father of american essay

Prologue Magazine

The Founding Fathers Online

Winter 2010, Vol. 42, No. 4

By Keith Donohue

Six weeks after the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia ended, George Washington received a letter from his fellow delegate Gouverneur Morris dated October 30, 1787.

In it he discusses the prospect of the adoption of the Constitution among the various states, and he credits Washington for its success, "Indeed I am convinced that if you had not attended the Convention, and the same Paper had been handed out to the World, it would have met with a colder Reception, with fewer and weaker Advocates, and with more and more strenuous opponents."

Morris goes on to argue, in a letter preserved in the Papers of George Washington, that only Washington is suitable to become President and take the reins of the new and unruly republic. "And indeed among these thirteen Horses now about to be coupled together there are some of every Race and Character. They will listen to your Voice, and submit to your Control; you therefore must I say must mount this Seat."

Washington was not swayed immediately, and indeed, his correspondence over the next year shows just how assailed he was by uncertainty and his own desire to retire from public life. At last he was persuaded by his fellow patriots, and in April 1789, he left Mount Vernon for New York City to assume the office he was to hold for the next eight years.

Learn more about:

• Founding Fathers who signed the Declaration of Independence
• Founding Fathers who signed the Constitution
• The National Historical Publications and Records Commission , its work, and its grants program

The story of George Washington's reluctant acceptance to stand for election as first President of the new nation is told with great élan in Ron Chernow's new biography, Washington: A Life, and while well known, this Hamlet-like wavering on Washington's part comes most fully alive through the actual words of the participants. Captured in letters to and from Washington, his angst and vacillation over the presidency are often tinged by a certain underlying pride in being asked so often and so forcefully.

Chernow was able to describe in detail Washington's dilemma by turning to Washington's papers, which have been collected over the years and used by historians to write biographies. Now, Washington's papers, along with those of five other of his contemporary Founding Fathers, will soon be freely accessible via the Internet as a result of an ongoing project sponsored by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC), with strong congressional support.

The voluminous letters, diaries, and papers kept by Washington offer a first-hand account not only of his struggle over the question of the presidency but virtually every aspect of his life from his youth to his forays in the French and Indian War, the creation of Mount Vernon, his leadership of the Continental Army, his presidency of the Constitutional Convention, and his years as first President.

Like many 18th-century property owners and statesmen, Washington maintained meticulous records of his business, professional, and personal life, and these historical documents are the primary source materials for our understanding of those distant times and events. Chernow acknowledges, in his book, his own debt to those primary source materials:

Any biographer of George Washington must stand in awe of the scholarly feat accomplished by the eminent team of editors at The Papers of George Washington project, which operates out of the University of Virginia at Charlottesville. By gathering relevant documents from around the globe, they have produced a modern edition of Washington's papers that eclipses the far more modest edition published by John C. Fitzpatrick back in the 1930s and early 1940s. Whereas Fitzpatrick, in his thirty-nine volumes, limited himself to the letters written by Washington, the new edition—sixty volumes of letters and diaries and still counting—includes letters written to him as well as excerpts of contemporary letters, diaries, and newspapers. Expert commentary appears at every step along the way. Strange as it may seem, George Washington's life has now been so minutely documented that we know far more about him than did his own friends, family, and contemporaries.

George Washington is but one of the Founding Fathers whose life has been so minutely documented. An editorial team at the University of Virginia is also working on a comprehensive edition of The Papers of James Madison, although the first 10 volumes were edited at the University of Chicago. The John Adams Papers are currently being published by Harvard University Press with editorial work at the Massachusetts Historical Society.

Princeton University is the home to most of The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, and in 1999, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello took on part of the job and began The Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Retirement Series. The Papers of Benjamin Franklin was established in 1954 under the joint auspices of Yale University and the American Philosophical Society. Between 1961 and 1987, Columbia University Press published the complete 27-volume edition of The Papers of Alexander Hamilton.

All told, there are 242 volumes of these documentary editions in print, and each volume contains hundreds of documents sent to and from the statesmen, including letters, diary and journal entries, publications (such as The Federalist Papers in the Hamilton edition); editorial essays introducing the selection of documents and providing historical context; annotations clarifying the significance and meaning of particular items; and extensive indexes for each volume and for entire series.

The papers themselves are drawn from originals and copies of originals located in the National Archives, the Library of Congress, and in literally hundreds of archives, public and private, across the United States and around the world.

Once copies had been assembled and arranged in chronological order, editorial teams began the task of deciphering, interpreting, and transcribing handwritten documents. Every transcription is verified against the original, in the words of one editor, "line by line, word by word, letter by letter." This attention to accuracy ensures that final transcriptions reflect the most verifiable versions of the originals.

The next stage in the process is annotation—identifying the significant correspondents, the subjects and events under discussion, and references to other people, documents, and publications within the project and elsewhere. Annotation is frequently the most time-consuming part of the process, and it plays an essential role in placing the documents and their contents in context. Specialized knowledge about the historical period is necessary to illuminate these details, and editors provide further context through introductory materials.

Modern historical documentary editing—based on the precepts and rigorous standards of scientific history—began in the 1940s with work by Julian Boyd of Princeton on the Thomas Jefferson papers, financed by a major gift from the New York Times. In 1950, Boyd presented the first volume to President Truman, who called for publication of all of the papers of the Founding Fathers.

"I am convinced that the better we understand the history of our democracy, the better we shall appreciate our rights as free men and the more determined we shall be to keep our ideals alive," he said. The President also asked the National Historical Publications Commission—which later became the National Historical Publications and Records Commission—to plan a national program for publication of the papers of other public figures important to understanding American history.

During the 1950s, the Commission helped the Founders projects with research into archives and collections, and by 1964, Congress had authorized funds for the agency to award grants. Over the past decades, the NHPRC has funded all six of the projects (with the exception of the Jefferson Retirement Series) in their ongoing work, and the print publication resulting from this massive effort is about two-thirds complete.

Historians have praised the work of the editors behind these documentary editions and relied on the papers to create new and exciting histories and biographies. David McCullough told Congress in 2008, "The value of the Papers of Founding Fathers goes far beyond their scholarly importance, immense as that is. These papers are American scripture. They are our political faith, the free and open exchange of ideas, the often brilliant expressions of some of the most fertile minds, the greatest statesmen, patriots, and seers in our history."

McCullough's own work is testament to the value of the edited papers. His Pulitzer Prize–winning biography John Adams relied heavily upon The Papers of John Adams documentary edition, and that work, in turn, became the basis for the Emmy Award–winning television series on HBO.

Likewise, historian Joseph Ellis's Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation, which received the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for History, and David Hackett Fischer's Washington's Crossing, which received the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for History, used the work of the documentary editions, as did Walter Isaacson's Benjamin Franklin: An American Life.

In addition to his new biography on Washington, Ron Chernow used the Columbia University project to write Alexander Hamilton: A Biography (2004). Dozens of other histories, biographies, and artistic interpretations have used the original papers to create fresh versions of the old story of America's founding.

Politicians across the spectrum recognize the value of the Founders' papers, and President Ronald Reagan said in 1986, "I have great hope for the children of America, that they too will read the works of Madison, Washington, Jefferson, Adams, and Hamilton. For in their letters to each other and in their essays, in their arguments and in their opinions, all so passionately stated, the image of an age can be discerned."

While their print editions reside in libraries across the nation, the project editors realized in the late 1980s that one way to increase access to their work was through electronic publication and the Internet. Several of the projects began investigating ways to translate their materials from print to electronic publication for the World Wide Web.

In 2001 the University of Virginia Press, with help from a major award from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and matched by funding from the President's Office of the University of Virginia, founded Rotunda ( http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/ ), an electronic imprint of the press. Part of the early work of Rotunda was to create digital versions of the documentary editions of the Founding Era.

The fruit of this vision, the American Founding Era Collection, is currently available by institutional license. Now, through a cooperative agreement with the National Archives, the University of Virginia Press will develop a full-featured web site—hosted by the National Archives—that will allow free access to the papers of the six Founders.

The Founders Online will launch in the summer of 2013. It includes over 120,000 documents and thousands of explanatory notes drawn from the Washington, Adams, Madison, Hamilton, and Jefferson print editions. Next year, the Franklin print edition will be added, along with a batch of papers that will also appear with annotations in future print editions. Within three years, the web site should include a total of 175,000 documents, and eventually it plans to have all of the existing documents and notes in a single web site where individuals can read, browse and search through a new lens to the Founding Era.

"This award to help the University of Virginia Press create a new online presence for the papers of our nation's founders is great news for the University and for scholars everywhere, said University of Virginia President Teresa Sullivan. "For 10 years, the press has built on the pioneering vision of UVA faculty to harness digital technology in the service of scholarship and education through the Rotunda imprint. As a public university, we applaud the leadership of the National Archives in bringing this important archive to life. Making these materials available to the public for free reflects the core values of the University and indeed of our nation's founding generation, whose words will now be readily available to teachers, students, and citizens."

Editors at the projects echo her remarks.

Jim Taylor, director of The Papers of John Adams project at the Massachusetts Historical Society, said, "Free access to the Founders Online will serve a much broader audience of citizens the way that Rotunda's subscription version serves the scholarly community."

Barbara Oberg, director of The Papers of Thomas Jefferson at Princeton University, said, "Founders Online is a significant step toward making the nation's cultural patrimony freely available to the American citizenry. 'Knowledge,' Thomas Jefferson wrote, 'is the common property of all mankind.' If a republic is to survive—let alone thrive—free access to knowledge is basic, and what better place to begin than with the words of America's founders? But to make Founders Online possible at all, it has taken the expertise, hard work, and dedication of the editorial teams behind the effort."

The new web site will be built on a half-century of work by documentary editors—the tireless scholars who collected, transcribed, annotated, indexed, and published the original papers.

The possibilities for new discoveries are endless. Teachers will be able to call up primary source material in the history classroom in the blink of an eye. Students and scholars will have the ability to home in on key concepts and search across all six collections, not only by simple word searches but by terms assigned in the indexing process and through editorial annotations.

For example, the Founders' views on slavery might be assembled in a single set of search results in which many of the original documents do not use the word at all.

Or one might collect all the correspondence between Adams and Jefferson along with their contemporaries' views on each man and create a richer portrait on their fraught relationship.

Or one might trace the Founders' letters and diaries and debates leading up to the Constitutional Convention, their thoughts during the meetings in Philadelphia, the ratification of the Constitution by the states, and how the Washington administration, first Congress, and first Supreme Court implemented the grand experiment.

The Founders Online continues that experiment in democracy by making freely available in one place the original words of the original statesmen. Although it holds only a small portion of the primary source material, the National Archives is an ideal home for this collection.

In the same Act of Congress creating the National Archives in 1934, there was language establishing a National Historical Publications Commission designed to publish the most important documents of our history, whether or not those papers were in the stewardship of the government. The Commission augments the work of the National Archives and creates a way for partnerships to be created with other archives in the nation to help tell the American story.

In announcing the creation of the Founders Online, David S. Ferriero, Archivist of the United States, said that having these papers online will better inform current-day debates over the meaning of our founding documents.

"This new archive of the Founding Era will revolutionize our understanding by creating for the first time a free and fully searchable collection of the Founders' own words in the context of their time," he said.

"As scholars and statesmen debate the meaning of documents such as the Constitution and Bill of Rights, they can turn to the originals and the wit and wisdom of the Founders' own debates. And we can only express our gratitude for the effort of dedicated editors and scholars to create this work, a national monument to the founding of our nation."

The great minds who fiercely debated the founding of our country—Franklin, Washington, Hamilton, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison—rarely agreed together on public policy for the new nation, though they were unanimous in support of the principles and underlying idea of America. Now today's best minds will have the chance to contrast and compare the Founders' words and ideas through a communications medium that none could foresee, though all would acknowledge it as a democratizing force. The words of the Founders belong online, where people across the country and around the world can freely read and wonder at their wisdom.

