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HTAV. Nick Frigo - Education Consultant. Re-imagining the American Revolution. The focus.
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HTAV Nick Frigo - Education Consultant Re-imagining the American Revolution
The focus • AMERICA: Teacher Workshop: Re-Imagining the American Revolution“In this teacher workshop, Nick will provide an overview of some recent scholarship on the American Revolution. Teachers will be provided with a range of resource material, ready to use classroom activitiesas well as strategies for guiding students through this rich, detailed and exciting revolutionary period. A particular focus will also be given to some of the leading revolutionary thinkers and their ideas”.
The Study Design • Key knowledge • This knowledge includes • • the chronology of key events and factors which contributed to the revolution; • • the causes of tensions and conflicts generated in the old regime that many historians see as contributing to the revolution; for example, rising and unfulfilled class expectations; fluctuations in economic activity; failed attempts at economic, social or political reform; perceived social or economic inequality or lack of political voice; colonial self assertion after the French and Indian War in the American colonies; • • the ideas and ideologies utilized in revolutionary struggle; for example, ideas of liberty, equality, fraternity, • • the role of revolutionary individuals and groups in bringing about change;in the American colonies, Benjamin Franklin, Patrick Henry, ThomasJefferson, Samuel Adams, Thomas Paine and the Sons of Liberty
My past thinking • Undertaking an Honours degree subject – “Historians and Autobiography”. • My work during my Masters degree – • “Making method out of madness: the control or cure of lunacy? A ‘treatment’ of the insane in England between the years 1825 and 1850 – with particular reference to the Hanwell lunatic asylum” • Phew……….
How did this tie to revolutions? • Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Rush
leading revolutionary thinkers and their ideas • Benjamin Franklin • Thomas Jefferson
Why is Benjamin Franklin such an interesting figure?
The Lofty and • ………the not so lofty . . . . But still useful
strategies for guiding students through this rich, detailed and exciting revolutionary period. • ‘Amazing’ historiography • Digital resources • The Internet • I tunes U • Video material
Franklin Historiography • “Franklin and his contemporaries may never have seen themselves as members of a unified intellectual movement, but they did believe that their world was historically distinct in a number of way.” – Frank Kelleter, “Franklin and the Enlightenment”. • “The term reason, contested as it was in the eighteenth century, widely served to signify this sense of distance from earlier periods. The same is true for the name, Benjamin Franklin, which cam to stand for all sorts of things but almost symbolized the promise or threat of a new age of human autonomy.”
Frank Kelleter, Franklin and the Enlightenment, (2008) • “ . . . The Enlightenment never existed as a homogenous set of ideas or as a coherent ideological program. Instead opposing understandings of enlightened thought an action coexisted.” • “Benjamin Franklin is one of the best know but understood of America’s revolutionary generation”.
Frank Kelleter, Franklin and the Enlightenment (2008) • Increasing numbers of historians, see “an inherent connection between Franklin’s lightening rods an his establishment of lending libraries (making education accessible to all people, nut just to a small coterie of learned men), between his experiments in electricity and his various political projects, from his vision of a Greater Britain in the 1750s to his advocacy of American independence in the 1770s and on to the federalist constitutionalism of his final years.”
Jack Rakove, Revolutionaries (2010), p. 81 • “While testifying before the House of Commons in favor of repealing the Stamp Act, Franklin hinted that Americans might not object to all taxes levied by Parliament. ‘Internal’ taxes, such as the stamp duty, were improper, but ‘external’ taxes – such as duties on trade – might be acceptable.”
Ray Raphael, Founders (2009) • At the time of the Stamp Act – “Three weeks earlier, many of the people now gathered before the State House had threatened to level Benjamin Franklin’s house because they considered him a ‘warm advocate’ of the Stamp Act”.
