Americanization of Benjamin Franklin in Term Paper

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156).

The shift Franklin made from a man dedicated to the alliance of England and America to a man who embraced the American cause has been a puzzle for historians for a long time, and Wood tries to provide some answers to the questions raised. He had entrusted his Autobiography and other papers to his friend Joseph Galloway when he had to go to France, but Galloway kept to the British side and fled to England, leaving the papers behind, which is how Abel acquired them. Other friends of like mind did much the same. Only Franklin from this group changed his view and adopted the American cause, in effect being Americanized.

Wood makes it clear that the choice was a difficult one for Franklin. He was loyal to England, and he would become fiercely loyal to America. The break with the one before the dedication to the other took a good deal of time as Franklin struggled with the change coming over him. His first sign of dissension with England came when he questioned the authority of Parliament in America. Franklin spent years in England and experienced a good deal of stress as his attitudes changed and as he felt less and less welcome in England.

Wood depicts Franklin's life as a series of turning points at which he had to make a decision on what to make of his life after that. The final shift noted is the one to American patriot, and how Franklin arrived at his decision is in keeping with the way chose other shifts in his life.

The Franklin in this book is recognizable as the patriot and icon known to us today, but Wood also shows ore facets to the man's character and offers more understanding of the nature of the man, not the symbol.

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Wood also places Franklin more in the society of the time, linking him to various people and showing how these people influenced him and how he influenced their actions as well. Wood's picture of the time also shows the developments leading to the Revolutionary War as more complex than the usual picture of an overbearing British military presence seeking to tax the colonists more than was right and the colonists simply seeing Britain as a foreign presence to be expelled by a people seeking to govern themselves. The range of thought at the time was broader than that, and Franklin himself occupied several positions along the continuum of thought about what the future should be for the colonies. Wood shows some of the reasons why Franklin made the changes he made and how his shifts in thought were received by his contemporaries, contributing finally to the more persistent image of Franklin that we have to this day.

Reference

Wood, G.S. (2004). The Americanization of….....

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