By William H. Benson
The Parallel Lives
Of The NOBLE AMERICAN RELIGIOUS THINKERS AND BELIEVERS:
Roger Williams VS. Cotton Mathers
NEW ARTICLES
Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin was born on January 17, 1706 in Boston, Massachusetts, 320 years ago.
In recent days, I discovered Ken Burns’s two episodes on Benjamin Franklin that aired in April 2022 on PBS. The second part is more interesting, his efforts during the Revolution.
Franklin was in London, when the Boston Tea Party occurred on December 16, 1773. It was he, a well-known American, who received a public berating from England’s Solicitor General January of 1774, in the Privy Council.
His feelings hurt, Franklin sailed back to Pennsylvania, convinced that independence was a better choice. He arrived home in May 1775, a month after the battles at Lexington and Concord, a month before the horrific battle at Bunker Hill.
Pennsylvania appointed Franklin to the 2nd Continental Congress. He was the old man there, 69-years old. He stayed quiet, appeared to sleep often, but was keen for independence.
In late April of 1776, Franklin, with two other delegates, traveled to Montreal, in Canada, to convince the Canadians to join the 13 colonies. The Canadians refused. Loyalists they were.
Franklin returned with a hat composed of fur, skinned from a marten.
That summer, Franklin served on a committee to write a declaration of independence. Thomas Jefferson of Virginia, then 33-years-old, wrote it, but Franklin edited it.
Instead of, “We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable,” Franklin urged for a more philosophical meaning, “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” Jefferson agreed.
On September 11, 1776, Franklin and John Adams met with British Admiral Richard Howe on Staten Island to discuss peace, but Howe refused to admit that the colonists had a new nation.
In October 1776, Franklin sailed from Philadelphia, with two grandsons, 16-year-old Temple Franklin, and 7-year-old Benny Bache. The USS “Reprisal” arrived in France in December 1776. A month later Franklin turned 71.
Franklin wore his marten fur hat to hide unsightly scabs atop his bald head due to weeks of a poor diet aboard the “Reprisal.” The French people considered Franklin’s hat rustic and quaint.
Franklin’s duty: to convince French officials to sign an alliance with the colonies and to support the Americans with arms.
He was the one American whom the French people knew, because of his experiment with a kite in a lighting storm. Many wanted to see this famous American. He was harassed day and night at his room in the Hotel de Valentinois in Passy, a suburb within Paris.
He played chess. He flirted with beautiful French ladies. He met King Louis XVI.
After Franklin received the good news that American forces had defeated General Burgoyne at the battle at Saratoga, in New York, in 1777, he and French officials signed two alliances.
The French government spent some 1.3 billion livres on the colonists’ war with England.
With French naval support in the Chesapeake Bay, and with French soldiers and cannons, the combined American and French armies forced British general Lord Cornwallis to surrender his army at Yorktown, Virginia, on October 19, 1781. The brutal and bloody war was over.
If not for Franklin’s diplomatic skill in France, Washington may not have won the war.
Two years later, on September 3, 1783, Benjamin Franklin signed the Paris Peace Treaty with English officials. By it, England’s government recognized America’s independence.
Franklin sailed back to Philadelphia in the summer of 1785. Two years later, Pennsylvania appointed Franklin to the Constitutional Convention. When asked if America now had a republic or a monarchy, Franklin replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.”
A Poor Richard quote: “either write things worth reading, or do things worth writing about.” Franklin did both. He passed away on April 17, 1790, at the age of eighty-four.
Tunnels and war coincide
People burrow into the subsoil, build tunnels, plus storage rooms, and stockpile food and water, for one reason, and that is to stay alive. Atop the ground, in the open air, in the sunshine, they feel oppressed, insecure, and poised to die or suffer an injury.
On July 4, 1863, thirty-one thousand Confederate soldiers, trapped inside Vicksburg, on the Mississippi River, surrendered to the Union’s commanding officer, Ulysses S. Grant, on the forty-eighth day of Grant’s siege of that town.
