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Reappraising Benjamin Franklin in the context of the politics of his day, this article examines how his supposed questionable reputation with women dates to the time when he ran for the Pennsylvania Assembly in 1764. During that rancorous election, opponents slandered Franklin with scandalous remarks against his character. Franklin's ideas about women, his writings about them, and his relationships with two kinswomen important to his life—Jane Franklin Mecom and Deborah Read Franklin—form the purview of a re-examination of the ages-old stories about Franklin and women.

The controversy over the lands in the Wyoming Valley of Pennsylvania has been the stuff of legend (in stories of the Battle of Wyoming) and the historical record. Scholars in recent years have presented the history of the region as a contest between empires, between monied classes and common people seeking to eke out a living in a border region, and between individuals unsure of the political implications of democratic institutions. Left out of the narratives of the 1780s Wyoming controversy is a key figure who assisted in resolving the dispute: Benjamin Franklin. Biographers of Franklin have omitted discussion of his important intervention in the Wyoming events. Yet Franklin had a significant role to play as the controversy reached its resolution in the formation of the county of Luzerne.

A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders: Electricity and Enlightenment in Early America. By James Delbourgo. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. Pp. 367. Cloth, $29.95.)Doctor Franklin's Medicine. By Stanley Finger. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. Pp. xiii, 379. Cloth, $39.95.)Science and Empire in the Atlantic World. Edited by James Delbourgo and Nicholas Dew. (New York: Routledge, 2008. Pp. xiv, 365. Cloth, $95.00; Paper, $31.95.)Reviewed by Carla MulfordIn recent decades, scholarship on the scientific revolution and Enlightenment studies more generally has taken a turn away from intellectual history (largely the story of the training and writings of elite groups) toward cultural studies, social history, and the history of technology and its circulation. Rather than focusing primarily on the findings of the Royal Society, scholars have excavated the stories of numerous lesser-known scientists, engineers, and "quacks" involved in experimental, technological, and human sciences, and they have articulated a range of stories that have usefully called into question the imperial narratives of the Enlightenment. Rather than speaking of one Enlightenment that moved from the center to the peripheries, these scholars have shown the extent to which so-called enlightened sciences were embraced everywhere by everyday people for everyday ends. Examining the interplay between technology and human behavior and between culture and state formation, scholars such as Roy Porter, Margaret Jacob, Stephen Shapin, Simon Schaffer, and Michael Brian Schiffer have shown that while the ideology of enlightenment was in part the province of the well-to-do intellectuals who pontificated on matters of natural philosophy, epistemology, teleology, and ontology, it was also integrally evidenced in the responses of everyday people to the wonders being elucidated by experimental science practiced and reported on in their midst.The three books under review participate in this newer conversation about the impact of experimental science for the general population, revealing how local forms of scientific knowledge and technological knowhow assisted in creating public cultures of scientific enlightenment that eventually found (or challenged) a marketplace of knowledge-sharing and disciplinary boundary-making among the intelligentsia in England and Europe. In metropolitan centers during the seventeenth century, debates continued between experimental scientists and traditional philosophers like Cambridge divine and philosopher Henry More (1614-1687), who disliked the challenge to then-current epistemes being launched by experimental scientists and their "slibber sauce experiments." To the charges More laid against experimental science, William Petty (whose tracts garnered him the admiration of young Benjamin Franklin) responded that "the sweetness of experimental knowledge" was far preferable to "Vaporous garlick 8c onions of phantasmaticall seeming philosophy."1The debates about the importance of the experimental method continued through the seventeenth century, but the empirical method eventually held sway for a large swath of the population interested in improving on existing practices, whether in agriculture, astronomy, navigation, physiology, or iatrochemistry. At the time that Franklin praised Sir Francis Bacon as "a prodigious genius," one "justly esteem'd the father of modern experimental philosophy" (quoted in Finger, Doctor Franklin's Medicine, 10), Bacon's methods had been embraced - and challenged, even as they were embraced - by collectors and natural philosophers in different hemispheres. Indeed, as Neil Saner points out in his essay, "Fruitless Botany: Joseph de Jussieu's South American Odyssey" (in Delbourgo and Dew's collection Science and Empire), Bacon's wellknown maxims were being turned on their head: Whereas Bacon had proposed that "m situ description was to be followed by the metropolitan ordering and interpretation of natural data," Joseph de Jussieu insisted that only those with lived experience in the field ought to be credited as scientists. …

