Benjamin Franklin in American Thought and Culture, 1790-1990

How Benjamin Franklin’s life and legacy have been used, misused, interpreted, and reinterpreted throughout American history and popular culture

A teenage runaway whose face later appeared on the one-hundred-dollar bill, as well as the man who penned Poor Richard’s Almanac and later helped shape the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, Benjamin Franklin lived a life of wide-ranging dimension, talent, contradiction, and change. A printer, writer, publisher, inventor, scientist, philanthropist, and diplomat, he was a quintessential Renaissance man. Down-to-earth and pragmatic, self-educated and versatile, inquisitive and resourceful, witty and humorous, irreverent and rebellious, Franklin has come to embody emphatically American characteristics. How people have used, misused, interpreted, and reinterpreted his life and legacy provides a fascinating window through which to understand American history. Nian-Sheng Huang studies the historical figure of Franklin, not as an icon on a pedestal, but through the eyes, voices, perceptions, and public activities of ordinary Americans, in popular culture and across generations.