During the siege, civilians had dug some five hundred caves into the hillsides, and fitted them out with “rugs, beds, and chairs.” One cave dweller said, “We were in hourly dread of snakes. The vines and thickets were full of them.”
What can I achieve with Greek mythology?
What is the good that comes from knowing even a little about the ancient Greeks’ religion?
I prefer to learn of actual people who once lived in a historical setting, a time and a place. Greek mythology, instead, is a collection of make-believe fantasy stories I would like to know more of, but I find it hard to gain much traction from them, practical use. I wonder.
Mark Twain disparaged the whole notion. “Classics,” he said, “are the books that everybody wants to claim to have read, but nobody wants to read.”
After all, Greek religion is mythology, a series of stories about the gods and the goddesses whom the Greeks believed resided on or near Mount Olympus.
They included a dozen Olympians: Zeus, Poseidon, Hades, Hestia, Her
Steve Inskeep’s new book: “Differ We Must”
Since 2004, radio personality Steve Inskeep has hosted National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition.” During Covid lockdown in 2020, at home with time to spare, Inskeep researched and wrote a book that was published this past week.
Inskeep found its title, “Differ We Must: How Lincoln Succeeded in a Divided America,” in a letter that Abraham Lincoln wrote to his good friend Joshua Speed, dated August 24, 1855.
Last week, Inskeep explained to Amna Nawaz of PBS News Hour, and Scott Simon of NPR, that Speed was from Kentucky, that he was from a rich family that owned more than 50 slaves. Speed approved of slavery. Lincoln also was from Kentucky, but his family was poor, and Lincoln hated slavery.
Peering into the future
Peering into the futureSome people possess a talent to peer deep into the future. In Biblical times people called them prophets. In the Middle Ages, people believed them wizards. Today they are economists who make projections based upon previous business data. Thomas...
The discovery near Motza, Israel
The main highway running east to west across Israel’s width is Highway One. It connects Tel Aviv and Jerusalem to the Jordan River Valley, near Jericho.
In 2012, highway contractors working 5 kilometers west of Jerusalem near the town of Motza uncovered a Neolithic town, home to perhaps 3,000 people at one time.
A new thing, an interstate highway, led to a discovery of an old thing, a town.
Tel Motza is now the largest Neolithic site in Israel. Archaeologists define a Tel as “a mound or small hill that has built up over centuries of occupation.” Excavators dig down through the layers until they find a bottom layer.
Archaeologists uncovered stone tools made of flint—arrowheads, axes, sickle blades, and knives—as well as human bones, clay figurines, grain silos, and a temple.
Books and censorship
The list of banned, censored, and challenged books is long and illustrious.
“Decameron” (1353) by Giovanni Boccaccio, and “Canterbury Tales” (1476) by Geoffrey Chaucer were banned from U. S. mail because of the Federal Anti-Obscenity Law of 1873, known as the Comstock Law.
That law “banned the sending or receiving of works containing ‘obscene, ‘filthy,’ or ‘inappropriate’ material.
William Pynchon, a prominent New England landowner and founder of Springfield, Massachusetts, wrote a startling critique of Puritanism, that he mailed to London and had it published there in 1650. He entitled it “The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption.”
Older Posts
A summer’s day
Popular song writers will, on occasion, dub into their lyrics references to summer.
In 1970, Mungo Jerry sang, “In the summertime, when the weather is high, you can stretch right up and touch the sky.” In 1972, Bobby Vinton sang, “Yes, it’s going to be a long, lonely summer.” In 1973, Terry Jacks sang about enjoying his “Seasons in the Sun.”
In 1977, in the film Grease, John Travolta and Olivia Newton John sang a back-and-forth duet about their “summer days drifting away, to summer nights.”
