A Hamilton-Inspired Playlist from Ben Franklin's World

Since its Broadway premiere in 2015, Hamilton: An American Musical has taken the world by storm. For many who have seen Hamilton, the undeniable star of the show is not the young, scrappy, and hungry title character or his tempered frenemy Burr, but the resplendent George III. The sardonic king interjects at three different points in… Read More

Read More

Doing History: The Power of Biography

Today’s post accompanies the Doing History 3 series on Ben Franklin's World. You can find supplementary materials for the series on the OI Reader app, available through iTunes or Google Play. Biographies serve as a gateway to history. They serve this role because, as all of our guest scholars in the Doing History: Biography series related, biographies humanize the past. At their core biographies are about people, and as people, we are naturally curious about how others lived, worked, and experienced life. Read More

Read More

Doing History: A Biographer’s Dilemma: Can We Make Arguments Out of Lives?

Today’s post accompanies “Researching Biography,” episode 212 of Ben Franklin’s World and part of the Doing History 3 series. You can find supplementary materials for the episode on the OI Reader app, available through iTunes or Google Play. Always be arguing. It’s the historian’s version of David Mamet’s line for salesmen, “Always be closing.” I know that rule, and I know another one, too: don’t oversimplify. Because historians are not, to put it mildly, Occam’s Razor kind of people. We don’t think that the simplest answer is best; the simplest answer is the one we give three points out of ten on the midterm. The more causes the better, in our book. There are historians who readily combine these two directives to create bold arguments and to make those arguments reflect the complexities of human society. I am not one of them. Working my way through an archive, I become entranced by nuances and exceptions to the rule. “What is your argument?” I sternly ask myself. “My goodness, will you look at this,” I answer, helplessly. Read More

Read More

Doing History: Writing Biography

Today’s post accompanies “Considering John Marshall Part 2,” episode 211 of Ben Franklin’s World and part of the Doing History 3 series. You can find supplementary materials for the episode on the OI Reader app, available through iTunes or Google Play. In prior weeks, Michael McGandy has written about biography from the perspective of a publisher and interviewed numerous historians of early America about why they chose to write biographies. Today, he conducts an in-depth conversation about the process of writing biography with historian and biographer Cynthia Kierner. Read More

Read More

Doing History: Reconceiving Biography

Today’s post accompanies “Considering John Marshall Part 1,” episode 210 of Ben Franklin’s World and part of the Doing History 3 series. You can find supplementary materials for the episode on the OI Reader app, available through iTunes or Google Play. When asked to consider the prospects for biography, Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter Onuf reflected on their experience researching and writing as a team: But positioning Jefferson in his time and, more importantly for us, in his place, enabled us to see and know his world and the world of his contemporaries a little better. The pay-off for us is in the nuances, in glimpses of the dynamics of family life, in the performance of mastery, in the ways he fashioned himself as a patriarch. Biography can show us the way to good history; a good historical understanding is the prerequisite and justification for a worthwhile biography. The reciprocal relationship that Annette and Peter highlight here is, I think, an important insight. Not only are biography and history connected by processes of research and writing, they are associated with respect to the goals of a “worthwhile biography.” In sum: big-picture history without a fine sense of individual experience is as deficient as is detailed biography that lacks a strong sense of context, place, and pattern. Read More

Read More

Doing History: Arguing Biography

Today’s post accompanies “Considering Biography,” episode 209 of Ben Franklin’s World and part of the Doing History 3 series. You can find supplementary materials for the episode on the OI Reader app, available through iTunes or Google Play. I am an editor, I admit, who is wary of biography. When a junior scholar working on her first book raises the prospect of writing a biography or a book with a strong biographical line, I sound a note of caution. Are there other ways, I ask, of telling this story? I wonder if the author knows how biography is evaluated in the scholarly community. Frankly, I question, are the virtues of this form worth the manifest danger of putting her career at risk? Read More

Read More

Happy 4th Birthday, Ben Franklin's World!

This week the Omohundro Institute’s award winning podcast, Ben Franklin’s World: a Podcast about Early American History turned four years old! This made us wonder, how would Ben have celebrated? Turns out his letters might offer us some hints. In 1767, Ben gifted a poem to Mary Stevenson for her birthday: “You’d have the… Read More

Read More

Abigail and Tom

Today’s post accompanies “Partisans: The Friendship and Rivalry of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson” episode 193 of Ben Franklin’s World. Abigail Adams adored Thomas Jefferson. “He is one of the choice ones of the earth,” she wrote to her sister after meeting him in 1784. Thomas Jefferson, in return, admired Mrs. Adams and… Read More

Read More

We’ve Been Doing History’s History

Today’s post accompanies “Freedom and the American Revolution,” episode 166 of Ben Franklin’s World and part of the Doing History 2: To the Revolution! series. You can find supplementary materials for the episode on the OI Reader app, available through iTunes or Google Play. History is a primary context for every decision we make; our understanding of the past—our own as individuals and collectively—is background, framework, presumption, and rationale. It’s not always conscious, and it’s not always exact or even correct. But it is there, informing us. It isn’t the case, either, that history is inescapable, or the past makes any specific future inevitable. Individuals and communities large and small can make change happen suddenly or deliberately. But when we recognize change, it is because we know what came before. Read More

Read More

Ben Franklin's World and Podcasts in the Classroom

The following post originally appeared at Teaching United States History. We often emphasize to our students that our lectures, and even our entire courses, have arguments and use evidence to make those arguments. We also talk about historiography, even if we don’t use the term, and show students how historians produce new historical knowledge. This semester, my US I class is using Liz Covart’s podcast Ben Franklin’s World to consider both of these issues. Read More

Read More

Planning a spring syllabus? Read this first

2017 was an extraordinary year for the Omohundro Institute’s burgeoning role as a podcast producer. Liz Covart, creator and host of Ben Franklin’s World, joined the OI full-time as Digital Projects Editor. While they remain based in Boston much of the year, Liz, her partner Tim, and their companion Sprocket, planted a Red Sox flag in front of… Read More

Read More

The Pennsylvania Committee of Safety and the War at Home

Today's post accompanies "Revolutionary Committees and Congresses," episode 153 of Ben Franklin's World and part of the Doing History 2: To the Revolution! series. You can find supplementary materials for the episode on the OI Reader app, available through iTunes or Google Play. Ask any revolutionary: there’s an enormous gap between the idea of systemic cultural change and its actual implementation. How do you get the guy who’s just trying to, like, make barrels over here to co-sign something as world-rending as a revolution? For American patriot factions in the 1770s, the burden of bridging the gulf between ideology and practice fell in large part on Committees of Safety. From their inception as enforcement mechanisms for the Continental Association’s mass boycotts of British consumer goods, Committees of Safety were all about the material effects of ideas. They were the ones insisting that it wasn't enough to merely think poorly of British treatment of the Colonies—you had to perform that disapproval for your neighbors or else risk public censure. The whole point of a Committee of Safety, in other words, was to make it clear to ordinary people that potentially abstract questions of international diplomacy were also concrete problems that they had to care about in their everyday lives. Read More

Read More

Recent Posts

June 29, 2025

Peer Review for the Born-Digital?


April 1, 2025

BJ Lillis


April 1, 2025

Patrick Barker

Subscribe to the Blog

[ninja_form id='48']