Word: franklin
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...Franklin admitted to being a “Briton” first and would probably have stayed in London had his wife, Dorothy, not forced him home to Philadelphia. But Dorothy’s claim on Franklin wasn’t strong enough to bring him home at night. Franklin’s philandering was well-known throughout colonial social circles, his fliration with prominent ladies often earning him seats at tables in society with which he could never compete financially...
...always concerned about money as a printer traveling in the world of planters and fur traders. So, when the deist Franklin was offered a chance to print the pamphlets of the great fire and brimstone preacher, Jonathan Edwards, he had no reservations about being the largest distributor of Great Awakening propaganda. In a later controversy, Franklin was eager to print colonial paper money not because it would facilitate economic growth, but because he knew that as a printer, he’d get some of the cut for printing out the cash...
Like vignettes, each of Brands’ chapters provides a concise, lyrical summary of five years in the life of Franklin and five years in the growth of the U.S. Never judging, Brands relays the events of Franklin’s life as a series of choices made by a man who understood the changing realities of the world in which he lived...
...Franklin’s mysterious early life fades into the Franklin we know—the politician and statesman of Early America—Brands’ narrative becomes stale and overdrawn. The last third of Franklin’s life is dry and stuffy, just like the summer chambers of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia...
Brands tries to signal a more mature, stately Franklin in the last years of the innovator’s life, but instead sounds as though Franklin is a subject worthy of beatification. “In letters, science and commitment to the common weal, Franklin was the first—in the sense of foremost—American of his generation. Considering the length and breadth of his multiple legacies, he was probably the first American of any generation...