Support for Ben Franklin's world comes from the

Omaha Institute of Early American History and Culture.

Normally when I ask scholars about their experience with the OI,

they tell me how much the Institute helped them discover

more about early American history?

They received this help in the form of one of the OI's fellowships,

editorial assistance from its publishing program,

or from conversation sparked by Institute sponsored conferences and seminars.

But David Shields told me the most remarkable story yet.

He told me how his experiences with the Omaha

Institute, both as an undergraduate at the College of William and Mary and as a more senior scholar,

taught him how to think about history and use historical sources in ways that have helped him

influence our present-day environment and eating patterns.

I'm kind of a child of the Omaha Institute.

I did my undergraduate work at William and Mary,

and studying at Williamsburg gives people interested in early America a variety of ways of getting into things.

And while I was certainly working in the print archives, I was also working as a field excavator

for the Virginia Association for the Preservation of Antiquities.

And one of the things that digging for artifacts did and engaging in the sort of thinking about material culture that is so evident in Williamsburg and has been part of the conversation that the

Omaha Institute has always been about is that it made me think differently about the ways to

conceive the study of tests. One of the things which is unusual about my career

as a scholar is that I've never limited myself to six inches of a library shelf.

...