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Will the Real Ben Franklin Please Stand Up?
June 4, 2004

Pulitzer prize-winning historian Gordon Wood leads a ‘constitutional conversation’ about his new book, The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin. Central to America's idea of itself is the character of Benjamin Franklin. We all know him, or think we do. In recent works and in our inherited conventional wisdom, he remains fixed in place as a genial polymath and self-improver who was so very American that he is regarded by many as the first American. The problem with this beloved notion of Franklin's quintessential ‘Americanness,’ Gordon Wood asserts, is that it's simply not true.