Benjamin Carp, Defiance of the Patriots, (2010), pp 187-8. • During the Stamp Act tensions: “In this climate of increasing alarm, [Benjamin] Franklin was running into trouble. Franklin had sent to Massachusetts some of the private letters that Hutchison and Andrew Oliver had sent . . . In those letters, Hutchison had expressed his antipathy towards the Sons of Liberty, complained about the weakness of the Council, and asserted that restraints on colonial privileges would be necessary to tie the colonies more firmly to the British Empire.”
Gordon Wood, The American Revolution (2003) • “The British Empire, Benjamin Franklin warned, was like a fragile Chinese vase that required delicate handling indeed.”
“We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hand separately.” • Benjamin Franklin, at the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
I pod resources • American Revolution App • American Revolution Learn
Thomas Jefferson –DVD & Teacher Tie ins • Political Freedom • Social Freedom • Intellectual Freedom
I Tunes U • Recordings & ‘Printed’ Materials
resource material, ready to use classroom activities • Historiographical activities • Analysis of visual representations • Video resource sheets • A library of images • Bibliography
The Albany Plan 1754 – At the request of British authorities delegates from the Colonies meet in Albany in order to make a single treaty with the Iroquois. * Many historians have seen the inability to come to a resounding consensus of the colonies not been able at this point to ‘in concert’ together. The Albany Plan of Union was based on a plan drawn up by Benjamin Franklin in 1751.
Differing views of Paine • Paine’s Common Sense appealed to a wide range of colonial opinion angered by England. • Colonials such as John Adams “who were with the patriot cause but wanted to make sure that it didn’t go too far in the direction of democracy . . . Adams denounced Paine’s plan as ‘so democratical, without any restraint . . . That it must produce confusion and every evil work’.” - Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the US.
Common Sense • Paine dealt with practical advantages of sticking to England: • ‘I challenge the warmest advocate for reconciliation t show a single advantage that this continent can reap by being connected with Great Britain. I repeat the challenge; not a single advantage is derived.”
Common Sense • The emotional claim Paine was to make by the end of Common Sense was: • “Everything that is right or reasonable pleads for separation. The blood of the slain, the weeping voice of nature cries, ‘TIS TIME TO PART.” • Common Sense went through 25 editions in 1776. • According to Zinn, pamphleteering “had become by this time the chief theatre of debate about relations with England. From 1750 to 1776 four hundred pamphlets had appeared . . .” – Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the US.
Common Sense • As for the bad effects of connection to England, Paine said: • “ . . .the injuries and disadvantages which we sustain by that connection are without number . . . Any submission to, or dependence on, Great Britain, tends directly to involve this Continent in European wars and quarrels, and set us at variance with nations who would otherwise seek our friendship.”
Thomas Paine – Common Sense • Common Sense appeared in early 1776 ad became the most popular pamphlet in the American colonies. • “It made the first bold argument for independence . . . ‘Society in every state is a blessing, but Government even in its best state is but a necessary evil . . .’.” – Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the Us.
The Albany Plan 1754 – At the request of British authorities delegates from the Colonies meet in Albany in order to make a single treaty with the Iroquois. * Many historians have seen the inability to come to a resounding consensus of the colonies not been able at this point to ‘in concert’ together. The Albany Plan of Union was based on a plan drawn up by Benjamin Franklin in 1751.
John Dickinson, Letters from a farmer in Pennsylvania • Dickinson was a wealthy lawyer from Philadelphia but, writing as a ‘simple farmer from Pennsylvania’ he became the foremost American pamphleteer. • Newspapers published his letters and by March 1768 all twelve were collected into a single pamphlet.
John Dickinson, Letters from a farmer in Pennsylvania • Dickinson continually grappled with the idea of the subordinate position the colonists had with Parliament – was it possible to both dependent and free at the same time? • When the revolutionary war came, Dickinson eventually decided to side with the Americans (but it took him a time to decide).
John Dickinson, Letters from a farmer in Pennsylvania • For Dickinson “a ‘tax was a tax’. Whatever its form, Parliament had no right to levy on the colonies . . . ‘Parliament … possesses a legal authority to regulate the trade of Great Britain, and all her colonies’, but it had no right to tax the colonies in any way”. – Edward Countryman, The American Revolution.