Updated June 4, 2013

Keith Donohue joined the National Archives in 2004 as communications director for the National Historical Publications and Records Commission. He was a speechwriter and director of publications at the National Endowment for the Arts and is the author of the novels The Stolen Child, Angels of Destruction, and Centuries of June. He has a Ph.D. in English from the Catholic University of America.  

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James Madison

By: History.com Editors

Updated: March 22, 2022 | Original: October 29, 2009

James Madison (1751-1836) was a Founding Father of the United States and the fourth American president, serving in office from 1809 to 1817. An advocate for a strong federal government, the Virginia-born Madison composed the first drafts of the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights and earned the nickname “Father of the Constitution.” 

In 1792, Madison and Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) founded the Democratic-Republican Party, which has been called America’s first opposition political party. When Jefferson became the third U.S. president, Madison served as his secretary of state. In this role, he oversaw the Louisiana Purchase from the French in 1803. During his presidency, Madison led the U.S. into the controversial War of 1812 (1812-15) against Great Britain. After two terms in the White House, Madison retired to his Virginia plantation, Montpelier, with his wife Dolley (1768-1849).

Early Years

James Madison was born on March 16, 1751, in Port Conway, Virginia , to James Madison Sr. and Nellie Conway Madison. The oldest of 12 children, Madison was raised on the family plantation, Montpelier, in Orange County, Virginia. At age 18, Madison left Montpelier to attend the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University).

Did you know? Montpelier, James Madison's Virginia plantation home, was established by his grandfather in 1723. An estimated 100 enslaved people lived at Montpelier when Madison owned it. The property was sold after this death. Today the estate, which covers some 2,600 acres, is open to the public.

After graduation, Madison took an interest in the relationship between the American colonies and Britain, which had grown tumultuous over the issue of British taxation. When Virginia began preparing for the American Revolutionary War (1775-83), Madison was appointed a colonel in the Orange County militia. Small in stature and sickly, he soon gave up a military career for a political one. In 1776, he represented Orange County at the Virginia Constitution Convention to organize a new state government no longer under British rule.

During his work in the Virginia legislature, Madison met lifelong friend Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), author of the Declaration of Independence and the third president of the United States. As a politician, Madison often fought for religious freedom, believing it was an individual’s right from birth.

In 1780, Madison became a Virginia delegate to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia. He left Congress in 1783 to return to the Virginia assembly and work on a religious freedom statute, though he would soon be called back to Congress to help create a new constitution.

Father of the Constitution

After the colonies declared independence from Britain in 1776, the Articles of Confederation were created as the first constitution of the United States. The Articles were ratified in 1781 and gave most of the power to the individual state legislatures who acted more like individual countries than a union. This structure left the national Congress weak, with no ability to properly manage federal debt or maintain a national army.

Madison, after undertaking an extensive study of other world governments, came to the conclusion that America needed a strong federal government in order to help regulate the state legislatures and create a better system for raising federal money. He felt the government should be set up with a system of checks and balances so no branch had greater power over the other. Madison also suggested that governors and judges have enhanced roles in government in order to help manage the state legislatures.

In May 1787, delegates from each state came together at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, and Madison was able to present his ideas for an effective government system in his “Virginia Plan,” which detailed a government with three branches: legislative, executive and judicial. This plan would form the basis of the U.S. Constitution . Madison took detailed notes during debates at the convention, which helped to further shape the U.S. Constitution and led to his moniker: “Father of the Constitution.” (Madison stated the Constitution was not “the off-spring of a single brain,” but instead, “the work of many heads and many hands.”)

Ratifying the Constitution and the Bill of Rights

Once the new constitution was written, it needed to be ratified by nine of the 13 states. This was not an easy process, as many states felt the Constitution gave the federal government too much power. Supporters of the Constitution were known as Federalists , while critics were called Anti-Federalists.

Madison played a strong role in the ratification process and wrote a number of essays outlining his support for the Constitution. His writings, along with those penned by other advocates, were released anonymously under the title “The Federalist,” a series of 85 essays produced between 1787 and 1788. After extensive debate, the U.S. Constitution was signed by members of the Constitutional Convention in September 1787. The document was ratified by the states in 1788 and the new government became functional the following year.

Bill of Rights

Madison was elected to the newly formed U.S. House of Representatives , where he served from 1789 to 1797. In Congress, he worked to draft the Bill of Rights , a group of 10 amendments to the Constitution that spelled out fundamental rights (such as freedom of speech and religion) held by U.S. citizens. The Bill of Rights was ratified by the states in 1791.

In the new, more powerful Congress, Madison and Jefferson soon found themselves disagreeing with the Federalists on key issues dealing with federal debt and power. For example, the two men favored states’ rights and opposed Federalist leader Alexander Hamilton ’s (c. 1755-1804) proposal for a national bank, the Bank of the United States . 

In 1792, Jefferson and Madison founded the Democratic-Republican Party, which has been labeled America’s first opposition political party. Jefferson, Madison and James Monroe (1758-1831) were the only Democratic-Republicans ever to become U.S. presidents, as the party divided into competing factions in the 1820s.

Dolley Madison

Madison also had a new development in his personal life: In 1794, after a brief courtship, the 43-year-old Madison married 26-year-old Dolley Payne Todd (1768-1849), an outgoing Quaker widow with one son. Dolley’s personality contrasted sharply with that of the quiet, reserved Madison. She loved entertaining and hosted many receptions and dinner parties during which Madison could meet other influential figures of his time. During the couple’s 41-year marriage, Dolley Madison and James Madison were reportedly rarely apart.

James Madison, Secretary of State: 1801-09

Through the years, Madison’s friendship with Jefferson would continue to thrive. When Jefferson became the third president of the United States, he appointed Madison as secretary of state. In this position, which he held from 1801 to 1809, Madison helped acquire the Louisiana Territory from the French in 1803. The Louisiana Purchase doubled the size of America.

In 1807, Madison and Jefferson enacted an embargo on all trade with Britain and France. The two European countries were at war and, angered by America’s neutrality, they had begun attacking U.S. ships at sea. However, the embargo hurt America and its merchants and sailors more than Europe, which did not need the American goods. Jefferson ended the embargo in 1809 as he left office.

James Madison, Fourth President and the War of 1812

In the presidential election of 1808, Madison defeated Federalist candidate Charles Cotesworth Pinckney (1745-1825) to become the nation’s fourth chief executive. Madison continued to face problems from overseas, as Britain and France had continued their attacks on American ships following the embargo. In addition to impeding U.S. trade, Britain took U.S. sailors for its own navy and began supporting American Indians in battles against U.S. settlers.

In retaliation, Madison issued a war proclamation against Britain in 1812. However, America was not ready for a war. Congress had not properly funded or prepared an army, and a number of the states did not support what was referred to as “Mr. Madison’s War” and would not allow their militias to join the campaign. Despite these setbacks, American forces attempted to fight off and attack British forces. The U.S. met defeat much of the time both on land and at sea, but its well-built ships proved to be formidable foes.

As the War of 1812 continued, Madison ran for re-election against Federalist candidate DeWitt Clinton (1767-1828), who was also supported by an anti-war faction of the Democratic-Republican Party, and won. Despite the victory, Madison was often criticized and blamed for the difficulties stemming from the war. Trade stopped between the U.S. and Europe, hurting American merchants once again. New England threatened secession from the Union. The Federalists undermined Madison’s efforts; and Madison was forced to flee Washington, D.C., in August 1814 as British troops invaded and burned buildings, including the White House , the Capitol and the Library of Congress .

Finally, weary from battle, Britain and the U.S. agreed to negotiate an end to the war. The Treaty of Ghent was signed in December 1814 in Europe. Before word of the peace agreement reached America, a major victory for U.S. troops at the Battle of New Orleans (December 1814-January 1815) helped shine a positive light on the controversial war. Though the war was mismanaged, there were some key victories that emboldened the Americans. Once blamed for the errors in the war, Madison was eventually hailed for its triumphs.

Final Years

After two terms in office, Madison left Washington, D.C., in 1817, and returned to Montpelier with his wife. Despite the challenges he encountered during his presidency, Madison was respected as a great thinker, communicator and statesman. He remained active in various civic causes, and in 1826 became rector of the University of Virginia, which was founded by his friend Thomas Jefferson. Madison died at Montpelier on June 28, 1836, at the age of 85, from heart failure.

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Benjamin Franklin and the American Enlightenment

Written by: thomas kidd, baylor university, by the end of this section, you will:.

• Explain how and why the different goals and interests of European leaders and colonists affected how they viewed themselves and their relationship with Britain

Suggested Sequencing

This Narrative should be accompanied by the Benjamin Franklin Mini DBQ Lesson.

Benjamin Franklin stood on the corner of Fourth and Arch Streets in Philadelphia and took in the massive unfinished building in front of him. He remembered how nine years earlier, in 1740, the hall, constructed for the celebrated evangelical preacher George Whitefield, had been the largest in Philadelphia. Now it stood empty, and Franklin pondered what it might become. At forty-three years old, he was a savvy entrepreneur. In 1728, he had set up a printing house where he published several different newspapers, printed hundreds of books on a variety of topics, and, most famously, wrote his popular yearly Poor Richard’s Almanack . Franklin’s “Poor Richard” offered witty advice and practical tips, encouraging colonists to be thrifty, hard-working, and disciplined. The Almanack was a smashing success, running for twenty-eight years and selling ten thousand copies annually.

Franklin was an important American scientist, inventor, and printer who was part of the larger Enlightenment, or Age of Reason. The Enlightenment was an international conversation of ideas that took place in the eighteenth century to increase and classify knowledge about the natural world and human condition through reason and experimentation. Scientists and other thinkers joined learned scientific societies, corresponded with one another, and published their discoveries in scientific journals. Their goals were to improve society and humanity.

Although Franklin made plenty of money from his printing, he also believed his work served a greater civic and humane purpose. Newspapers, magazines, and pamphlets were like little beacons of light, spreading knowledge among citizens throughout the land. Printing also helped keep government from becoming corrupt. Franklin remembered how, in 1733, authorities had dragged the New York newspaperman John Peter Zenger into court for criticizing the royal governor, William Cosby. Zenger’s newspaper published articles suggesting that the governor had fired colonial justices who refused to increase his salary. Zenger was found not guilty of libel in the landmark case for freedom of the press. However, colonial authorities continued their attempts to censor newspapers. Franklin knew he had to be clever in using satire and anonymously written pieces if he were to criticize the government in print.

As he studied the giant assembly hall, he wondered how it might serve the cause of enlightening the city’s young men. Franklin believed it was critical for the citizenry in colonial America to be well educated. Along with others who shared the Enlightenment ideals of reason and free inquiry, he felt moral virtue was formed through learning. A virtuous people could then govern themselves in their colonial legislatures and town meetings. In addition to his work as a printer, Franklin had worked hard to spread knowledge throughout the city and improve civic life. In 1727, he created a debating society called the Junto that discussed new ideas, and in 1731, he founded the first public lending library in the colonies, the Library Company of Philadelphia, to promote civic knowledge and virtue. He also helped found a hospital, a fire company, and the militia. Now, in the 1740s, a new idea came into Franklin’s mind as he stood in front of the empty speaking hall. Perhaps this building could be a place of instruction, a beacon of light that would shed rays of truth throughout the colonies.

Franklin quickly drew up a plan for this institution, the Academy of Pennsylvania (later renamed the University of Pennsylvania). All the other colonial colleges had been founded for religious purposes. For example, Harvard College was established in the 1630s to train Puritan ministers. By the early 1700s, it was still committed to Christianity, but it taught its Congregationalist ministers the new “rational” theology instead of Calvinist doctrine. In 1701, a rival institution, Yale College, was founded by ministers who hoped it would maintain traditional Calvinist theology. The College of William & Mary (1693) was run by Virginian Anglicans, and evangelical Presbyterians founded the College of New Jersey (later Princeton University) in 1746. Franklin wanted his Academy to be different. Instead of primarily training ministers, it would educate young men to be successful businessmen and public servants.

