Benjamin Franklin

Author(s):  
D. G. Hart

Benjamin Franklin grew up in a devout Protestant family with limited prospects for wealth and fame. By hard work, limitless curiosity, native intelligence, and luck (what he called “providence”), Franklin became one of Philadelphia’s most prominent leaders, a world-recognized scientist, and the United States’ leading diplomat during the War for Independence. Along the way, Franklin embodied the Protestant ethics and cultural habits he learned and observed as a youth in Puritan Boston. This book follows Franklin’s remarkable career through the lens of the trends and innovations that the Protestant Reformation started (both directly and indirectly) almost two centuries earlier. The Philadelphian’s work as a printer, civic reformer, institution builder, scientist, inventor, writer, self-help dispenser, politician, and statesman was deeply rooted in the culture and outlook that Protestantism nurtured. Through the alternatives to medieval church and society, Protestants built societies and instilled habits of character and mind that allowed figures such as Franklin to build the life that he did. Through it all, Franklin could not assent to all of Protestantism’s doctrines or observe its worship. But for most of his life, he acknowledged his debt to his creator, reveled in the natural world guided by providence, and conducted himself in a way (imperfectly) to merit divine approval. This biography recognizes Franklin as a cultural or non-observant Protestant, someone who thought of himself as a Presbyterian, ordered his life as other Protestants did, sometimes went to worship services, read his Bible, and prayed, but could not go all the way and join a church.

2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Eko Wahyono ◽  
Rizka Amalia ◽  
Ikma Citra Ranteallo

This research further examines the video entitled “what is the truth about post-factual politics?” about the case in the United States related to Trump and in the UK related to Brexit. The phenomenon of Post truth/post factual also occurs in Indonesia as seen in the political struggle experienced by Ahok in the governor election (DKI Jakarta). Through Michel Foucault's approach to post truth with assertive logic, the mass media is constructed for the interested parties and ignores the real reality. The conclusion of this study indicates that new media was able to spread various discourses ranging from influencing the way of thoughts, behavior of society to the ideology adopted by a society.Keywords: Post factual, post truth, new media


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 159-165
Author(s):  
William J. Maxwell ◽  
Bill V. Mullen

William J. Maxwell, editor of James Baldwin: The FBI File (2017), interviews Bill V. Mullen on his 2019 biography, James Baldwin: Living in Fire, along the way touching on both Baldwin’s early internationalism and his relevance to the current wave of racial discord and interracial possibility in the United States.


2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 94-102
Author(s):  
Lance E Mason

The present sociopolitical environment in the United States is perpetually mediated and beset with information from innumerable sources. This paper argues that Dewey’s conception of communication as a mutual act of meaning-making holds insights for explaining the connections between pervasive mediation and political polarization, in addition to understanding why political discourse has become more degrading in recent years. It also points the way toward viable solutions by arguing for the reorientation of schools toward valuable living experiences that are becoming less pronounced in the broader culture, such as sustained face to face engagement on matters of social import.


2013 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
pp. 815
Author(s):  
Clayton Bangsund

In both the United States and Canada, bankruptcy preferential transfer avoidance provisions are aimed at creating equality of distribution among similarly situated creditors. However, there is a key difference in the way each jurisdiction’s regime treats the notion of intent. An analysis of each regime, using examples, illustrates the way in which Canada’s regime effectually does violence to the distributive equality policy objective, while the US regime adheres to it.


1958 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 419-430
Author(s):  
Gustave Weigel

One of the constant worries of the United States, since the role of a dominant world-power has been thrust on her, is the situation of Latin America. Relations with Canada require thought and preoccupation but they produce no deep concern. Canada and the United States understand each other and they form their policies in terms of friendly adjustment. Yet the same is not true when we consider the bloc of nations stretching to the south of the Rio Grande. They form two thirds of the geographic stretch of the western hemisphere, and they constitute a population equal to ours. The dependence on Latin America on the part of the United States in her capacity as an international power is evident. What is not evident is the way to make our friendship with our southern neighbors a more stable thing than the fragile arrangement which confronts us in the present.


1986 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 149-155
Author(s):  
Jacques Barzun

The role of commentator has seemed to me invidious ever since I read in a classics journal a description of the chorus in Greek tragedy: “It comments freely about what it does not understand.” But one would have to be uncommonly stupid to have failed to understand he papers in this symposium, marked as they are by lucidity, pedagogical logic, and that very winning quality, personal conviction. As I recalled the several topics treated and reviewed my notes, it seemed to me that there was one point on which everybody agreed, which is this: Tocqueville’s great book was addressed primarily to the French and next to Europe at large, last to the United States. Its aim was to find the way of organizing the aftereffects of revolution, of defusing the explosive charge. The march of democracy was inevitable: need It be violent?


2019 ◽  
pp. 69-87
Author(s):  
Sarah L. Quinn

This chapter shows how Progressives returned to the issue of farm credit distribution in the early 1900s and drew on European precedents to reframe credit allocation as a way for the central government to help people help themselves. American Progressives thus replaced their earlier, more radical farm credit politics with a more moderate vision of government-supported credit as an inexpensive way of supporting self-help. The chapter then considers the Federal Farm Loan Act (FFLA). Compared with other hallmarks of Progressive Era state building, the FFLA seems relatively unimportant. Nevertheless, it was a turning point in the use of selective credit as a tool of federal statecraft in the United States. The FFLA provided federal credit on a national level that was administered through public–private partnerships and bolstered by tax expenditures. By tracing the lead-up to this policy, one can see how Progressives forged a new array of cultural and organizational approaches to federal credit that would later proliferate across policy arenas.


Author(s):  
Timothy Matovina

This chapter argues that the long-standing links between Latin and North America already lead many Latinos to adopting a more hemispheric perspective to Catholicism in the United States. The memory that Hispanics established faith communities in Spanish and Mexican territories before the United States expanded into them shaped the historical development of those communities as they, their descendants, and even later immigrants became part of the United States. The chapter shows how such perceptions conflict with the presumption that European immigrants and their descendants set a unilateral paradigm for assimilating newcomers into church and society. Since the early 1990s, the geographic dispersion of Latinos across the United States and the growing diversity of their national backgrounds have brought the historical perspectives of Catholics from Latin America and the United States into unprecedented levels of daily contact.


Author(s):  
Elizabeth Zanoni

This chapter maps changing links between Italian migration and trade to the United States and Argentina. It focuses on Italian elites’ endeavors to exploit these links as part of larger nation- and empire-building projects. By comparing government statistics to elite representations of Italian people and food exports in trademarks and in Italian Chamber of Commerce publications, it argues that Italian leaders masculinized migrant marketplaces and the transnational paths in which they were embedded. Unlike neighboring European countries where ties between consumption and nationhood were increasingly associated with women, Italy’s massive emigration required linking Italian consumption to male citizens abroad. While labor migrants established profitable commercial routes in Italian exports, these gendered representations of manly markets overlooked the way transnational family economies restrained migrant consumption.


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