In my Baylor graduate seminar on the American Revolution, we recently read Jill Leporeâ??s marvelous Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin. She details Ben and Jane Franklinâ??s lengthy correspondence, pondering the ways in which the circumstances of history allowed the bright boy Ben to pursue fame and scientific knowledge, while Jane married at fifteen and lived a family life that was rich in relationships but also full of strife and struggle. (Many children and grandchildren preceded her in death, and her husband was constantly in debt â?? any knock on the door might be a collection officer come to take more household items, or to take him to to debtorsâ?? prison.)
Harvardâ??s Lepore is one of the finest prose stylists among American historians today, and this is a book that you canâ??t skim even if you want to. Although I did not care much for the tone of Leporeâ??s polemical The Whites of their Eyes, which I reviewed at Patheos, here Lepore is back to what she does best: painting vivid pictures of lives and conflicts in the past, and raising provocative issues about the meaning and methods of history. In the case of Jane Franklin, she confronts the perennial question of why most people â?? especially women and the poor â?? never get mentioned in history, while the Ben Franklins of the world get innumerable books written about them. The most obvious answer is sources, and Lepore goes to great lengths to show why so many of Janeâ??s letters â?? even ones written to Ben â?? did not survive, while Benâ??s did.
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