Yale University Press

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

Edmund S. Morgan

“The best short biography of Franklin ever written.”--Gordon S. Wood

Benjamin Franklin is perhaps the most remarkable figure in American history: the greatest statesman of his age, he played a pivotal role in the formation of the American republic. He was also a pioneering scientist, a bestselling author, the country’s first postmaster general, a printer, a bon vivant, a diplomat, a ladies man, and a moralist--and the most prominent celebrity of the eighteenth century.

Franklin was, however, a man of vast contradictions, as Edmund Morgan demonstrates in this brilliant biography. A reluctant revolutionary, Franklin had desperately wished to preserve the British Empire, and he mourned the break even as he led the fight for American independence. Despite his passion for science, Franklin viewed his groundbreaking experiments as secondary to his civic duties. And although he helped to draft both the Declaration of Independence and the American Constitution, he had personally hoped that the new American government would take a different shape. Unraveling the enigma of Franklin’s character, Morgan shows that he was the rare individual who consistently placed the public interest before his own desires.

Written by one of our greatest historians, Benjamin Franklin offers a provocative portrait of America’s most extraordinary patriot. Edmund s. Morgan is Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University. He has written more than a dozen books including Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America, which won the Bancroft Prize, and American Slavery, American Freedom, which won the Francis Parkman Prize and the Albert J. Beveridge Award. Cited as “one of America’s most distinguished historians,” Morgan was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2000.

The greatest statesman of his age, Ben Franklin was also a pioneering scientist, a bestselling author, the first American postmaster general, a printer, a bon vivant. He was also a man of vast contradictions. This brilliant biography by one of our greatest historians offers a compact and provocative new portrait of America’s most extraordinary patriot.

“A wise and brilliant study.”--Robert Middlekauff, Stanford University

“The best short biography of Franklin ever written.”--Gordon Wood, Brown University

2002 American History
352 pp. 20 illus., 5 1/2 x 8 1/4
Cloth ISBN 0-300-09532-5 $24.95

THE WORKS OF JONATHAN EDWARDS
Volume 20: The “Miscellanies,” 833-1152

Jonathan Edwards

Edited by Amy P. Pauw

Throughout his adult life Jonathan Edwards kept a series of personal theological notebooks on a wide variety of miscellaneous subjects. This volume includes the notebook entries written during the eventful and tumultuous years 1740-1751, when Edwards was plagued by a series of bitter controversies with his Northampton congregation that culminated in his dismissal. This was also the period during which he witnessed, documented, and pondered the surprising revivals of the Great Awakening, as well as their precipitous decline.

Amy Plantinga Pauw is Henry P. Mobley, Jr., Professor of Doctrinal Theology, Louisville Presbyterian Seminary.

2002 American History
560 pp. 3 illus., 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
Cloth ISBN 0-300-09174-5 $85.00

AFFAIRS OF HONOR
National Politics in the New Republic

Joanne B. Freeman

http://www.yale.edu/yup/books/088779.htm

In this extraordinary book, Joanne Freeman offers a major reassessment of
political culture in the early years of the American republic. By exploring both
the public actions and private papers of key figures such as Thomas Jefferson,
Aaron Burr, and Alexander Hamilton, Freeman reveals an alien and profoundly
unstable political world grounded on the code of honor. In the absence of a party
system and with few examples to guide America’s experiment in republican
governance, the rituals and rhetoric of honor provided ground rules for political
combat. Gossip, print warfare, and dueling were tools used to jostle for status
and form alliances in an otherwise unstructured political realm. These political
weapons were all deployed in the tumultuous presidential election of 1800—an
event that nearly toppled the new republic.

By illuminating this culture of honor, Freeman offers new understandings of
some of the most perplexing events of early American history, including the
notorious duel between Burr and Hamilton. A major reconsideration of early
American politics, Affairs of Honor offers a profoundly human look at the
anxieties and political realities of leaders struggling to define themselves and their
role in the new nation.

2001 American History
384 pp. 38 b/w illus., 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
Cloth ISBN 0-300-088779 $29.95

AMERICAN SYMPATHY
Men, Friendship, and Literature in the New Nation

Caleb Crain

"A friend in history," Henry David Thoreau once wrote, "looks like some premature soul." And
in the history of friendship in early America, Caleb Crain sees the soul of the nation’s literature.

In a sensitive analysis that weaves together literary criticism and historical narrative, Crain
describes the strong friendships between men that supported and inspired some of America’s
greatest writing—the Gothic novels of Charles Brockden Brown, the essays of Ralph Waldo
Emerson, and the novels of Herman Melville. He traces the genealogy of these friendships
through a series of stories. A dapper English spy inspires a Quaker boy to run away from
home. Three Philadelphia gentlemen conduct a romance through diaries and letters in the
1780s. Flighty teenager Charles Brockden Brown metamorphoses into a horror novelist by
treating his friends as his literary guinea pigs. Emerson exchanges glances with a Harvard
classmate but sacrifices his crush on the altar of literature—a decision Margaret Fuller invites
him to reconsider two decades later. Throughout this engaging book, Crain demonstrates the
many ways in which the struggle to commit feelings to paper informed the shape and texture of
American literature.

