You wanna know what’s weird? I’ll tell you what’s weird – teaching a class on Benjamin Franklin during the exact time that Ken Burns is airing a documentary on Ben Franklin. When I proposed this class on September 8, 2021, I didn’t have much of an idea where the class would go – I just knew that when I was teaching a previous class on the Revolutionary War era, Ben was everywhere and I wanted to know more about him.
Here are some things I didn’t know:
The Omohundro Institute at the College of William and Mary (just down the street from me) was the host of a podcast called Ben Franklin’s World, which has been producing a weekly program since 2014! That’s a lot of podcasts.
Premier American filmmaker Ken Burns was working on a program about Ben. This has been in the works for a couple of years. How do I know that? One of the historians who appeared on tonight’s broadcast died in 2020.
Michael Douglas is slated to star in an Apple TV+ limited series on Ben’s years in Paris. No release date has been set
So Ben is apparently having a moment, and I’m happy to be along for the ride.
It’s weird to watch a video series on something I’ve studied pretty intently for the last six months. I thought my class was pretty superficial, boiling down an extraordinary life into six hours of lecture. But tonight I realized that my coverage was not so bad after all; Burns’s documentary sped through the first 70 years of Ben’s life in two hours, skipping over a lot of things I talked about. I think tonight’s episode, which will cover the last 10 years of Ben’s life over the course of two hours, will go into much greater depth than the first episode did.
I was following #BenjaminFranklin PBS on Twitter during the program, and saw some interesting comments. Overall, people liked the program – but then, there was some self-selection going on, because no one who disliked Ken Burns or American History was going to watch this show. The show revealed some hard truths about Ben – including his apparent comfort with the institution of slavery throughout most of his life and his apparent dismissal of his wife Deborah for the last 20 years of their marriage, and some people had opinions about this:
Rex the TV Terrier (I follow him on Twitter) commented that “Ben Franklin was very smart and invented a lot of things. But he was also kind of a d*ck.” Rex is a very refined dog.
@SperryGary didn’t like the fact that the show revealed anything negative about Ben. His comment was that “#BenjaminFranklin PBS is trying to cancel America’s most beloved founding father. Incredible.” When I responded that “Truth is hard,” the response was a Karen meme. Original. Creative. Yawn.
The class ended well today. I think we all learned a lot and had some fun while we were at it. I staged a dramatic reading between two people in the class today, and they read the transcript of Ben’s question-and-answer session in Parliament about the Stamp Act. I also gave away a book to someone in the class. I had somehow ended up owning two copies of Stacy Schiff’s book A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America. So I decided to give one copy away. I got an index card, wrote on it WINNER WINNER CHICKEN DINNER, and taped it on the bottom of a chair in the classroom. At the appropriate time in the class, I told everyone to look under their chair to see who won the prize. The man who was sitting in the lucky chair was very excited to be the winner. Everyone wants to be a winner.
So. Another Osher Class in the books. Done and dusted. Ready for the next class.
Wishing I were there to take the class!