Tuesday, November 24 2020, 6pm GMT/1pm EST
Join us for a fun virtual America-themed quiz for Thanksgiving! Enter as an individual or a team. Winners will receive exclusive Benjamin Franklin House treats. All proceeds will go toward advancing our mission to bring history and innovation to life at the only surviving Franklin home.
£5 entry – Buy your tickets here
Wednesday December 9th 2020, 5pm BST/12pm EDT. Register here.
Join us for the December instalment of Ben’s Book Club, a monthly virtual gathering looking at themes relating to Benjamin Franklin, the 18th century, and American history.
This month we will be taking a festive break by talking to George Goodwin, our Author in Residence, about his book Christmas Traditions, an entertaining and enlightening guide to the sacred and secular traditions of Christmas, with many of the latter being 19th-century Anglo-American creations that owe much to Washington Irving and Charles Dickens.
When first experienced in childhood, Christmas seems all of a piece and to have a wondrously timeless quality, as its different aspects blend snugly together. With a collection of charming facts, quotations and anecdotes, George considers the history of the season’s most important festive elements. Beautifully illustrated with images from the British Library’s own vast collections, Christmas Traditions rekindles the memories that are an essential part of the magical nature of Christmastime.
George Goodwin is Honorary Author in Residence at Benjamin Franklin House in London, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a Makin Fellow at the British Library’s Eccles Centre for American Studies, who sponsor his Christmas talks. As well as being the author of Christmas Traditions (2019), George has written three highly-acclaimed historical studies which include Benjamin Franklin in London: The British Life of America’s Founding Father.
Christmas Traditions is published by the British Library and most of its illustrations come from the BL’s own magnificent collections. It is available here and here and through all good bookshops.
Join us even if you don’t have a chance to read the book by the event date!
This event is free of charge but please consider making an online donation here to support the work of Benjamin Franklin House.
Please note this is a past event. View upcoming events and all past virtual talks here.
Monday November 9th, 5pm BST/12pm EDT
George Goodwin discusses his latest research on George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and the intelligence networks that shaped the War for Independence.
George Goodwin is Author in Residence at the Benjamin Franklin House in London. He is the author of Benjamin Franklin in London: The British Life of America’s Founding Father (Yale University Press) and contributor of the Benjamin Franklin entry in The Digital Encyclopedia of George Washington.
He is the recipient of two separate international research fellowships at the Robert H. Smith Center for Jefferson Studies, Monticello. This research project will provide a core element of his forthcoming book, Benjamin Franklin’s War: London, Paris and America’s Fight for Independence. Goodwin is an Eccles Centre Makin Fellow at the British Library, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and of the Royal Society of Arts. He is a graduate of Cambridge University.
Please note this is a past event. View upcoming events and all past virtual talks here.
Watch this lecture here.
Join us for the annual Robert H Smith Family Foundation lecture in American Democracy which aims to promote the importance of international diplomacy and democracy in the spirit of Benjamin Franklin as a diplomat and politician.
The settled position of law and the judges in our constitution has undergone very severe stress testing over the last five years, through Brexit and coronavirus. Those two crises demonstrate the dominance of the executive, who as coronavirus demonstrates can change the law at will if circumstances demand it, and the dominance of politics – if the politicians don’t like the limits set by the law they will not only change the law, they may change the constitution to neuter the judges. How much at risk is the rule of law? And what should we do about it? Has politics prevented us from defending the rule of law? The lecture will set out the threat which is real, the consequences which are dire, and the steps we can take both to form a coalition which defends the rule of law and the specific constitutional changes needed to embed the rule of law.
Charlie Falconer (@LordCFalconer) is an English qualified barrister and partner based in Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher’s London office. The former UK Lord Chancellor and first Secretary of State for Justice spent 25 years as a commercial barrister, becoming a QC in 1991.
Chaired by Paul Apostolidis, Associate Professorial Lecturer and Deputy Head of Department for Education in the Department of Government at LSE.
This event is hosted in partnership with the Department of Government (@LSEGovernment), the world-leading centre for study and research in politics and government.
During their lifetimes and in the years since, Benjamin Franklin and George Washington have been the subject of great literary interest. Yet each has typically been a minor player in the chronicles of the other – until now. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Edward J. Larson’s new book, Franklin & Washington, uncovers the close relationship between these two principal founders of the United States. Professor Larson, University Professor of History and Darling Chair in Law at Pepperdine University, who was also an inaugural Fellow at the Library for the Study of George Washington at Mount Vernon, will be in conversation with Dr. Márcia Balisciano, Director of the Benjamin Franklin House in London, the world’s only surviving Franklin home. On the table will be the genesis of Franklin and Washington’s friendship and its impact on the American story, and their legacies in a time of challenge.
Please note this is a past event. View upcoming events and all past virtual talks here.
Please note this is a past event. View upcoming events and all past virtual talks here.
Join us for the October installment of Ben’s Book Club, a monthly virtual gathering looking at themes related to Benjamin Franklin, the 18th century, and American history.
This month we will be talking to Wendy Moore about her first book ‘The Knife Man’, a fascinating biography of the 18th century surgeon John Hunter. This celebrated anatomist was a contemporary of Dr William Hewson, a fellow resident of 36 Craven Street during Benjamin Franklin’s stay, who ran a private anatomy school from the garden. Both were trained by John’s elder brother William. In later years John advised Franklin on his health.