Unlike other colonial colleges, the Academy would not be run by one Christian denomination. Franklin, who grew up in a strict Calvinist family, had gradually come to think that true religion was about moral virtue rather than a particular set of doctrines. He was skeptical about traditional Christian teaching on salvation, the divinity of Jesus Christ, and the Trinity. He was also convinced, like other Enlightenment thinkers, that the best way for a society to promote virtue was to tolerate all religious beliefs. Governments should not support one particular religion, Franklin argued, but instead trust that truth would prevail through inquiry. His belief in toleration extended to the Academy’s Board of Trustees, which comprised members of several different Christian denominations.

As plans came together for the Academy, Franklin embraced another idea. Instead of following the traditional curriculum, in which students studied ancient languages and Roman and Greek classics, the Academy would teach students knowledge of contemporary arts and sciences. Franklin was a scientist who argued that the Academy should teach “practical knowledge.” Such an education would equip young men to make a good living and to be active citizens. The trustees of the Academy did not share Franklin’s vision, however, and ultimately chose a more traditional curriculum.

Franklin, perhaps the colonies’ most prominent Enlightenment thinker, most famously contributed to human knowledge with his innovative scientific discoveries. He began wondering whether lightning were a form of electricity. In 1750, he published an article suggesting that this could be proven by flying a kite in a lightning storm. Two years later, Franklin decided to try. He stepped out into the streets of Philadelphia as thunder crashed and lightning streaked across the sky and released into the stormy air a kite with a key tied to its string. He watched as the loose threads of the string began to repel each other and, as he moved his hand close to the key, saw it spark. He had proven that lightning was electricity. Franklin won international acclaim as a man of science and corresponded with many of the most important scientists throughout the colonies and Europe.

Benjamin West painted Benjamin Franklin Drawing Electricity from the Sky sometime around 1816. By surrounding Franklin with cherubs, what statement was West making about him and his contributions to academia?

Though that was Franklin’s most famous experiment, it was by no means his last. An endlessly curious man, Franklin invented bifocal glasses and a more fuel-efficient fireplace stove, studied the circulation of currents in the Atlantic Ocean, wrote about theories of light, and made scientific observations of meteorology, refrigeration, and conduction. He did not take out any patents to profit financially from his discoveries, because he wanted all humanity to benefit from the expansion of knowledge. He pursued his scientific work while continuing to publish through his printing press, serving as president of the American Philosophical Society and colonial America’s Postmaster General, and working tirelessly as a political theorist and statesman. Franklin exemplified the enthusiasm and optimism of the Enlightenment. Like Thomas Jefferson and other men and women of the Enlightenment, he believed in the promise of reason and scientific discovery for progress. The new nation that Franklin helped found reflected many of his values: freedom of the press, freedom of religion, the importance of education and learning, healthy civic institutions, and knowledge held by a self-governing citizenry. Franklin’s work as a printer, scientist, and politician helped shed the light of liberty across a new nation. Over the next few decades, the Founders contributed to the American Enlightenment associated with creating a political novus ordo seclorum, a “new order for the ages.”

Review Questions

1. Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanack is an example of his

• radical political beliefs
• entrepreneurial success
• poor business decisions
• orthodox religious views

2. Which of the following highlights Benjamin Franklin’s high regard for civic virtue?

• His founding of the Junto
• His conducting scientific experiments and sharing his findings
• His applying for patents
• His writing of his autobiography

3. How was Franklin’s Academy of Pennsylvania unique among the early colonial universities, such as Harvard and Yale?

• It was founded on Puritan principles.
• It was the first university founded in the American colonies.
• It was chartered by the British crown.
• It focused on business and public service instead of religious training.

4. Which statement best describes Benjamin Franklin’s religious outlook?

• He was a devout Catholic.
• He supported state-run religious institutions favoring a particular denomination.
• He rejected the philosophy of Enlightenment thinkers for traditional Protestant views.
• He was skeptical of organized religion and focused instead on moral virtue.

5. Throughout his life, Benjamin Franklin held all the following roles except

6. Because of the myriad roles he held in his lifetime, Benjamin Franklin typified what larger movement?

• The Great Awakening
• The Enlightenment
• The temperance movement
• The labor movement

Free Response Questions

• Explain how Benjamin Franklin influenced the development of democracy in the mid-eighteenth century.
• Explain how Benjamin Franklin’s scientific ideas and practices influenced colonial society.

AP Practice Questions

1. A historian might use the image of Benjamin Franklin to support which of the following statements?

• Franklin was interested in proving traditional religious beliefs through scientific experimentation.
• Franklin believed in a democratic form of government.
• Enlightenment thinking such as Franklin’s was based on science and reason.
• Franklin advocated civic virtue and political activism.

2. Which of the following could a historian use to support Franklin’s reputation as a thinker of the Enlightenment?

• Franklin’s devotion to the Calvinist faith
• Franklin’s publication of Poor Richard’s Almanac
• Franklin’s apprenticeship to his brother
• Franklin’s role in the founding of the Academy of Pennsylvania

3. The Enlightenment had the most significant impact on

• the Great Awakening
• Bacon’s Rebellion
• the ideals behind the American Revolution
• the demands of the Stamp Act Congress

Primary Sources

Sketch of the Franklin Stove: https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/franklin/franklin-scientist.html

Suggested Resources

Brands, H.W. The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin . New York: Doubleday, 2000.

Franklin, Benjamin. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. [Various publishers]

Isaacson, Walter. Benjamin Franklin: An American Life . New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003.

Kidd, Thomas S. Benjamin Franklin: The Religious Life of a Founding Father . New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017.

Morgan, Edmund S. Benjamin Franklin . New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002.

Richard, Carl J. The Founders and the Classics: Greece, Rome, and the American Enlightenment . Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995.

Wood, Gordon S. The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin . New York: Penguin, 2004.

Related Content

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness

In our resource history is presented through a series of narratives, primary sources, and point-counterpoint debates that invites students to participate in the ongoing conversation about the American experiment.

The Vision Of The Founding Fathers

What kind of nation did the Founders aim to create?

Men, not vast, impersonal forces — economic, technological, class struggle, what have you — make history, and they make it out of the ideals that they cherish in their hearts and the ideas they have in their minds. So what were the ideas and ideals that drove the Founding Fathers to take up arms and fashion a new kind of government, one formed by reflection and choice, as Alexander Hamilton said, rather than by accident and force?

The worldview out of which America was born centered on three revolutionary ideas, of which the most powerful was a thirst for liberty. For the Founders, liberty was not some vague abstraction. They understood it concretely, as people do who have a keen knowledge of its opposite. They understood it in the same way as Eastern Europeans who have lived under Communist tyranny, for instance, or Jews who escaped the Holocaust.

The Plymouth Pilgrims were only the first of many who came to the New World to escape religious persecution. Hard as it may be to believe it at this distance of time, British law once forbade non-Anglican Protestants to worship freely — jailing and even burning them for dissenting in the 16th and 17th centuries, and then, more liberally, fining them — and it barred them (along with Catholics and Jews) from the great universities and from political office. In response, thousands of Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Baptists, Quakers, and others fled. Not incidentally, they brought with them their dissenting tradition of governing their own congregations and hiring and firing their own ministers — in other words, they brought to these shores a political culture of self-government. Moreover, because they were accustomed to reading the Bible and feeling free to judge its meaning for themselves — to believing, that is, that they had a direct relation to God and his word independent of any worldly institution or authority — they also brought a deeply rooted culture of individualism and personal responsibility. For them, the individual and his conscience were of preeminent importance.

William Livingston, a signer of the Constitution and longtime governor of New Jersey, had earlier, in the 1750s, run a journal that was key in turning the American mind toward revolution. In one issue he reminded his readers how “the countless Sufferings of your pious Predecessors for Liberty of Conscience, and the Right of private Judgment,” drove them “to this country, then a dreary Waste and barren Desert.” His own Presbyterian grandfather was among those pious predecessors. John Jay, our first chief justice, wrote a gripping account of how his paternal grandfather, a French Protestant, returned home to La Rochelle from a trading voyage abroad to find his parents, siblings, and neighbors gone. Their houses were occupied by soldiers, their church destroyed, their savings confiscated. While he had been away, he learned, France had revoked its toleration of the Huguenots. He was lucky to be able to sneak aboard a ship and sail away to freedom in the New World. Jay's maternal grandparents similarly had to flee anti-Protestant persecution, one from Paris and one from Bohemia. Jay's son and biographer tells us this proudly; it was a living family legend.

As Edmund Burke warned his fellow members of Parliament four weeks before Lexington and Concord, when it was already too late, “All protestantism . . . is a sort of dissent,” but American Protestantism “is a refinement on the principle of resistance; it is the dissidence of dissent, and the protestantism of the protestant religion.” Whatever might be the differences among the American Protestant sects, he said, they all agree “in the communion of the spirit of liberty.”

Long before Emma Lazarus wrote about the huddled masses yearning to breathe free, George Washington noted that for “the poor, the needy, & the oppressed of the Earth,” America was already what he called “the second Land of promise.” This Promised Land offered, said James Madison, “an Asylum to the persecuted and oppressed of every Nation and Religion.”

In fact, for Madison — who studied at Princeton under the radical Scottish-born Presbyterian John Witherspoon — it was red-hot outrage over a remnant of religious oppression in the New World that drove him, until then a sickly and directionless youth, into a political career. Virginia, where Anglicanism was still the official, established religion until the Revolution, had jailed a group of Baptist preachers for their unorthodox religious writings. If you aren't free to think your own thoughts and believe your own beliefs, fumed Madison, you aren't free, period, since freedom is seamless. And as a practical matter, there can be no progress without intellectual freedom. So when the 25-year-old revolutionary took part in drafting Virginia's Declaration of Rights, he rejected its original provision for religious toleration. It's not government's business to “tolerate” somebody's beliefs, he maintained. You are free to think whatever your reason convinces you is true, government or no government; and that's what the Declaration of Rights ended up saying. Madison would never use Thomas Jefferson's high-flown language, but he certainly agreed with his close friend's sentiment that “I have sworn upon the altar of god, eternal hostility to every form of tyranny over the mind of man.” These men knew what it meant to individuals and to a whole culture to have to parrot an official orthodoxy, or else remain silent — and they knew what physical tyrannies such unfreedom of belief could unleash.

It is a deeply tragic paradox that the Founders also valued liberty so highly because they lived amidst slavery. Even the slave-owners among them knew how obscenely unjust the institution was. “The whole commerce between master and slave,” wrote Jefferson, “is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other.” I needn't detail the crushing toil, the sadistic punishments, the sexual exploitation, the break-up of families, the enforced ignorance, and the regulation of every aspect of life comprehended in Jefferson's decorous statement of the inhumanity of which human nature is capable.

In 1759, more than a century before the Civil War, Richard Henry Lee of Stratford Hall, later president of the Continental Congress (and incidentally a cousin of the Stratford-born Robert E. Lee), made his maiden speech in the Virginia House of Burgesses. His message to his fellow slave-owners: End slavery. How can anyone who calls himself a Christian, he demanded, think that “our fellow-creatures . . . are no longer to be considered as created in the image of God as well as ourselves, and equally entitled to liberty and freedom by the great law of nature?” On a more down-to-earth level, he pointed out that slaves who see their masters living in luxury and freedom, “whilst they and their posterity are subjected for ever to the most abject and mortifying slavery,” must become “natural enemies to society, and their increase consequently dangerous.”

