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Ben Franklin's World is a production of Colonial Williamsburg Innovation Studios.

It's such a delight to think about Ben Franklin's World for this 400th episode.

And first of all, I have to say congratulations.

It's quite an achievement to make it to this milestone.

Music an achievement to make it to this milestone. Hello and welcome to episode 400 of Ben Franklin's World, the podcast dedicated to helping

you learn more about how the people and events of our early American past

have shaped the present day world we live in. And I'm your host, Liz Covart. I feel like this one

snuck up on us, but here we are at episode 400. Wow, that's a lot of episodes in our back

catalog. And I have to say that most of the episodes over

the years, even if they're 10 years old, they stand up pretty well. Not only is a history relevant,

but even the audio stands up pretty well, so I'm pretty pleased with that. Now, to mark our

achievement, we're celebrating with an episode inspired by you. Earlier this year, when I asked

you the question for how you wanted to mark

episode 400, you suggested that we asked a lot of different historians about their ideas on a lot of

different topics. So I kind of mashed your suggestions together and Frankenstein them and came up

with two questions to pose a lot of different historians.

The two questions we're posing are what does Ben Franklin's world, and that's world with a

lowercase W, what does Ben Franklin's world mean to you and how do you define this world?

And what historical event, person, or place, do you wish more people knew about in the era of Ben Franklin?

From there, I invited many of our previous guests to participate in this episode by answering

our questions. Now, what's really fun about this episode is that none of our guest historians knew

...