Latest / New Books in American Studies
Thomas S. Kidd, "Benjamin Franklin: The Religious Life of a Founding Father" (Yale UP, 2017)
Renowned as a printer, scientist, and diplomat, Benjamin Franklin also published more works on religious topics than any other eighteenth-century American layperson. Born to Boston Puritans, by his teenage years Franklin had abandoned the exclusive Christian faith of his family and embraced deism. But Franklin, as a man of faith, was far more complex than the “thorough deist” who emerges in his autobiography. As Thomas Kidd reveals in Benjamin Franklin: The Religious Life of a Founding Father (Yale University Press, 2018), deist writers influenced Franklin’s beliefs, to be sure, but devout…
The skinny
The skinny isn't ready yet — notes appear once the transcript is processed.