Jefferson, who had written in the Declaration that all men are created equal, wrote in 1786, in words that prefigure Abraham Lincoln's Second Inaugural, “When the measure of their tears shall be full, when their groans shall have involved heaven itself in darkness, doubtless a god of justice will awaken to their distress, and by diffusing light and liberality among their oppressors, or at length by his exterminating thunder, manifest his attention to the things of this world, and that they are not to be left to the guidance of a blind fatality.”

So when the young and pigheaded King George III began meddling in American affairs after decades of an official British policy of “salutary neglect” toward the New World colonies, the Founders had a ready explanation for his intentions. The king, Washington concluded in 1774, aimed “to make us as tame, & abject Slaves, as the Blacks we Rule over with such arbitrary Sway” — a sentiment whose full implications it took General Washington a lifetime to grasp: He finally freed his slaves on his deathbed. Even earlier, Richard Henry Lee's brother Arthur, who became one of the Revolution's foreign agents, declared, “I cannot Conceive of the Necessity of becoming a Slave, while there remains a Ditch in which one may die free.” For such men, liberty wasn't just a word. They could feel it and taste it. Choosing your beliefs, your thoughts, your job, your officials, your laws, your taxes — being equal citizens before a law that was the same for all — they never took these freedoms for granted.

The Founders believed that the purpose of government was to protect life, liberty, and property from what they called the depravity of human nature — from man's innate capacity to do the kinds of violence that slave-owners, to take just one example, did every day. But government, they recognized, is a double-edged sword. You arm officials with the power to protect you; but those officials have the same fallen human nature as everyone else, so who is to say that they won't use that power to oppress you, as European governments had oppressed the colonists' forebears? From Pharaoh to Nero to the Stuart kings, history teems with examples of such despotic governments. Even the democratic republic the Founders created had to be run by imperfect men, and thus even it could turn into what Richard Henry Lee called an elective despotism. So the second great Founding idea is this: The mere fact that you elect representatives to govern you is no sure-fire guarantee of liberty. Or, as Madison saw it in Federalist No. 10: Taxation with representation can be tyranny.

This danger worried the Founders constantly, and they struggled to protect their new government from it. Their first experiment was to make that government too weak to oppress them. But it was also, they found, too weak to do its chief job of protecting them against violence. The Revolutionary War proved longer and harder than it need have been, since the central government lacked authority to tax in order to pay soldiers or buy arms. But when the Founders set out to write a new Constitution to give the federal government powers sufficient to its purpose, they did so with their hearts in their mouths. They strictly limited those powers to what they deemed absolutely essential, and they carefully spelled out what those powers were. They divided and subdivided power, and made each branch of government a check on the others, to guard against overreaching. They required frequent elections, gave the president a veto, and in turn made him and other officials subject to impeachment.

Madison, the Constitution's chief designer, constructed his exquisitely balanced mechanism to work by the power of ambition countering ambition, and interest countering interest. A realist about human nature, like most of the Founders, he devised a government for ordinary men as they really were, not for prodigies of virtue. Even so, he conceded, there had to be at least a smidgen of virtue somewhere. If “there is not sufficient virtue among men for self-government,” he wrote, then only “the chains of despotism can restrain them from destroying and devouring each other.”

Washington was even more explicit about this, the third of the great Founding ideas: A democratic republic requires a special kind of culture, one that nurtures self-reliance and a love of liberty. Constitutions are all very well, the Founders often observed, but they are only “parchment barriers,” easily breached if demagogues subvert the “spirit and letter” of the document. They can do this dramatically, in one revolutionary putsch, or they can inflict a death by a thousand cuts, gradually persuading citizens that the Constitution doesn't mean what it says but should be interpreted to mean something different, or even something opposite.

The ultimate safeguard against such usurpation is the vitality of America's culture of liberty. In his first State of the Union speech, Washington stressed this point, emphasizing a view universal among the Founders. The “security of a free Constitution,” he said, depends on “teaching the people themselves to know and to value their own rights; to discern and provide against invasions of them; to distinguish between oppression and the necessary exercise of lawful authority; . . . to discriminate the spirit of liberty from that of licentiousness,” and to unite “a speedy, but temperate vigilance against encroachments, with an inviolable respect for the laws.” If citizens start to take liberty for granted, if their culture — molded by journalists and writers, preachers and teachers — starts to hold other values in higher esteem, then the spirit that gives life to the Constitution will flicker out. Americans, Washington wrote on another occasion, should guard against “listlessness for the preservation of natural and unalienable rights,” for “no mound of parchm[en]t can be so formed as to stand against the sweeping torrent of boundless ambition on the one side, aided by the sapping current of corrupted morals on the other.”

The Founders well understood, as John Adams reminisced in 1818, that it was a change in the “principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections” of Americans that had sparked the Revolution. They considered that new culture of freedom that had arisen among them in the decades before Lexington and Concord, along with the new Constitution they created, to be the most precious inheritance they bequeathed to future generations of their fellow citizens. That vision offers us an instructive standard by which to gauge the present.

This piece originally appeared in National Review Online

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Founding Father’s Library

A list of the most read books in the libraries of key figures in the American Revolution and the founding of the American Republic.

• Bibliographies: Founding Father’s Library: A Bibliographical Essay
• Goodrich Seminar Room Experience
• Collections: The Founding Fathers of the U.S. Constitution
• Collections: The American Revolution and Constitution

The Most Commonly Read Books of the Founding Generation

The Founding Fathers of the American Constitution made it clear what authors and texts had influenced their own thinking on the idea of liberty. Goodrich Seminar Room list and a few more besides. Lutz's "top 40" texts (actually 37) by frequency of citation by the founding generation are listed below.

Another source of information about what books influenced the thinking of the American founding generation are the lists of recommended books they themselves drew up. Both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson drew up a list of key texts in letters they wrote and, in the case of Jefferson, he actually donated his personal library (twice) to Congress to create the beginnings of what is now the Library of Congress and also drew up a catalog for the University of Virginia library.

The "Top 40" Authors cited by the Founding Generation (with links to material in the Online Library of Liberty)

• Montesquieu
• Sir William Blackstone
• Cesare Beccaria
• John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon
• Samuel Pufendorf
• Sir Edward Coke
• Thomas Hobbes
• William Robertson
• Hugo Grotius
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau
• Lord Bolingbroke
• Francis Bacon
• Richard Price
• William Shakespeare
• Alexander Pope
• John Milton
• Abbe Guillaume Raynal
• Abbe Gabriel Mably
• Niccolo Machiavelli
• Emmerich de Vattel
• William Petyt
• John Robinson
• Algernon Sidney
• John Somers
• James Harrington
• Paul de Rapin-Thoyras

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The Texts They Read

Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu (1689-1755)

• Persian Letters (1734)
• Reflections on the Causes of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire (1734)
• The Spirit of the Laws (1748)

Sir William Blackstone (1723-1780)

• Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-69)

John Locke (1632-1704)

• An Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690)
• The Two Treatises of Civil Government (1689)
• A Letter on Toleration An Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690s)
• Some Consideraations of the Consequences of the Lowering of Interest and Raising the Value of Money (1691)
• On the Reasonableness of Christianity (1696)

David Hume (1711-1776)

• A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-1740)
• An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1751)
• Treatise: An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751)
• Political Discourses (1752)
• History of England (1754-1762)
• The Natural History of Religion (1755)
• Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779)

Plutarch (c. 46-125)

• Roman Lives

Cesare Beccaria (1738-1794)

• An Essay on Crimes and Punishments (1764)

John Trenchard (1662-1723) and Thomas Gordon (?-1750)

• Cato's Letters (1724)
• Trenchard and Walter Moyle (1672-1721), A Short History of Standing Armies iin England (1698)

Jean Louis Delolme (1740-1805)

• The Consitution of England (1771)

Samuel, Baron von Pufendorf (1632-1694)

• Elementa Jurisprudentiae universalis (1661)
• De jure naturae et gentium (1672)

Sir Edward Coke (1552-1634)

• Institutes of the Laws of England (1628-1644)

Cicero (106-43 BC)

• De Officiis
• De Oratione
• De Republica

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)

• Leviathan (1651)

William Robertson (1721-1793)

• History of Scotland (1759)
• History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V (1769)
• History of America (1777)

Hugo Grotius (1583-1645)

• On the Law of War and Peace (1625)

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778)

• Discourse on the Origin of the Inequality of Men (1754)
• The Social Contract (1762)
• Emile (1762)

Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)

• The Freeholder's Political Catechism (1733)
• A Dissertation Upon Parties (1735)
• Remarks on the history of England (1743)
• The Idea of a Patriot King (1749)
• A Letter on the Spirit of Patriotism (1749)
• Letters on the Study and Use of History (1752)

Francis Bacon (1561-1626)

• The Advancement of Learning (1605)
• Novum organum (1620)
• De argumentis scientarum (1623)
• Essays (1625)
• The New Atlantis (1627)

Richard Price (1723-1791)

• Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty (1776)
• Observations on the Importance of the American Revolution (1784)

William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

Titus Livius (Livy) (59BC - AD17)

• History of Rome

Alexander Pope (1688-1744)

• The Dunciad (1728)
• Of False Taste (1731)
• Of the Uses of Riches (1732)
• An Essay on Man (1733-34)

John Milton (1608-1674)

• The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660)

Tacitus (c. 56-120)

• History of Germany
• The Histories

Plato (c. 427-347 BC)

Abbe Guillaume Raynal (1713-1796)

• Philosophical and Political History of ... the East and West Indies (1770)

Abbe Gabriel Mably (1709-1785)

• Observations on the Romans (1740)
• Observations on the Government and Laws of the U.S. (1784)

Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527)

• Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy (1531)
• The Prince (1532)

Emerich de Vattel (1714-1767)

• The Law of Nations (1759-1760)

William Petyt (1636-1707)

• The Antient Right of the Commons of England Asserted (1680)

Francois Arouet de Voltaire (1694-1778)

• Letters on the English Nation (1733)
• Works (1751)
• General History and State of Europe (1756)

John Robinson (1575-1625)

Algernon Sidney (1622-1683)

• Discourses Concerning Government (1698)

John Somers (1651-1716)

• Vox populi, vox dei: Judgement of Kingdooms and Nations Concerning the Rights, Privileges, and Properties of the People (1709)

James Harrington (1611-1677)

• Oceana (1656)

Paul de Rapiin-Thoyras (1661-1725)

• History of England (1726-31)

Secondary Sources

Donald S. Lutz, "The Relative Importance of European Writers on Late Eighteenth Century American Political Thought," American Political Science Review 1984, no. 189, pp. 189-97.

Donald S. Lutz, "Appendix: European Works Read and Cited by the American Founding Generation," in A Preface to American Political Theor y (University Press of Kansas, 1992), pp. 159-164.

Douglas L. Wilson, Jefferson's Books (Charlottesville: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, 1996). Originally published in Thomas Jefferson: A Reference Biography , ed. Merrill D. Peterson (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1986).

Thomas Jefferson's Library: A Catalog with the Entries in his own Order , ed. James Gilreath and Douglas L. Wilson (Washington: Library of Congress, 1989).

Trevor Colbourn, The Lamp of Experience: Whig History and the Intellectual Origins of the American Revolution (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1998). Colbourn has compiled a useful Appendix of "History in the Colonial Library", pp. 245-86, including a section on the history books owned by Thomas Jefferson, pp. 267-73.

Thomas Jefferson, "Letter to Peter Carr. Paris, Aug. 10, 1787," pp. 900-906 and "Letter to Robert Skipworth with a List of Books. Monticello, Aug. 3, 1771," pp. 740-45 in Thomas Jefferson, Writings (The Library of America).

The Library of Congress online exhibition of Jefferson's Library , August 9, 2001 at https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/jefferson/jefflib.html

Rick Gardiner's The American Colonist's Library: A Treasury of Primary Documents at http://personal/pitnet.net/primarysources/ Visited: August 14, 2001.

