Benjamin Franklin in American Thought and Culture, 1790-1990 - by Nian-Sheng Huang (Paperback)

About the Book

Originally published in 1994 as Memoirs, American Philosophical Society (vol. 211).

Book Synopsis

How Benjamin Franklin's life and legacy have been used, misused, interpreted, and reinterpreted throughout American history and popular culture

A teenage runaway whose face later appeared on the one-hundred-dollar bill, as well as the man who penned Poor Richard's Almanac and later helped shape the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, Benjamin Franklin lived a life of wide-ranging dimension, talent, contradiction, and change. A printer, writer, publisher, inventor, scientist, philanthropist, and diplomat, he was a quintessential Renaissance man. Down-to-earth and pragmatic, self-educated and versatile, inquisitive and resourceful, witty and humorous, irreverent and rebellious, Franklin has come to embody emphatically American characteristics. How people have used, misused, interpreted, and reinterpreted his life and legacy provides a fascinating window through which to understand American history. Nian-Sheng Huang studies the historical figure of Franklin, not as an icon on a pedestal, but through the eyes, voices, perceptions, and public activities of ordinary Americans, in popular culture and across generations.

Review Quotes

"[A] splendid introduction for all future Franklinists."--Esmond Wright "American Studies"

"[A]mbitious, useful... a valuable piece of scholarship."--David M. Larson "PMHB"

"An important contribution to the existing scholarship."--Stephen H. Brown "Journal of American History"

"Nian-Sheng Huang seems to have read everything ever written about Benjamin Franklin, from contemporaries to modern authors, and he judiciously assesses the various interpretations that have come about over two centuries...This book is a gem."--Cecil B. Currey "American Historical Review"

About the Author

Nian-Sheng Huang is an Emeritus Professor of History at California State University Channel Islands. He received his doctorate in history from Cornell University in 1990 and has been a productive scholar specializing in the life and legacy of Benjamin Franklin and American society.