Revered and feared in equal measure, John Hunter was the most famous surgeon of eighteenth-century London. Rich or poor, aristocrat or human freak, suffering Georgians knew that Hunter’s skills might well save their lives but if he failed, their corpses could end up on his dissecting table, their bones and organs destined for display in his remarkable, macabre museum. Maverick medical pioneer, adored teacher, brilliant naturalist, Hunter was a key figure of the Enlightenment who transformed surgery, advanced biological understanding and even anticipated the evolutionary theories of Darwin. He provided inspiration both for Dr Jekyll and Dr Dolittle. But the extremes to which he went to pursue his scientific mission raised question marks then as now.
‘The Knife Man’ won the UK Medical Journalists’ Association Consumer Book Award and was short-listed for the Marsh Biography Award and the Saltire Award. Other titles by Wendy Moore include ‘Wedlock‘, ‘How to Create the Perfect Wife‘, ‘The Mesmerist’, and her latest publication ‘Endell Street’ tells the story of the suffragette doctors who ran a Military Hospital in the heart of London in World War One. Wendy is a prize-winning author and freelance journalist who has written for numerous national newspapers including the Guardian, Times, Sunday Telegraph and Express as well as for medical journals including the Lancet and BMJ. She is one of the members of the judging panel for the annual Benjamin Franklin House Literary Prize for young writers and you can watch her virtual talk on ‘Endell Street’ here.
You can buy ‘The Knife Man’ here.
Join us even if you don’t have a chance to read the book by the event date!
This event is free of charge but please consider making an online donation here to support the work of Benjamin Franklin House.
Please note this is a past event. View upcoming events and all past virtual talks here.
Join us for the November installment of Ben’s Book Club, a monthly virtual gathering looking at themes related to Benjamin Franklin, the 18th century, and American history.
This month we will be talking to Dr Amanda Foreman about her brilliant narrative, ‘A World on Fire’, in which she tells the fascinating story of the American Civil War–and the major role played by Britain and its citizens in that epic struggle.
Between 1861 and 1865, thousands of British citizens volunteered for service on both sides of the Civil War. From the first cannon blasts on Fort Sumter to Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, they served as officers and infantrymen, sailors and nurses, blockade runners and spies. Through personal letters, diaries, and journals, Foreman introduces characters both humble and grand, while crafting a panoramic yet intimate view of the war on the front lines, in the prison camps, and in the great cities of both the Union and the Confederacy. In the drawing rooms of London and the offices of Washington, on muddy fields and aboard packed ships, Foreman reveals the decisions made, the beliefs held and contested, and the personal triumphs and sacrifices that ultimately led to the reunification of America.
‘A World on Fire’ was the winner of the Fletcher Pratt Award for Civil War History, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and was selected for the New York Times Top Ten Books of 2011. Amanda Foreman is also the author of the best-selling ‘Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire’. In 2016, Foreman served as chair of The Man Booker Prize. That same year, her BBC documentary series, ‘The Ascent of Woman’, was released. Currently, she is a columnist for The Wall Street Journal bi-weekly ‘Historically Speaking’ and an Honorary Research Senior Fellow in the History Department at the University of Liverpool. Her next book, ‘The World Made by Women’, is scheduled to be published by Penguin Random House in 2021.
You can buy ‘A World on Fire’ here.
Join us even if you don’t have a chance to read the book by the event date!
This event is free of charge but please consider making an online donation here to support the work of Benjamin Franklin House.
Open House London is the capital’s largest annual festival of architecture and design. This annual event allows the public to cross the threshold of some of London’s most interesting buildings, including Grade I, 1730s Benjamin Franklin House. Half-hourly guided tours will take place throughout the day.
Saturday 19 and Sunday 20 September, 11.00am-4.30pm
Free – half-hourly tours run on a first come first served basis. Advance booking required.
Register here
Donations welcome
Rules for a safe visit
All visitors will be required to wear masks while in the House except:
Tour groups are limited to 4 people from separate households in line with social distancing measures.
Please refrain from touching public surfaces while in the House
Please do not enter the House if you feel unwell
Our staff is available should you need any assistance
For more information email info@benjaminfranklinhouse.org
Although once disregarded by historians as sentimental and ephemeral, today American sheet music is valued for the unique light it sheds upon the nation’s concerns and aspirations. In this talk, Eccles Centre for American Studies librarian Jean Petrovic will share items held at the British Library. She will consider how this music moved ‘from the sacred to the secular and from the timeless to the timely’ and will explore how songs associated with World War I and the movement for female suffrage captured, reflected – and possibly even shaped – the cultural and political zeitgeist.
Image: Marie Zimmerman, Votes for Women. Suffrage Rallying Song. Philadelphia: E.M. Zimmerman, 1915. British Library shelfmark: H.3992.r.(18)
Benjamin Franklin was born at a time when the abhorrent practice of slaveholding was common. He was initially accepting of owning slaves, and came to London with two black servants, Peter and King, who became free on arrival in Britain. His years on Craven Street led to a fundamental transformation. House Director, Dr. Márcia Balisciano, will explain how Franklin became the American founder who campaigned against slavery, spending his last days as the President of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery.
This event was free to attend but we would ask attendees to consider making a voluntary donation here to support Benjamin Franklin House continue to share Franklin’s story as we begin to reopen to the public.
Watch the full talk and Q&A here:
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