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Leisure  • Western Philosophy

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson is the father of American Literature. In a series of strikingly original essays written in the mid-nineteenth century, he fundamentally changed the way America saw its cultural and artistic possibilities, enabling its separation from transatlantic literary traditions. ‘We have listened too long,’ he wrote, ‘to the Courtly muses of Europe.’ His ejection of cultural traditions brought about what one contemporary called America’s ‘intellectual declaration of independence’ and established generational conflict and transformation as the commanding ideas in American Literature.

Emerson himself hardly seemed destined to fit the revolutionary mould. He was born in 1803, the son of a Boston preacher, and was descended from a line of New England ministers that went back to the bedrock of seventeenth-century Puritanism. When his father died in 1811 his mother took in boarders to pay the rent. Still, she sent him to Harvard in 1817 and then to Harvard Divinity School to train for the priesthood in 1825. As a young man he was strongly influenced by his remarkable aunt, Mary Moody Emerson, who, though self-taught, had read everything from Shakespeare to the Romantics and had formed a unique religious perspective based on piety, nature and literature that would resonate powerfully in the life and work of her nephew. So when he was ordained in 1829, marrying the love of his life Ellen Tucker in the same year, Emerson was already unsatisfied with the formal nature of New England religious orthodoxy. When Ellen died of tuberculosis just two years later he resigned from the church and soon after embarked on a recuperative trip to Europe, leaving on Christmas day 1832.

Two crucial things happened to Emerson on that tour of Europe. In Paris he went to the famous Jardin des Plantes , a botanical and zoological garden. There he had an epiphany, writing in his journal that:

I feel the centipede in me — cayman, carp, eagle, & fox. I am moved by strange sympathies, I say continually ‘I will be a naturalist.’

His insight was that nature is in us, part of us; and not just its higher forms, but in all its grotesquery and wildness. 

The second thing that happened on that tour was that he met the English Romantic poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth – and found them rather ordinary, dry and conservative men. The insight that Emerson drew from this was that if great men could be so ordinary why should not ordinary men be great? As he would write a few years later: ‘Meek young men grow up in libraries believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote these books.’ Emerson had found two ideas that would guide his life’s work: that man and nature are one and that everyone can recognise that they are a uniquely significant human being.

On his return to America in 1833 Emerson became a professional lecturer, giving talks on natural history and literature in halls around New England. He remarried and had several children, presenting a stolid, bourgeois appearance to the world. His inner life, though, was full of turbulence and originality. In his 1836 essay Nature , he outlined the germ of a new philosophy. A key element of this was the importance of American originality. In its opening lines he wrote: ‘Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?’ America needed to stop looking back to its European heritage and start looking about itself. No past moment was more important than the present moment. No tradition was more important than novelty. No generation was better than the current generation. Everything that matters is here now – and that ‘here’ was America.

This was an extension of Emerson’s ideas about the significance of the individual that came under the heading of ‘self-reliance.’ Everywhere he looked he saw people living lives that were based on tradition, that were limited by religious forms and social habits. No one could be themselves, he thought, because they were all too busy being who they were supposed to be. Emerson wanted to get rid of each of these burdens – the past, religion and social forms – so that each person could find out who they truly were. As he put it: ‘history is an impertinence and an injury’; ‘our religion, we have not chosen, but society has chosen for us’ and ‘Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members.’ We must, he argued, live from within, trusting nothing but our own intuitions. For, as he concludes: ‘Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.’

This leaves open a vital question: what is your nature once you have rid yourself of history, tradition and religion? What can be said is that it is not self-indulgence, it is not hedonism, it is not narcissism – rather it is the surrender to that force which Emerson recognised back in the Jardin des Plantes : it is obedience to nature itself.

By nature Emerson seemed to mean the natural world – plants, animals, rocks and sky – but what he really meant was God. For Emerson was a Pantheist, someone who believed that God exists in every part of creation, from the smallest grain of sand to a star – but also, crucially, that the divine spark is in each of us. In following ourselves we are not being merely fickle and selfish, but rather releasing a Divine Will that history, society and organised religion have hidden from us. The individual, as he writes, ‘is a god in ruins’ ( CW1 42); but we have it within us, by casting off all custom, to rebuild ourselves. He makes this Pantheist connection explicit in his most famous lines:

Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear. […] Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.  

In the Romantic tradition, on which Emerson draws, it is the sublime – great mountains, rushing torrents, dark forests – which releases the inner vision as we find ourselves in awe of them. For Emerson it is a perfectly dull walk across an ordinary common on a dark winter’s evening that brings him ‘to the brink of fear.’ Emerson’s God is in the snow puddles too. Stood there, on the common, he disappears, becoming nothing, as the currents of God flow through him. What is left is a ‘transparent eyeball.’ Such transcendent moments are rare but they reveal an essential connection between nature, God and man – they are one. They also give, for Emerson, a proper sense of each individual’s importance as a part of God. ‘Transcendentalism’ became the name of the movement that grew up around Emerson at that time.  

Another aspect of this epiphany that was to have a profound effect on American literature was the emphasis on the value of the ordinary. What Emerson put forward in essays like ‘The American Scholar’ and ‘The Poet’ was that the American everyday was the proper subject of literature. This was because for Emerson the Transcendentalist God is everywhere and it is the poet’s job to reveal this. ‘There is no object,’ he writes, ‘so foul that intense light will not make beautiful. […] Even the corpse has its own beauty.’ This coming from a man who opened his first wife’s tomb a year after her death.

The great American writers who followed Emerson were liberated by his work to look around and write about what they saw and how they lived, transforming the everyday into a vital symbol of something higher and more elusive. Henry David Thoreau’s two years at Walden Pond became a book that showed the cosmos reflected in the depths of its waters. The poet Walt Whitman said ‘I was simmering, simmering, simmering; Emerson brought me to a boil.’ Emily Dickinson heard a fly buzz and could write of the other side of death. The novelist Herman Melville took a whaling voyage and made it an allegory of American imperialism and the defiance of nature. In the twentieth century the critic Harold Bloom looked back at Emerson’s originality and saw in it the origin of the ‘strong tradition’ of American poets from Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens to John Ashbery. Emerson’s legacy to American literature and culture – and indeed to the world – was one of ceaseless invention and forward momentum – as he put it: “I unsettle all things. No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker with no Past at my back.”

