The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, Vol. 9: Volume 9: January 1, 1760 through December 31, 1761
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Early in the period covered by this volume Franklin wro...)
Early in the period covered by this volume Franklin wrote the "Canada Pamphlet," one of his earliest and most important efforts to influence British public opinion. In it he urged that in peace negotiations with France, Great Britain should insist on receiving the whole of Canada as a permanent possession, rather than the island of Guadeloupe. Franklin's time and attention were also taken up by a major contest with the Pennsylvania Proprietors before the officers of the Crown to gain royal approval of a series of important acts passed by the Assembly. Neither side won a complete victory, though on the central issue that had taken Franklin to England he achieved the recognition of the Assembly's right to tax the proprietary estates on the same basis as the property of other landowners. His periods of leisure were brightened by a widening circle of British friends and by travel in England and the Low Countries.
The Public Records of the State of Connecticut: For the Year 1782, With the Journal of the Council of Safety Council From January 17, 1782, to December 16, 1782, Inclusive (Classic Reprint)
(Excerpt from The Public Records of the State of Connectic...)
Excerpt from The Public Records of the State of Connecticut: For the Year 1782, With the Journal of the Council of Safety Council From January 17, 1782, to December 16, 1782, Inclusive
Capt Isaac Gallop, M Moses Kenney, for Voluntown. Capt Elisha Child, M Jedidiah Morse, for Woodstock.
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This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, Vol. 8: Volume 8: April 1, 1758 through December 31, 1759
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In this volume Franklin is representing the Pennsylvani...)
In this volume Franklin is representing the Pennsylvania Assembly in London, meeting with limited success before the Privy Council over the question of the Proprietor's alleged fraud in Indian lands and with complete reversal over an issue of parliamentary privilege. The personal antagonism between him and Proprietor Thomas Penn develops into an angry break. His personal success, however, is extensive. He travels widely, looking up ancestors and surviving relatives; he receives local honors in Edinburgh and Glasgow and an honorary degree from the University of St. Andrews, becoming "Doctor Franklin." He enjoys scientific and intellectual associations with members of the Royal Society, and warm and delightful friendships with people he meets on his travels as well as in London.
The Papers of Benjamin Franklin Volume 1 January 6, 1706 Through December 31, 1734
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This is the first volume to come from a great scholarly...)
This is the first volume to come from a great scholarly undertaking, the assembly and editing of Benjamin Franklin's complete writings and correspondence. Sponsored jointly by the American Philosophical Society and Yale University, this new edition of forty volumes will contain everything that Franklin wrote that can be found and, for the first time, in full or abstract, all letters addressed to him, the whole arranged in chronological order. To be published over a period of fifteen years, it will supersede all previous editions, for thousands of letters by Franklin have been located since Smyth's edition fifty years ago.
This first volume, for example, contains more than triple the amount of material in the Smyth edition for this period of Franklin's life, from his birth on January 17, 1706 to the end of 1734. This is a period reflecting the young Franklin of Boston and Philadelphia as a man of letters—essayist, journalist, pamphleteer—and as a rising young printer. here are the literary pieces he wrote and printed in the New-England Courant, the American Weekly Mercury, or the Pennsylvania Gazette, or as separately printed pamphlets. Here are the first issues of Poor Richard's Almanack. Here is his famous Epitaph and his ritual for private worship, "Articles of Belief and Acts of Religion," together with legal and business papers connected with his printing business. Also included is a genealogy, the fullest ever compiled, of Franklin's complicated family, with chronology of Franklin's first twenty-nine years. Each volume will have its own index, with a cumulative index at the end.
As a large proportion of Franklin's literary production has never been reprinted since it first appeared in the 1720s and 1730s, this volume should add usefully to the available body of early American materials. Especially significant to collectors will be the reproduction in photographic facsimile, for the first time, of the entire twenty-four pages of the "first impression" of the first Poor Richard, that for 1733, from the unique copy in the Rosenbach Foundation.
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin: Second Edition (Yale Nota Bene)
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A classic of eighteenth-century American history and li...)
A classic of eighteenth-century American history and literature, Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography has had an influence perhaps unequaled by any other book by an American writer. Written ostensibly as a letter to his son William, Franklin's Autobiography offers his reflections on philosophy and religion, politics, war, education, material success, and the status of women.
Prepared by the editors of The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, this edition is drawn with scrupulous care from the original manuscript in Franklin's handwriting now in the Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery. The introduction by Leonard W. Labaree places the autobiography in literary and historical contexts. In a new foreword, Edmund S. Morgan writes about Franklin's dual allegiance as an American and a subject of an English king—and his emergence as a leader of the American Revolution. This edition also includes biographical notes, a chronology of Franklin's life, and an updated bibliography.