"One of those rare books that change the way we think about things that matter. Either as an
indispensable text or as a cult classic, it will endure."—Michael Zuckerman, University of
Pennsylvania

"Remarkable and engagingly written, this book is a major contribution to the rethinking of the
deeper origins of American prose style and substance."—Jay Fliegelman, Stanford University

Caleb Crain is a contributing editor for Lingua Franca magazine and writes for The New
Republic and The New York Times Book Review.

2001 Literary Studies
352 pp. 14 b/w illus., 6 1/8 X 9 1/4
Cloth ISBN 0-300-08332-7 $35.00

RETURN PASSAGES
Great American Travel Writing, 1780-1910

Larzer Ziff

In this arresting book, Larzer Ziff traces the history of distinctively American travel
writing through the stories of five great representatives. John Ledyard
(1752ñ1789) sailed with Captain Cook, walked across the Russian empire, and
attempted to find a transcontinental route across North America. John Lloyd
Stephens (1805ñ1852), who today is recognized as the father of Maya
archaeology, uncovered hundreds of ruins in two expeditions to the Yucatan and
Central America, and he also was one of the first Americans to reach the Arabia
Petrae. Bayard Taylor (1825ñ1878) invented travel writing as a profession. The
only writer on Commodore Perry's expedition to Japan, he traveled also to Europe,
Africa, India, and the Arctic Circle solely for the purpose of producing books about
these journeys. Finally, in Mark Twain's unabashed concentration on the haps and
mishaps of the tourist and Henry James's strikingly different cosmopolitan
accounts of European sites and societies, travel writing conclusively emerged as
great art.

Ziff explains the ways in which the American background of these writers
informed their impressions of foreign scenes and shows how America served
always as the final object of the critical scrutiny they brought to bear on other
people and their lands.

"This brilliant account of the changes in a century of American travel writing
recovers three all but forgotten authors and re-sees two celebrated ones. It is at
once a kind of adventure story, a study of changing literary sensibility, and a fresh
look at nineteenth century cultural history by a learned and entertaining
scholar."--Daniel Aaron

"Ziff's penetrating and detailed account of the different kinds of discourse that the
genre of ëtravel writing' can contain and on the widely differing ways in which
American writers could use it to explore both their national and authorial identities
is a pleasure to read."--John Hollander

Larzer Ziff is Caroline Donovan Research Professor of English at The Johns
Hopkins University. Among his books are The American 1890s, Literary
Democracy, and Writing in the New Nation, the last published by Yale
University Press.

Reviews

This book, the first to trace the distinctive history of American travel writing,
focuses on five great representatives of the genre: John Ledyard who set out to
walk around the world in the 1700s; John Lloyd Stephens, the father of Mayan
archaeology; Bayard Taylor, the nineteenth-century wanderer who invented travel
writing as a profession; Mark Twain, who focused on the haps and mishaps of the
uncultivated tourist; and Henry James, from whose cosmopolitan accounts of other
societies travel writing emerged as great art.

"This brilliant account of the changes in a century of American travel writing
recovers three all but forgotten authors and re-sees two celebrated ones. It is at
once a kind of adventure story, a study of changing literary sensibility, and a fresh
look at 19th century cultural history by a learned and entertaining scholar."--Daniel
Aaron

"Larzer Ziff's penetrating and detailed account of the different kinds of discourse
that the genre of ëtravel writing' can contain and on the widely differing ways in
which American writers could use it to explore both their national and authorial
identities. This book is additionally valuable for its critical resurrection of Bayard
Taylor as well as on the new light it sheds on Twain and Henry James, and it is a
pleasure to read."--John Hollander

2001 Literary Criticism
320 pp. 21 illus., 5 1/2 x 8 1/4
Cloth ISBN 0-300-08236-3 $29.95

My Life with Benjamin Franklin

Claude-Anne Lopez

This delightful book is a collection of incidental pieces that reveal little-known aspects of the life and personality of Benjamin Franklin. Written by the doyenne of Franklin scholars, it conveys Franklin’s humor, resiliency, courage, and intelligence, and his faith in a better future.

The selections are based on Claude-Anne Lopez’s research in the treasure trove of nearly thirty thousand documents on Franklin assembled at Yale University. They include a detailed refutation of an anti-Semitic forgery attributed to Franklin and currently circulating on the Internet; three mini-detective stories showing Franklin on the fringes of the espionage world; discussions of Franklin’s efforts to outfit Washington’s army and to choose the first dinner set for the Foreign Service; and the tale of the misadventures of a French utopian scheme he sponsored. The only piece of fiction in the book is an imaginary party during which, on the first anniversary of his death, six illustrious Frenchmen discuss Franklin’s influence on their country. Lopez has provided brief personal introductions to each of the pieces, giving her reasons for writing them and in the process
threading the essays together.

Claude-Anne Lopez, for many years an editor of The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, is also the author of Mon Cher Papa: Franklin and the Ladies of Paris, published by Yale University Press, as well as many other books and articles about Franklin.

2000 Biography/History
288 pp. 5 1/2 x 8 1/4
ISBN 0-300-08192-8 $25.00

July 24, 2002