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Article: Big Ben.(book on Benjamin Franklin)
- Article from:
- New Criterion
- Article date:
- October 1, 2002
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2002 Foundation for Cultural Review. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Edmund Sears Morgan Benjamin Franklin. Yale University Press, 368 pages, $24.95
There is only one member of the Founding Generation who, even if he had never turned his hand to statecraft, would be known to posterity as more than a footnote to the kind of obscure work of local history that gathers dust on the shelves of county historical societies throughout the east. George Washington would be remembered as a promising Virginia aristocrat who surrendered his militia company to the French at Fort Dusquesne; Jefferson as a debt-ridden gentleman farmer with a taste for exotic vegetables, heterodox religious opinions, and conventional racial views; Adams a splenetic ...