Leonard Woods Labaree was an American historian and educator. He was a professor of history at Yale University for more than forty years.
Background
Leonard Woods Labaree was born near the Persian (now Iranian) village of Urumia, one of two children of Benjamin Woods Labaree and Mary Alice Schauffler, American missionary teachers at a Presbyterian college for Persia's Nestorian Christians. In 1904 his father was killed by Kurdish tribesmen, who mistook him for another missionary. Soon thereafter his mother returned to the United States with her children. Taking up residence in Connecticut, she became superintendent of New Britain City Mission and also taught part-time in Hartford Seminary's missionary program.
Education
Labaree attended Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Connecticut, before enrolling at Williams College in 1915. He graduated with honors from Williams College in 1920. In the fall of the same year Labaree entered graduate school at Yale University, where he was a student of the noted colonial historian Charles M. Andrews. In 1923 he completed his M. A. degree. In 1926 he received the Ph. D.
Career
When the United States entered World War I in 1917, Labaree volunteered for service as a balloon pilot, received his commission as second lieutenant, and served in the Twenty-eighth Balloon Company of the Army Air Service from 1917 to 1919.
In 1924 he began his forty-five-year career on the Yale faculty, starting at the rank of instructor. Three years later he was promoted to assistant professor. From 1929 to 1930 he served as Carnegie Visiting Professor at Armstrong College of Durham University in England. Because of the Great Depression, promotions at Yale, as elsewhere, were virtually frozen. Labaree's appointment as assistant professor was renewed periodically, but it was not until 1938, by which time he had succeeded Andrews as Yale's colonial historian, that he was made associate professor and granted tenure.
He was elevated in 1942 to professor and became Durfee Professor and then Farnam Professor of History in 1946, the chair his mentor had held. Labaree authored a number of important scholarly monographs on various aspects of colonial American history. Included among them are Royal Government in America: A Study of the British Colonial System Before 1783 (1930); Milford, Connecticut: The Early Development of the Town as Shown in Its Land Records (1933), his M. A. thesis, which was issued in the Connecticut Tercentenary series; Royal Instructions to British Colonial Governors, 1670-1776 (1935), which he collated and edited as an outgrowth of his monograph from 1930; and Conservatism in Early American History (1948), which was based on his Anson P. Stokes Lectures at New York University in 1947. In addition, he edited five volumes of The Records of the State of Connecticut (1782 - 1796) during the decade from 1941 to 1950, when he served as official historian for the state of Connecticut.
His editorial skills became evident early in his professional career. In 1933 he embarked upon a fourteen-year term as editor of the Yale Historical Publications series, sponsored by the Yale Department of History. When Yale University, in partnership with the American Philosophical Society, decided to publish a new and definitive edition of the papers of Benjamin Franklin, they chose Labaree to head the project.
In 1954, Labaree took charge of a small group of scholars who began the painstaking job of locating and copying all the surviving Franklin papers. In a tour-de-force of editorial enterprise, they assembled copies of 27, 800 widely scattered manuscript documents, then transcribed and edited the first fourteen volumes of a collection that is expected to run to forty-five volumes when completed (about the year 2006). Five years of intensive searching, sorting, collating, and transcribing preceded publication of the first volume, although in 1957, on the 250th anniversary of Franklin's birth, the editors offered a preview of things to come by bringing out a small volume of letters under the title Mr. Franklin.
Two years later the first volume of the Papers appeared. The academic community praised it and subsequent volumes and credited Labaree with setting editorial standards for thoroughness, accuracy, and clarity that made the project the model of its kind. Those standards have not been surpassed by the editors of the papers of other founding fathers.
In 1969 Labaree retired from Yale. At that time, fourteen volumes of the Papers and a new scholarly edition of the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (1964) had been published. In retirement at Northford, where he and his wife had restored an old Connecticut farmhouse, Labaree remained active. His historical knowledge, together with his reputation for common sense and impartiality, earned him positions as town moderator and chairman of the local planning board. He continued to conduct historical research and edited, for the New Haven Colony Historical Society, a three-volume history of the socially and politically important Shepard family. He died at his Northford home.
Achievements
Labaree's greatest contributions to his profession were made as editor of historical texts. In this capacity Labaree helped shape and steer through the press some forty volumes of diverse historical texts, most of which originated as doctoral dissertations. However, it was as editor-in-chief of The Papers of Benjamin Franklin (1959) that Labaree achieved preeminence. Labaree's reputation for exhaustive research, meticulous attention to detail, and sound judgment made him an obvious candidate to lead what was, at the time, one of the most ambitious editorial enterprises in the history of American book publishing.
He won the American Historical Association's Justin Winsor Prize for his work "A Study of the British Colonial System Before 1783" (1930)