Full Article Index

• 01. On Feeling Manic
• 02. Ostracism Anxiety
• 03. The Need For A Modern Monastery
• 04. Why the World Can Seem So Frightening – and How to Make It Feel Less So
• 05. Four Ways of Coping With Anxiety
• 06. Might You Be Hypervigilant? A Sombre Questionnaire
• 07. A Question to Ask Ourselves When We're Feeling Low and Paranoid
• 08. The Importance of Not Knowing
• 09. Why We May Be Addicted to Crises
• 10. The Causes of Obsessive Thinking
• 11. What Our Bodies are Trying to Tell Us
• 12. Anxiety-as-Denial
• 13. Our Anxious Ancestry
• 14. Auditing Our Worries
• 15. Why We May Need a Convalescence
• 16. Don't Hope for the Best; Expect the Worst
• 17. The Age of Agitation
• 18. How to Sleep Better
• 19. How and Why We Catastrophise
• 20. On Being 'Triggered'
• 21. OCD — and How to Overcome It
• 22. How Mental Illness Impacts Our Bodies
• 23. Signs You Might Be Suffering from Complex PTSD
• 24. On Skin Picking
• 25. Stoicism and Tigers Who Come to Tea
• 26. The Seven Most Calming Works of Art in the World
• 27. After the Storm
• 28. Thoughts for the Storm
• 29. Emotional Maturity in a Crisis
• 30. Preparing for Disaster
• 31. How to Stop Being Scared All the Time
• 32. The Ultimate Dark Source of Security
• 33. What Everybody Really Wants
• 34. Simplicity & Anxiety
• 35. A Way Through Panic Attacks
• 36. Self-Hatred & Anxiety
• 37. The Question We Should Ask Ourselves When Anxious
• 38. On Anxiety
• 39. The True Cause of Dread and Anxiety
• 40. On Being Scared All the Time
• 41. The Importance of Having A Breakdown
• 42. On Asking for Help
• 43. The Normality of Anxiety Attacks
• 44. On Panic Attacks
• 01. Might I Be Feeling Lonely Rather Than Worried?
• 02. A Place for Despair
• 03. On Being Gaslit In Our Childhoods
• 04. How to Make It Through
• 05. When Our Battery is Running Low
• 06. The Many Moods We Pass Through
• 07. When I Am Called to Die
• 08. If You Stopped Running, What Would You Need to Feel?
• 09. Can We Live With the Truth?
• 10. Five Questions to Ask Yourself Every Evening
• 11. Why Things May Need to Get Worse Before They Can Get Better
• 12. The Limits of the Conscious Mind
• 13. Why Life is Always Difficult
• 14. What is a Transcendental Experience?
• 15. Building the Cathedral
• 16. Rewriting Our Inner Scripts
• 17. What Sleeping Babies Can Teach Us
• 18. How to Endure
• 19. Everything Is So Weird
• 20. Escaping Into History
• 21. The Inevitability of Choice
• 22. What Would Jesus Do?
• 23. Stop Worrying About Your Reputation
• 24. You Still Have Time
• 25. I Will Survive!
• 26. On Trying to Control the Future
• 27. A Few Things Still to Be Grateful For
• 28. No One Knows
• 29. There is No Happily Ever After
• 30. The Catastrophe You Fear Will Happen has Already Happened
• 31. There is Always a Plan B
• 32. The Consolations of History
• 33. The Lessons of Nature
• 34. What Others Think of You - and The Fall of Icarus
• 35. On the Sublime
• 36. Gratitude for the Small Things
• 37. Why ‘Earthrise’ Matters
• 38. On Flowers
• 39. The Valuable Idea Behind the Concept of the Day of Judgement
• 40. The Wisdom of Animals
• 41. The Lottery of Life
• 42. Untranslatable Words
• 43. The Wisdom of Rocks: Gongshi
• 44. Wu Wei – Doing Nothing 無爲
• 45. The Faulty Walnut
• 46. Perspectives on Insomnia
• 47. On the Wisdom of Space
• 48. Memento Mori
• 49. On the Wisdom of Cows
• 50. On Calming Places
• 51. Why Small Pleasures Are a Big Deal
• 52. The Consolations of a Bath
• 53. The Importance of Staring out the Window
• 54. Clouds, Trees, Streams
• 55. On Sunshine
• 01. The Ecstatic Joy We Deny Ourselves
• 02. Why Illusions Are Necessary to Achieve Anything
• 03. Preparing for a Decent Night of Sleep
• 04. Returning Anger to Where It Belongs
• 05. Controlling Insomnia – and Life – Through Pessimism
• 06. How to Be Cool the Yoruba Way
• 07. Why We Should Refuse to Get into Arguments
• 08. The Perils of Making Predictions
• 09. Making Peace with Life's Mystery
• 10. The Promise of an Unblemished Life
• 11. Daring to Be Simple
• 12. Haikus and Appreciation
• 13. The Call of Calm
• 14. What Would Paradise Look Like?
• 15. How to Process Your Emotions
• 16. The Wisdom of Dusk
• 17. The Appeal of Austere Places
• 18. How to Go to Bed Earlier
• 19. Why We All Need Quiet Days
• 20. The Benefits of Provincial Life
• 21. How to Live in a Hut
• 22. For Those Who (Privately) Aspire to Become More Reclusive
• 23. The Hard Work of Being 'Lazy'
• 24. Expectations - and the 80/20 Rule
• 25. Taking It One Day at a Time
• 26. Spirituality for People who Hate Spirituality
• 27. How to Spill A Drink Down One’s Front - and Survive
• 28. How To Stop Worrying Whether or Not They Like You
• 29. On Soothing
• 30. What Is Wrong with Modern Times - and How to Regain Wisdom
• 31. The Disaster of Anthropocentrism - and the Promise of the Transcendent
• 32. On Needing to Find Something to Worry About — Why We Always Worry for No Reason
• 33. How We Are Easily, Too Easily, 'Triggered'
• 34. Hypervigilance
• 35. If The Worst Came to the Worst...
• 36. The Wonders of an Ordinary Life
• 37. In Praise of the Quiet Life
• 38. The Pursuit of Calm
• 39. Insomnia and Philosophy
• 01. African Proverbs to Live By
• 02. Why We Are Haunted by Ghosts of the Past
• 03. How to Be Cool the Yoruba Way
• 01. What Goes With What
• 02. Eight Rules to Create Nicer Cities
• 03. The Secret Toll of Our Ugly World
• 04. Henri Rousseau
• 05. Albrecht Dürer and his Pillows
• 06. On the Consolations of Home | Georg Friedrich Kersting
• 07. Francisco Goya's Masterpiece
• 08. How Industry Restores Our Faith in Humanity
• 09. Rembrandt as a Guide to Kindness
• 10. Buildings That Give Hope - and Buildings That Condemn Us
• 11. Katsushika Hokusai
• 12. Agnes Martin
• 13. The Importance of Architecture
• 14. The Secret of Beauty: Order and Complexity
• 15. Le Corbusier
• 16. Two World Views: Romantic and Classical
• 17. Oscar Niemeyer
• 18. Against Obscurity
• 19. Why Do Scandinavians Have Such Impeccable Taste in Interior Design?
• 20. Art for Art's Sake
• 21. Why We Need to Create a Home
• 22. Why You Should Never Say: ‘Beauty Lies in the Eye of the Beholder’
• 23. Andrea Palladio
• 24. Why Design Matters
• 25. On Good and Bad Taste
• 26. On How to Make an Attractive City
• 27. Art as Therapy
• 28. On Ugliness and the Housing Crisis
• 29. Johannes Vermeer
• 30. Caspar David Friedrich
• 31. Henri Matisse
• 32. Edward Hopper
• 33. Louis Kahn
• 34. Coco Chanel
• 35. Jane Jacobs
• 36. Cy Twombly
• 37. Andy Warhol
• 38. Dieter Rams
• 39. A Therapeutic Approach to Art
• 40. Christo and Jeanne-Claude 
• 41. On the Importance of Drawing
• 42. On Art as a Reminder
• 43. On the Price of Art Works
• 44. Secular Chapels
• 45. Relativism and Urban Planning
• 46. What Art Museums Should Be For
• 47. On Fakes and Originals
• 48. The Museum Gift Shop
• 01. What We Might Learn From The Dandies of The Congo
• 02. The Beauty of Komorebi
• 03. The Past Was Not in Black and White
• 04. The Drawer of Odd Things
• 05. Why Middle-Aged Men Think So Often About the Roman Empire
• 06. The Consolations of Catastrophe
• 07. What is the Point of History?
• 08. What Rothko's Art Teaches Us About Suffering
• 09. The Value of Reading Things We Disagree with
• 10. Easter for Atheists
• 11. The Life House
• 12. Why Philosophy Should Become More Like Pop Music
• 13. Why Stoicism Continues to Matter
• 14. The School of Life: What We Believe
• 15. Cultural Mining
• 16. Lego – the Movies
• 17. Philosophy – the Movies
• 18. History of Ideas – the Movies
• 19. Sociology – the Movies
• 20. Political Theory – the Movies
• 21. Psychotherapy – the Movies
• 22. Greek Philosophy – the Movies
• 23. Eastern Philosophy – the Movies
• 24. Art – the Movies
• 25. On Aphorisms
• 26. What Comes After Religion?
• 27. The Serious Business of Clothes
• 28. What Is the Point of the Humanities?
• 29. Why Music Works
• 30. The Importance of Music
• 31. The Importance of Books
• 32. What Is Comedy For?
• 33. What Is Philosophy For?
• 34. What Is Art For?
• 35. What Is History For?
• 36. What Is Psychotherapy For?
• 37. What Is Literature For?
• 38. The Joys of Sport
• 01. Following in the Buddha's Footsteps
• 02. Six Persimmons
• 03. The Four Hindu Stages of Life
• 04. Rice or Wheat? The Difference Between Eastern and Western Cultures
• 05. Eastern vs Western Views of Happiness
• 06. Four Great Ideas from Hinduism
• 07. Zen Buddhism and Fireflies
• 08. Six Ideas from Eastern Philosophy
• 09. Wu Wei – Doing Nothing 無爲
• 10. Kintsugi 金継ぎ
• 12. Lao Tzu
• 13. Confucius
• 14. Sen no Rikyū
• 15. Matsuo Basho
• 16. Mono No Aware
• 17. Guan Yin
• 18. Gongshi
• 20. Kintsugi
• 22. Why so Many Love the Philosophy of the East - and so Few That of the West
• 01. It Isn't About the Length of a Life...
• 02. On Luxury and Sadness
• 03. On Not Being Able To Cook Very Well
• 04. Food as Therapy
• 05. What We Really Like to Eat When No One is Looking
• 06. What Meal Might Suit My Mood? Questionnaire
• 01. Charles Dickens's Secret
• 02. Giuseppe di Lampedusa — The Leopard
• 03. Sei Shōnagon — The Pillow Book
• 04. Kakuzo Okakura — The Book of Tea
• 05. Victor Hugo and the Art of Contempt
• 06. Edward Gibbon — The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
• 07. How to Read Fewer Books
• 08. The Downfall of Oscar Wilde
• 09. What Voltaire Meant by 'One Must Cultivate One's Own Garden'
• 10. James Baldwin
• 11. Camus and The Plague
• 12. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• 13. Charles Dickens  
• 14. Gustave Flaubert
• 15. Fyodor Dostoevsky
• 16. Marcel Proust
• 17. Books as Therapy
• 18. Jane Austen
• 19. Leo Tolstoy
• 20. Virginia Woolf
• 21. James Joyce
• 01. Machiavelli's Advice for Nice Guys
• 02. Niccolò Machiavelli
• 03. Thomas Hobbes
• 04. Jean-Jacques Rousseau
• 05. Adam Smith
• 06. Karl Marx
• 07. John Ruskin
• 08. Henry David Thoreau
• 09. Thoreau and Civil Disobedience
• 10. Matthew Arnold
• 11. William Morris
• 12. Friedrich Hayek
• 13. John Rawls
• 01. What Should A Good Therapist Do For Us?
• 02. The Usefulness Of Speaking Your Feelings To An Empty Chair
• 03. What's the Bit of Therapy That Heals You?
• 04. Why We Need Therapy When We Give Up on Religion
• 05. How Psychotherapy Might Truly Help Us
• 06. Why You Should Take a Sentence Completion Test
• 07. Carl Jung's Word Association Test
• 08. Freud's Porcupine
• 09. How Mental Illness Impacts Our Bodies
• 10. How the Modern World Makes Us Mentally Ill
• 11. Twenty Key Concepts from Psychotherapy
• 12. Why Psychotherapy Works
• 13. The True and the False Self
• 14. What Happens in Psychotherapy? Four Case Studies
• 15. The Problem of Psychological Asymmetry
• 16. Freud on Sublimation
• 17. Sigmund Freud
• 18. Anna Freud
• 19. Melanie Klein
• 20. Donald Winnicott
• 21. John Bowlby 
• 22. A Short Dictionary of Psychoanalysis
• 23. Jacques Lacan
• 01. You Are Living in the Greatest Museum in the World
• 02. When Something is Beautiful...
• 03. Albrecht Dürer and his Pillows
• 04. How Giraffes Can Teach Us to Wonder
• 05. Sun Worship
• 06. The Importance of Dancing Like an Idiot
• 07. Walking in the Woods
• 08. Getting More Serious about Pleasure
• 09. On Going to the Zoo
• 10. The Fish Shop
• 11. On Small Islands
• 12. On Stars
• 13. On Grandmothers
• 14. Up at Dawn
• 15. On Crimes in the Newspapers
• 16. Driving on the Motorway at Night
• 17. On Sunday Mornings
• 18. A Favourite Old Jumper
• 19. Holding Hands with a Small Child
• 20. Feeling at Home in the Sea
• 21. The Book That Understands You
