known to people in his own lifetime; it was a product of the turbulent capitalism of the age of Jackson, the age so brilliantly depicted by Alexis de Tocqueville in his Democracy in America. And it is that popular image that seems to have the most resonance even today. Despite the continuing power of Franklins symbolic significance as the entrepreneurial American, however, the historic Franklin of the eighteenth century was never destined to be that symbol. Franklin was not even destined to be an American. How he became one is the theme of this book.
T HIS BOOK HAS BEEN in my mind for many years. I first became interested in writing about Franklin when I reviewed several volumes of his papers in the early 1970s. I let my thoughts about this extraordinary character stew for a decade. Then in 1983 the late William B. Cohen, chair of the Department of History of Indiana University, invited me to present a lecture on Franklin as part of Indiana Universitys bicentennial celebration of the signing of the Treaty of Paris, which ended the Revolutionary War against Britain. This invitation forced me to put some of my thoughts about Franklin on paper. So I am grateful to Professor Cohen and Indiana University for the invitation that got me started on this book. Franklin next became an important figure in my book The Radicalism of the American Revolution, and the several paragraphs devoted to him there anticipate some of what is in this study. Indeed, what happened to Franklin and Franklins image between the middle of the eighteenth century and the early decades of the nineteenth century seems to me to demonstrate vividly the radical social and cultural changes that the American Revolution brought about.
Much of the book was written when I was a fellow at the Institute for United States Studies in London in the winter and spring of 2002, and I want to thank the institute and its staff for their hospitality. For their editorial expertise I am grateful to my wife, Louise, and my daughter Elizabeth, and my friends Lesley Herrmann and Barbara Oberg. I am especially indebted to Ellen Cohn, who is currently the editor in chief of the Franklin Papers, not only for her careful reading of the manuscript, which saved me from many errors, but also for her making available to me a CD-ROM of the Franklin Papers, which includes those papers not yet published in the magnificent letterpress edition of Yale University Press. I am grateful too to my agent, Andrew Wylie, for all his support. My thanks also to Sophie Fels at The Penguin Press for her considerable and always cheerful aid in preparing the manuscript. My final thanks go to my editor at The Penguin Press, Scott Moyers, who is every authors dream of what an editor ought to be. He could not have been more helpful, and I am very grateful to him.
Font size:
Interval:
Bookmark:
Similar books «The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin»
Look at similar books to The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.
Discussion, reviews of the book The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.