In Treating Any Historical Cultural Moment, we are engaging a discourse of alterity that verifies our own being in time by drawing conclusions about others' existences at some other time. We are in the process of making history while discussing historical phenomena. In so doing, we are differentiating ourselves such that another's past is both apart from us and part of us, and the history we tell becomes our own. As Michel de Certeau has said about this process of history creation in his book,The Writing of History, we could be said to be creatingintelligibility, an intelligibility “established through a relation with the other” and contingent upon a “process of selection between what can beunderstoodand what must beforgottenin order to obtain the representation of a present” that is knowable. The history thus told is one tending to invoke a story line that itself reproduces a normative power arrangement in behalf of an already ongoing and authorized “text” of history. Some elements of the past thus discussed get silenced, while other elements are brought forward for discussion. In selecting, emending, adapting, and erasing, we are telling stories that seem to be about others but stories that are also abundantly about ourselves.

The Division of American Literature to 1800 is charged to recognize on rare occasions the extraordinary contributions of scholars to early American studies. In 2007, we honor the work of Pattie Cowell.

Some of the most memorable stories found in Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography are those related to his youth, when he taught himself to enter the world of words by working his way through the literary journalism of his day. Franklin’s recollections in the autobiography tell of Franklin’s hard work at his brother’s press and his having taught himself to write literary journalism by imitating The Spectator by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele. He became so skilled at such writing that he was able to dupe his brother into publishing his artful sketches, the inventive periodical series of “letters” by “Silence Dogood.” When Franklin established his own press in Philadelphia, his literary journalism found its maturity in his writings for his Pennsylvania Gazette and his Poor Richard almanacs. Such a literary apprenticeship suited Franklin’s creative talents and served the colonies well when Franklin traveled to England and France to negotiate on the colonies’ behalf during and then after the war against Britain.

This newest book by an eminent diplomatic historian is the culmination of years of research in archives in the United States, France, and Britain. Peter P. Hill's book ably complements his other st...

Comprehensive and accessible, this Companion addresses several well-known themes in the study of Franklin and his writings, while also showing Franklin in conversation with his British and European counterparts in science, philosophy, and social theory. Specially commissioned chapters, written by scholars well-known in their respective fields, examine Franklin's writings and his life with a new sophistication, placing Franklin in his cultural milieu while revealing the complexities of his intellectual, literary, social, and political views. Individual chapters take up several traditional topics, such as Franklin and the American dream, Franklin and capitalism, and Franklin's views of American national character. Other chapters delve into Franklin's library and his philosophical views on morality, religion, science, and the Enlightenment and explore his continuing influence in American culture. This Companion will be essential reading for students and scholars of American literature, history and culture.

The latter half of the eighteenth century was marked by shifting attitudes about the social formation, especially its stability and class differentiation, in Britain and France. The potential for establishing new forms of governance because of the clear possibility of independent economic viability of colonial holdings of both countries fostered clear anxiety among the genteel and aristocratic, because of an overwhelming desire to preserve the status quo — and thus the status — of elite group persons. For many from this group, the enriching of whole groups of people whose origin was not genteel or aristocratic meant a change in the social formation that was unacceptable. Especially if the upstarts had been born in the colonies, any attempt to “pull rank” with European upper classes was troublesome and unacceptable, regardless of how wealthy the colonial was. Didn’t the colonials, after all, live among the Indians of America? And weren’t those same Indians savages and brutes, far from the level of civilization that Europeans were participating in?