• 22. Old Photos of One’s Parents
• 23. Whispering in Bed in the Dark
• 24. On Feeling That Someone Else is So Wrong
• 25. The First Day of Feeling Well Again
• 01. St. Benedict 
• 02. Alexis de Tocqueville 
• 03. Auguste Comte
• 04. Max Weber
• 05. Emile Durkheim
• 06. Margaret Mead
• 07. Theodor Adorno
• 08. Rachel Carson
• 01. Three Essays on Flight
• 02. The Wisdom of Islamic Gardens
• 03. A World Without Air Travel
• 04. Walking in the Woods
• 05. Why We Argue in Paradise
• 06. The Advantages of Staying at Home
• 07. The Wisdom of Nature
• 08. The Holidays When You're Feeling Mentally Unwell
• 09. The Shortest Journey: On Going for a Walk around the Block
• 10. How to Spend a Few Days in Paris
• 11. Why Germans Can Say Things No One Else Can
• 12. Travel as Therapy - an Introduction
• 13. Lunch, 30,000 Feet – for Comfort
• 14. The Western Desert, Australia – for Humility
• 15. Glenpark Road, Birmingham - for Boredom
• 16. Comuna 13, San Javier, Medellin, Colombia - for Dissatisfaction
• 17. Pumping Station, Isla Mayor, Seville - for Snobbery
• 18. Eastown Theatre, Detroit - for Perspective
• 19. Capri Hotel, Changi Airport, Singapore - for Thinking
• 20. Cafe de Zaak, Utrecht - for Sex Education
• 21. Corner shop, Kanagawaken, Yokohama - for Shyness
• 22. Monument Valley, USA - for Calm
• 23. Heathrow Airport, London – for Awe
• 24. Pefkos Beach, Rhodes - for Anxiety
• 01. On Flying Too Close to the Sun - And Not Flying Close Enough
• 02. Kierkegaard on Love
• 03. Aristotle
• 04. Baruch Spinoza
• 05. Arthur Schopenhauer
• 06. Blaise Pascal
• 07. Six Ideas from Western Philosophy
• 08. Introduction to The Curriculum
• 10. The Stoics
• 11. Epicurus
• 12. Augustine
• 13. Boethius and The Consolation of Philosophy
• 14. Thomas Aquinas
• 15. Michel de Montaigne
• 16. La Rochefoucauld
• 17. Voltaire
• 18. David Hume
• 19. Immanuel Kant
• 21. Hegel Knew There Would Be Days Like These
• 22. Ralph Waldo Emerson
• 23. Nietzsche
• 24. Nietzsche, Regret and Amor Fati
• 25. Nietzsche and Envy
• 26. Martin Heidegger
• 27. Ludwig Wittgenstein
• 28. Jean-Paul Sartre
• 29. Albert Camus
• 30. Michel Foucault
• 31. Jacques Derrida
• 32. E. M. Cioran
• 01. What to Say in Response to an Affair
• 02. How To Handle the Desire for Affairs?
• 03. What Does It Take To Be Good at Affairs?
• 04. What Ideally Happens When An Affair is Discovered?
• 05. When Does An Affair Begin?  
• 06. A Brief History of Affairs
• 07. How to Reduce the Risk of Affairs
• 08. The Role of Sex in Affairs
• 09. How To Spot A Couple That Might Be Headed For An Affair
• 10. How Can An Affair Help A Marriage?
• 11. The Pleasures of Affairs
• 12. The Pains of Affairs
• 13. The Meaning of Infidelity
• 14. Loyalty and Adultery
• 15. Why People Have Affairs: Distance and Closeness
• 01. Who Actually Ends a Relationship?
• 02. The Pains of Heartbreak
• 03. Those Who Cannot Feel Love Until It Is Over
• 04. The Heroism of Leaving a Relationship
• 05. Exquisite Agony in Love
• 06. Why It Should Not Have to Last Forever...
• 07. When Does a Divorce Begin?
• 08. Rethinking Divorce
• 09. Three Questions to Help You Decide Whether to Stay in or Leave a Relationship
• 10. Stop Repeating the Same Mistakes
• 11. There's Nothing Wrong with Being on Your Own
• 12. The Wrong Idea of a Baddie
• 13. Finding Closure After a Breakup
• 14. Should Sex Ever Be a Reason to Break Up?
• 15. When a Relationship Fails, Who Rejected Whom?
• 16. The Fear of Not Being Able to Cope Practically Without a Partner
• 17. The Fear of Ending a Relationship
• 18. What About the Children When Divorce is on the Cards?
• 19. What If I Just Repeat the Same Mistakes Next Time?
• 20. Are My Expectations Too High?
• 21. Overcoming Nostalgia for a Past Relationship
• 22. The Feeling of Being Back in Love with the Person You're About to Leave
• 23. The Capacity to Give up on People
• 24. For Those Stuck in a Relationship
• 25. 10 Ideas for People Afraid to Exit a Relationship
• 26. People Who Want to Own Us - but Not Nourish Us
• 27. The Hardest Person in the World to Break up With
• 28. A Non-Tragic View of Breaking Up
• 29. A Guide to Breaking Up
• 30. How to Reject Someone Kindly
• 31. When Someone We Love Has Died
• 32. Why Did They Leave Us?
• 33. How to Break Up
• 34. How We Can Have Our Hearts Broken Even Though No One Has Left Us
• 35. The Psychology of Our Exes
• 36. 'Unfair Dismissal' in Love
• 37. How Not to Be Tortured By a Love Rival
• 38. Coping with Betrayal
• 39. Can Exes be Friends?
• 40. How to Get Over Someone
• 41. Why True Love Doesn’t Have to Last Forever
• 42. How to Get Over a Rejection
• 43. How to End a Relationship
• 44. Stay or Leave?
• 45. How to Get Divorced
• 46. On Forgetting Lovers
• 47. How Not to Break Up with Someone
• 01. A Dark Way to Predict What Might Happen in Your Relationship
• 02. Why Some Of Us Are So Bad At Spotting Red Flags
• 03. The Appeal of Rescuing Other People
• 04. Daring to Love
• 05. People Pleasers in Relationships
• 06. People Not to Fall in Love With
• 07. Picking Partners Who Won't Understand Us
• 08. How Do Emotionally Healthy People Behave In Relationships? 
• 09. The Avoidant Partner With The Power To Drive You Mad
• 10. On Picking a Socially Unsuitable Partner
• 11. How to Sustain Love: A Tool
• 12. Questions To Ask About Someone We Are Thinking Of Committing To
• 13. Our Two Great Fears in Love
• 14. The Pains of Preoccupied Attachment
• 15. Are You Afraid of Intimacy?
• 16. Why You Will Never Quite Get it Right in Love
• 17. Understanding Attachment Theory
• 18. Why We 'Split' Our Partners
• 19. Why We Love People Who Don't Love Us Back
• 20. Should I Be With Them?
• 21. The Seven Rules of Successful Relationships
• 22. Why We Must Explain Our Own Needs
• 23. How Good Are You at Communication in Love? Questionnaire
• 24. Why Some Couples Last — and Some Don't
• 25. The Difference Between Fragile and Strong Couples
• 26. What Relationships Should Really Be About
• 27. The Real Reason Why Couples Break Up
• 28. 6 Reasons We Choose Badly in Love
• 29. Can People Change?
• 30. Konrad Lorenz & Why You Choose the Partners You Choose
• 31. The Stranger You Live With
• 32. The Attachment Style Questionnaire
• 33. Why Anxious and Avoidant Partners Find It Hard to Leave One Another
• 34. The Challenges of Anxious-Avoidant Relationships — Can Couples With Different Attachment Styles Work?
• 35. On Rescue Fantasies
• 36. How to Cope with an Avoidant Partner
• 37. What Is Your Attachment Style?
• 38. 'I Will Never Find the Right Partner'
• 39. Too Close or Too Distant: How We Stand in Relationships
• 40. How Are You Difficult to Live with?
• 41. Why We're Compelled to Love Difficult People
• 42. Why Your Lover is Very Damaged - and Annoying
• 43. Why Tiny Things about Our Partners Drive Us Mad
• 44. How to Love Ugly People
• 45. Why Polyamory Probably Won’t Work for You
• 46. Why We Go Cold on Our Partners
• 47. An Instruction Manual to Oneself
• 48. The Terrors of Being Loved
• 49. The Partner as Child Theory
• 50. On the Fear of Intimacy
• 51. Meet the Parents
• 52. On Finding the 'Right' Person
• 53. If You Loved Me, You Wouldn't Want to Change Me
• 54. The Problems of Closeness
• 01. What We Can Always Do to Improve Our Relationships
• 02. How to Break Logjams in a Relationship
• 03. The Miseries of Push-Pull Relationships 
• 04. A Way To Break Logjams In A Couple
• 05. When Your Partner Loves You – but Does Their Best to Drive You Away...
• 06. A Rule to Help Your Relationship
• 07. Secret Grudges We May Have Against the Other Gender
• 08. The Demand for Perfection in Love
• 09. On Being Upset Without Knowing It
• 10. Who is Afraid of Intimacy?
• 11. Why Good Manners Matter in Relationships
• 12. A Role for Lies
• 13. The Secret Lives of Other Couples
• 14. On Saying 'I Hate You' to Someone You Love
• 15. When Love Isn't Easy
• 16. Two Questions to Repair a Relationship
• 17. Three Steps to Resolving Conflicts in Relationships
• 18. Stop Avoiding Conflict
• 19. An Alternative to Passive Aggression
• 20. Why We Must Soften What We Say to Our Partners
• 21. How to Be Less Defensive in Love
• 22. On Gaslighting
• 23. Why We Play Games in Love
• 24. On 'Rupture' and 'Repair'
• 25. Why it's OK to Want a Partner to Change
• 26. On Arguing More Nakedly
• 27. Do You Still Love Me?
• 28. Why We Need to Feel Heard
• 29. Five Questions to Ask of Bad Behaviour
• 30. The Art of Complaining
• 31. The Challenges of Communication
• 32. How To Have Fewer Bitter Arguments in Love
• 33. The Arguments We Have From Guilt
• 34. Attention-Seeking Arguments
• 35. When Our Partners Are Being Excessively Logical
• 36. When We Tell Our Partners That We Are Normal and They Are Strange
• 37. When Your Partner Tries to Stop You Growing
• 38. When Your Partner Starts Crying Hysterically During an Argument
• 39. Why We Sometimes Set Out to Shatter Our Lover's Good Mood
• 40. Why People Get Defensive in Relationships
• 41. A History of Arguments
• 42. The Fights When There Is No Sex
• 43. What We Might Learn in Couples Therapy
• 44. On the Tendency to Love and Hate Excessively
• 45. An Alternative to Being Controlling
• 46. Why We Should Not Silently Suffer From A Lack of Touch in Love
• 47. Why Anger Has a Place in Love
• 48. The Importance of Relationship Counselling
• 49. How to Argue in Relationships
• 50. Why We (Sometimes) Hope the People We Love Might Die
• 51. Be the Change You Want To See
• 52. I Wish I Was Still Single
• 53. Love and Sulking
• 54. On Being Unintentionally Hurt
• 55. The Secret Problems of Other Couples
• 56. On the Dangers of Being Too Defensive
• 57. On How to Defuse an Argument
• 58. How to Save Love with Pessimism
• 59. How 'Transference' Makes You Hard to Live With
• 60. Why You Resent Your Partner
• 61. Why It Is Always Your Partner's Fault
• 62. If It Wasn't for You...
• 63. Why You Are So Annoyed By What You Once Admired
• 64. Why You’re (Probably) Not a Great Communicator
• 01. The Need for Honesty on Early Dates
• 02. Why Dating Apps Won't Help You Find Love
• 03. Being Honest on a Date
• 04. Why Haven't They Called - and the Rorschach Test
• 05. Dating When You've Had a Bad Childhood
• 06. Varieties of Madness Commonly Met with On Dates
• 07. How to Seduce with Confidence
• 08. A Brief History of Dating
• 09. How to Prove Attractive to Someone on a Date
• 10. Existentialism and Dating
• 11. What to Talk About on a Date
• 12. What to Eat and Drink on a Date
• 13. How to Seduce Someone on a Date
• 14. How Not to Think on a Date
• 01. Getting Better at Picking Lovers
• 02. How We May Be Creating The Lovers We Fear
• 03. What If the People We Could Love Are Here Already; We Just Can't See Them?
• 04. The Lengths We Go to Avoid Love
• 05. Our Secret Wish Never to Find Love
• 06. Why We All End up Marrying Our Parents
• 07. True Love Begins With Self-Love
• 08. The Importance of Being Single
• 09. Why We Keep Choosing Bad Partners
• 10. Celebrity Crushes
• 11. Romantic Masochism
• 12. What Do You Love Me For?
• 13. If Love Never Came
• 14. On the Madness and Charm of Crushes
• 15. Why Only the Happy Single Find True Love
• 16. Should We Play It Cool When We Like Someone?
• 17. In Praise of Unrequited Love
• 18. Two Reasons Why You Might Still Be Single
• 19. How We Choose a Partner
• 20. Why Flirting Matters
• 21. Why, Once You Understand Love, You Could Love Anyone
• 22. Mate Selection
• 23. Reasons to Remain Single
• 24. How to Enjoy a New Relationship
• 01. Alternatives to Romantic Monogamy