70th Anniversary of the Korean Armistice Agreement
Last Thursday, July 27, 2023, North Korea’s leader Kim Jon Un presided over a military parade that celebrated the 70th anniversary of the signing of the Korean Armistice Agreement that ended the Korean conflict, from June 25, 1950, to July 27, 1953.
North Korea’s Foreign Ministry announced
Abraham Lincoln: infidel or faithful?
Abraham Lincoln: infidel or faithful?The two books that Abraham Lincoln read often and loved the most throughout his life were the King James Bible, published in 1611, and William Shakespeare’s works, first published as the First Folio in 1623, both the best of...
Four trials
Two trials in American history stand out above the others, the Salem Witch Trials and the Scopes Monkey Trial. Both were of a religious nature.
The two serve as bookends on America’s history, the first in 1693, in the years after New England’s founding, and the second in 1925, early in the twentieth century.
The trial at Salem Village, Massachusetts sought to identify and then execute those unseen spiritual forces, the witches, who, the village’s officials believed, went about in secret performing evil deeds in and around their community.
Servants of the people
Edward Muir is president of the American Historical Association. In the May issue of that non-profit’s magazine, “Perspectives on History,” he wrote a column he entitled, “The United States Needs Historians.”
Muir states in his thesis, “Our culture needs historians who can look behind today’s headlines and the latest ‘fake news’ to think about longer patterns in the past, even as they engage in current struggles.”
Explo ’72
This last week I watched the new Lionsgate film, “Jesus Revolution.” The film did better than expected, grossing $50 million in the first months after its release in February.
The screenplay is based upon a memoir that Greg Laurie, and co-writer Ellen Vaughn, published in 2018, “Jesus Revolution: How God Transformed an Unlikely Generation and How He Can Do It Again Today.”
One of University of Northern Colorado’s 2020 Honored Alumni
William H. Benson
Local has provided scholarships for history students for 15 years
A Sterling resident is among five alumni selected to be recognized this year by the University of Northern Colorado. Bill Benson is one of college’s 2020 Honored Alumni.
Each year UNC honors alumni in recognition for their outstanding contributions to the college, their profession and their community. This year’s honorees were to be recognized at an awards ceremony on March 27, but due to the COVID-19 outbreak that event has been cancelled. Instead UNC will recognize the honorees in the fall during homecoming Oct. 10 and 11……
Newspaper Columns
The Duodecimal System
For centuries, the ancient Romans calculated sums with their clunky numerals: I, V, X, L, C, D, and M; or one, five, ten, 50, 100, 500, and 1,000. They knew nothing better.
The Thirteenth Amendment
On Jan. 1, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, and by it, he declared that “all persons held as slaves” within the rebellious states “are and henceforward shall be free.” Lincoln’s Proclamation freed some 3.1 million slaves within the Confederacy.
The Fourteenth Amendment
After Congress and enough states ratified the thirteenth amendment that terminated slavery, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866. This law declared that “all people born in the United States are entitled to be citizens, without regard to race, color, or previous condition of slavery or involuntary servitude.” The Act equated birth to citizenship.
The New-York Packet and the Constitution
Jill Lepore, the Harvard historian, published her newest book a month ago, These Truths: A History of the United States. In a short introduction, she describes in detail the Oct. 30, 1787 edition of a semi-weekly newspaper, The New-York Packet.
Mr. Benson’s writings on the U.S. Constitution are a great addition to the South Platte Sentinel. Its inspiring to see the history of the highest laws of this country passed on to others.
– Richard Hogan
Mr. Benson, I cannot thank you enough for this scholarship. As a first-generation college student, the prospect of finding a way to afford college is a very daunting one. Thanks to your generous donation, my dream of attending UNC and continuing my success here is far more achievable
– Cedric Sage Nixon
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– Extra Times
FUTURE BOOKS
- Thomas Paine vs. George Whitefield
- Ralph Waldo Emerson vs. Joseph Smith
- William James vs. Mary Baker Eddy
- Mark Twain vs. Billy Graham
- Henry Louis Mencken vs. Jim Bakker
