Chronicles the founding father's life and his multiple careers as a shopkeeper, writer, inventor, media baron, scientist, diplomat, business strategist, and political leader, while showing how his faith in the wisdom of the common citizen helped to forge an American national identity based on the virtues of its middle class.

A revelatory portrait of Benjamin Franklin's youngest sister and a wholly different account of the founding of the United States.

The first major biography of Benjamin Franklin in more than sixty years, The First American is history on a grand scale -- a work of meticulous scholarship and a thoroughly engaging portrait of the foremost American of his day. Diplomat, scientist, philosopher, businessman, inventor, wit, and bon vivant, Benjamin Franklin was in every respect America's first Renaissance man. The eighteenth-century genius comes to life in this masterwork by acclaimed...

Chronicles the founding father's life and his multiple careers as a shopkeeper, writer, inventor, media baron, scientist, diplomat, business strategist, and political leader, while showing how his faith in the wisdom of the common citizen helped to forge an American national identity based on the virtues of its middle class.

Among other things, Benjamin Franklin was a printer, philosopher, inventor, statesman, and not least, a writer. Franklin's writings span a long and distinguished career of literary, scientific, and political inquiry—the work of a man whose life lasted for nearly all of the eighteenth century and whose achievements ranged from inventing the lightning rod to publishing Poor Richard's Almanac to signing the Declaration of Independence.His autobiography

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"Rick Atkinson, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning An Army at Dawn and two other masterly books about World War II, has long been admired for his unparalleled ability to write deeply researched, stunningly vivid narrative history. Now he turns his attention to a new war, and in the initial volume of the Revolution Trilogy he tells the story of the first twenty months of the bloody struggle to shake free of King George's shackles. From the battles...

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, which Franklin himself called his Memoirs, is the unfinished record of his life written between 1771 and 1790. It has become one of the most well-known and influential autobiographies in history, and has been praised both as a historical document and a piece of literature in its own right. William Dean Howells declared that "Franklin's is one of the greatest autobiographies in literature, and towers

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In 2010, one of the most consequential Court decisions in American political history gave wealthy corporations the right to spend unlimited money to influence elections. Justice Anthony Kennedy's majority opinion treated corruption as nothing more than explicit bribery, a narrow conception later echoed by Chief Justice Roberts in deciding McCutcheon volume FEC in 2014. With unlimited spending transforming American politics for the worse, warns Zephyr...

"Electricity is at the core of all modern life. Despite this, the full story of this revolutionary force has remained untold--until now. Simply Electrifying offers the comprehensive story of one of mankind's most important journeys: from a time when only a few could even imagine a world with electricity to today, when, for the most of us, a world without electricity would be unimaginable. Since the birth of the modern science of electricity 265 years...