This month marks Benjamin Franklin’s 320th birthday. Near the end of his life, he wondered what life would be like “two or three centuries hence.” Well, here we are. What would Franklin make of it? He ...

Today, we celebrate the towering life and legacy of Benjamin Franklin—printer and philosopher, inventor and diplomat, public servant and patriot, and one ...

Ever prescient, John Adams rightly predicted that Benjamin Franklin would forever occupy an elevated position in the American imagination. He was, after all, the man who risked life and limb to fly a ...

Volume 1: Journalist 1706-1730 -- List of illustrations -- Preface -- Part 1: Boston: Youth, 1706-1723: -- Prologue: Quandary -- Boston -- Child to adolescent ...

Child of the Puritans -- Exodus to Philadelphia, sojourn in London -- Philadelphia printer -- Poor Richard -- Ben Franklin's closest Evangelical friend -- Electrical man -- Tribune of the people -- ...

In 1723, a teenaged Benjamin Franklin created his first printing piece, a broadside elegy recently acquired by the University of Pennsylvania. Detail of “The Elegy on the Death of Aquila Rose,” ...