Benjamin Franklin | Join or Die | 1

American History Tellers

Wondery

Society & Culture, Kids & Family, History, Education For Kids

4.7 • 18.3K Ratings

🗓️ 12 June 2024

⏱️ 47 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In 1723, a teenage Benjamin Franklin arrived in Philadelphia ready to reinvent himself. He was a penniless apprentice printer with a hunger for knowledge and a burning ambition. Over the next 50 years, he would fashion himself into the most celebrated American of his time.

Franklin became a printer, a politician, a postmaster and an inventor. He tied a key to a kite string and discovered the secret of lightning. And in the 1760s, he became America’s leading diplomat in Britain, just as tensions between the colonies and their mother country reached a breaking point.

Pre-order your copy of the new American History Tellers book, The Hidden History of the White House, for behind-the-scenes stories of some of the most dramatic events in American history—set right inside the house where it happened.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Wunderry Plus subscribers can binge new seasons of American history tellers early and
0:05.1	ad free right now. Join Wundery Plus in the Wundery app or on Apple Podcasts. Imagine it's January 1758 and you're at home in your study in London, England.
0:29.0	You're the son of the founder of Pennsylvania.
0:32.0	You and the rest of your family still own most of the colony's unsettled land,
0:36.0	and you're determined to make sure it remains exempt from taxation.
0:40.0	But today you're entertaining an unwelcome guest.
0:43.0	Benjamin Franklin has traveled here as an agent of the Pennsylvania colonial assembly
0:48.0	trying to persuade you to pay taxes on your land.
0:51.0	You've allowed him to call on you, but you have no intention of giving into it. on your
0:53.0	land,
0:54.0	intention of giving in to his demands.
0:56.0	The fate of your family's wealth and power
0:58.0	rests on your shoulders.
1:00.0	You sit down on a carved mahogany chair across from Franklin, silently hoping this meeting
1:06.2	ends quickly.
1:07.2	You hand him a glass of Bordeaux, and he smiles gratefully.
1:11.2	You're too kind, sir.
1:12.4	My pleasure, Mr Franklin.
1:14.0	Now what can I do for you?
1:15.0	He takes a deep breath and squares his shoulders.
1:18.0	Your family still owns vast tracts of land in Pennsylvania.
1:21.0	Every other landowner in the colony pays taxes to our
	...

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