• 02. Twenty Ideas on Marriage
• 03. For Moments of Marital Crisis
• 04. What to Do on Your Wedding Night
• 05. Who Should You Invite to Your Wedding?
• 06. Pragmatic Reasons for Getting Married
• 07. The Standard Marriage and Its Seven Alternatives
• 08. Utopian Marriage
• 09. When Is One Ready to Get Married?
• 10. On the Continuing Relevance of Marriage
• 11. On Marrying the Wrong Person — 9 Reasons We Will Regret Getting Married
• 01. What Are We Lying To Our Lovers About? 
• 02. Those Who Have to Wait for a War to Say ‘I Love You’
• 03. What Celebrity Stalkers Can Teach Us About Love
• 04. The Achievement of Missing Someone
• 05. How Love Can Teach Us Who We Are
• 06. Beyond the Need for Melodrama in Love
• 07. True Love is Boring
• 08. How to Make Love Last Forever
• 09. How to Be Vulnerable
• 10. Why You Can't Read Your Partner's Mind
• 11. What Teddy Bears Teach Us About Love
• 12. What Role Do You Play in Your Relationship?
• 13. Why We Should Be 'Babyish' in Love
• 14. The Maturity of Regression
• 15. The Benefits of Insecurity in Love
• 16. Taking the Pressure off Love
• 17. A Pledge for Lovers
• 18. A Projection Exercise for Couples
• 19. A New Ritual: The Morning and Evening Kiss
• 20. Can Our Phones Solve Our Love Lives?
• 21. If We're All Bad at Love, Shouldn't We Change Our Definition of Normality?
• 22. Other People's Relationships
• 23. How to Cope with an Avoidant Partner
• 24. The Pleasure of Reading Together in Bed
• 25. 22 Questions to Reignite Love
• 26. The Wisdom of Romantic Compromise
• 27. How to Complain
• 28. How We Need to Keep Growing Up
• 29. Teaching and Love
• 30. Love and Self-Love
• 31. Humour in Love
• 32. The Advantages of Long-Distance Love
• 33. In Praise of Hugs
• 34. Why Affectionate Teasing is Kind and Necessary
• 35. The Couple Courtroom Game
• 36. Getting over a Row
• 37. Keeping Secrets in Relationships
• 38. A Lover's Guide to Sulking
• 39. Artificial Conversations
• 40. On the Role of Stories in Love
• 41. On the Hardest Job in the World
• 42. On the Beloved's Wrist
• 01. How Even Very ‘Nice’ Parents Can Mess Up Their Children
• 02. The Parents We Would Love To Have Had: An Exercise
• 03. Fatherless Boys
• 04. How to Raise a Successful Person
• 05. The Problems of Miniature Adults
• 06. Mothers and Daughters
• 07. The Importance of Swords and Guns for Children
• 08. When Parents Won't Let Their Children Grow Up
• 09. The Fragile Parent
• 10. Parenting and People-Pleasing
• 11. Three Kinds of Parental Love
• 12. A Portrait of Tenderness
• 13. What Makes a Good Parent? A Checklist
• 14. On the Curiosity of Children
• 15. How to Lend a Child Confidence
• 16. The Importance of Play
• 17. Why Children Need an Emotional Education
• 18. Coping with One's Parents
• 19. Are Children for Me?
• 20. How Parents Might Let Their Children Know of Their Issues
• 21. How We Crave to Be Soothed
• 22. Escaping the Shadow of a Parent
• 23. On Being Angry with a Parent
• 24. What You Might Want to Tell Your Child About Homework
• 25. On Apologising to Your Child
• 26. Teaching Children about Relationships
• 27. How Should a Parent Love their Child?
• 28. When people pleasers become parents - and need to say 'no'
• 29. On the Sweetness of Children
• 30. Listening to Children
• 31. Whether or not to have Children
• 32. The Children of Snobs
• 33. Why Good Parents Have Naughty Children
• 34. The Joys and Sorrows of Parenting
• 35. The Significance of Parenthood
• 36. Why Family Matters
• 37. Parenting and Working
• 38. On Children's Art
• 39. What Babies Can Teach Us
• 40. Why – When It Comes to Children – Love May Not Be Enough
• 01. What We Really, Really Want in Love
• 02. Falling in Love with a Stranger
• 03. Why We Need 'Ubuntu'
• 04. The Buddhist View of Love
• 05. What True Love Looks Like
• 06. How the Wrong Images of Love Can Ruin Our Lives
• 07. Kierkegaard on Love
• 08. Why Do I Feel So Lonely?
• 09. Pygmalion and your Love life
• 10. How to Love
• 11. What is Love?
• 12. On Romanticism
• 13. A Short History of Love
• 14. The Definition of Love
• 15. Why We Need the Ancient Greek Vocabulary of Love
• 16. The Cure for Love
• 17. On Seduction
• 18. Why We Need to Speak of Love in Public
• 19. How Romanticism Ruined Love
• 20. Our Most Romantic Moments
• 21. Loving and Being Loved
• 22. Romantic Realism
• 23. On Being Romantic or Classical
• 01. The Difficulties of Impotence
• 02. What is Sexual Perversion?
• 03. Our Unconscious Fear of Successful Sex
• 04. The Logic of Our Fantasies
• 05. Rethinking Gender
• 06. The Ongoing Complexities of Our Intimate Lives
• 07. On Post-Coital Melancholy
• 08. Desire and Intimacy
• 09. What Makes a Person Attractive?
• 10. How to Talk About Your Sexual Fantasy
• 11. The Problem of Sexual Shame
• 12. Who Initiates Sex: and Why It Matters So Much
• 13. On Still Being a Virgin
• 14. Love and Sex
• 15. Impotence and Respect
• 16. Sexual Non-Liberation
• 17. The Excitement of Kissing
• 18. The Appeal of Outdoor Sex
• 19. The Sexual Fantasies of Others
• 20. On Art and Masturbation
• 21. The Psychology of Cross-Dressing
• 22. The Fear of Being Bad in Bed
• 23. The Sex-Starved Relationship
• 24. How to Start Having Sex Again
• 25. Sexual Liberation
• 26. The Poignancy of Old Pornography
• 27. On Porn Addiction
• 28. A Brief Philosophy of Oral Sex
• 29. Why We Go Off Sex
• 30. On Being a Sleazebag
• 31. A Brief Theory of Sexual Excitement
• 01. Work Outs For Our Minds
• 02. Interviewing Our Bodies
• 03. The Top Dog - Under Dog Exercise
• 04. A Guide For The Recovering Avoidant
• 05. Where Are Humanity’s Problems Really Located?
• 06. On Feeling Obliged 
• 07. Why We Struggle With Self-Discipline
• 08. Why We Should Practice Automatic Writing
• 09. Why We Behave As We Do
• 10. Mechanisms of Defence
• 11. On Always Finding Fault with Others
• 12. The Hidden Logic of Illogical Behaviour
• 13. How to Weaken the Hold of Addiction
• 14. Charles Darwin and The Descent of Man
• 15. Why We Are All Addicts
• 16. Straightforward vs. Complicated People
• 17. Reasons to Give Up on Perfection
• 18. The Need for a Cry
• 19. On Confinement
• 20. The Importance of Singing Badly
• 21. You Don't Need Permission
• 22. On Feeling Stuck
• 23. Am I Paranoid?
• 24. Learning to Be More Selfish
• 25. Learning How to Be Angry
• 26. Why We're All Liars
• 27. Are You a Masochist?
• 28. How Badly Adapted We Are to Life on Earth
• 29. How We Prefer to Act Rather Than Think
• 30. How to Live More Wisely Around Our Phones
• 31. On Dreaming
• 32. The Need to be Alone
• 33. On the Remarkable Need to Speak
• 34. Thinking Too Much; and Thinking Too Little
• 35. On Nagging
• 36. The Prevention of Suicide
• 37. On Getting an Early Night
• 38. Why We Eat Too Much
• 39. On Taking Drugs
• 40. On Perfectionism
• 41. On Procrastination
• 01. Why We Overreact
• 02. Giving Up on People Pleasing
• 03. The Benefits of Forgetfulness
• 04. How to Take Criticism
• 05. A More Spontaneous Life
• 06. On Self-Assertion
• 07. The Benefit of Analogies
• 08. Why We Need Moments of Mad Thinking
• 09. The Task of Turning Vague Thoughts into More Precise Ones
• 10. How to Catch Your Own Thoughts
• 11. Why Our Best Thoughts Come To Us in the Shower
• 13. Confidence
• 14. Why We Should Try to Become Better Narcissists
• 15. Why We Require Poor Memories To Survive
• 16. The Importance of Confession
• 17. How Emotionally Healthy Are You?
• 18. What Is An Emotionally Healthy Childhood?
• 19. Unprocessed Emotion
• 20. How to Be a Genius
• 21. On Resilience
• 22. How to Decide
• 23. Why It Should Be Glamorous to Change Your Mind
• 24. How to Make More of Our Memories
• 25. What’s Wrong with Needy People
• 26. Emotional Education: An Introduction
• 27. Philosophical Meditation
• 28. Honesty
• 29. Self-Love
• 30. Emotional Scepticism
• 31. Politeness
• 32. Charity
• 34. Love-as-Generosity
• 35. Comforting
• 36. Emotional Translation
• 38. On Pessimism
• 39. The Problem with Cynicism
• 40. On Keeping Going
• 41. Closeness
• 42. On Higher Consciousness
• 43. On Exercising the Mind
• 44. Authentic Work
• 45. The Sorrows of Work
• 46. Cultural Consolation
• 47. Appreciation
• 48. Cheerful Despair
• 01. Naturally You Don't Trust Anyone!
• 02. What Is It Like to Be Mentally Unwell?
• 03. How 'Mad' People Make a Lot of Sense
• 04. Why We Keep Repeating Patterns of Unhappiness
• 05. Your Self-Esteem is a Record of Your History
• 06. Why Some People Love Extreme Sports
• 07. The Overlooked Pains of Very, Very Tidy People
• 08. On Feeling Guilty for No Reason
• 09. The Fear of Being Touched
• 10. Why Most of Us Feel Like Losers
• 11. One of the More Beautiful Paintings in the World...
• 12. The Origins of a Sense of Persecution
• 13. How to Overcome Psychological Barriers
• 14. The Sinner Inside All of Us
• 15. How to Be Less Defensive
• 16. Are You a Sadist or a Masochist?
• 17. You Might Be Mad
• 18. Fears Are Not Facts
• 19. Why It's Good to Be a Narcissist
• 20. Am I a Bad Person?
• 21. Why Some of Us Are So Thin-Skinned
• 22. The Five Features of Paranoia
• 23. Why So Many of Us Are Masochists
• 24. In Praise of Self-Doubt
• 25. Why We Get Locked Inside Stories — and How to Break Free
• 26. Why Grandiosity is a Symptom of Self-Hatred
• 27. The Origins of Imposter Syndrome
• 28. The Upsides of Being Ill
• 29. The Roots of Paranoia
• 30. Loneliness as a Sign of Depth
• 31. How Social Media Affects Our Self-Worth
• 32. How to Be Beautiful
• 33. Trying to Be Kinder to Ourselves
• 34. The Role of Love in Mental Health
• 35. Trauma and Fearfulness
• 36. On Despair and the Imagination
• 37. On Being Able to Defend Oneself
• 38. The Fear of Death
• 39. I Am Not My Body
• 40. The Problems of Being Very Beautiful
• 41. 6 Reasons Not to Worry What the Neighbours Think
• 42. Am I Fat? An Answer from History
• 43. The Problem of Shame
• 44. On Feeling Ugly
• 45. The Particular Beauty of Unhappy-Looking People
• 46. How Not to Become a Conspiracy Theorist
• 47. The Terror of a ‘No’
• 48. On Being Hated
• 49. The Origins of Everyday Nastiness
• 50. The Weakness of Strength Theory
• 51. On Self-Sabotage
• 52. FOMO: Fear Of Missing Out
• 53. On a Sense of Sinfulness
• 01. We All Need Our North Pole
• 02. We Need to Change the Movie We Are In
• 03. Maybe You Are, in Your Own Way, a Little Bit Marvellous
• 04. Why We Deny Ourselves the Chance of Happiness
• 05. How to Live More Consciously
• 06. Our Secret Longing to Be Good
• 07. Why Everyone Needs to Feel 'Lost' for a While
• 08. On the Consolations of Home | Georg Friedrich Kersting
• 09. On Feeling Rather Than Thinking
• 10. How to Be Interesting
• 11. Am I Too Clever?
• 12. A More Self-Accepting Life
• 13. 'Let Him Who Is Without Sin Cast the First Stone'
• 14. The Roots of Loneliness
• 15. Small Acts of Liberation
• 16. Overcoming the Need to Be Exceptional
• 17. The Fear of Happiness
• 18. The Truth May Already Be Inside Us
• 19. What Is the Meaning of Life?
• 20. The Desire to Write
• 21. Are Intelligent People More Lonely?
• 22. A Better Word than Happiness: Eudaimonia
• 23. The Meaning of Life
• 24. Our Secret Fantasies
• 25. Why We’re Fated to Be Lonely (But That’s OK)
• 26. Good Enough is Good Enough
• 27. An Updated Ten Commandments
• 28. A Self-Compassion Exercise
• 29. How to Become a Better Person
• 30. On Resolutions
• 31. On Final Things
• 01. How to 'Grow'
• 02. The Life-Saving Nature of Poor Memories
• 03. The Stages of Development - And What If We Miss Out on One…
• 04. Who Might I Have Been If…
• 05. Yes, Maybe They Are Just Envious…
• 06. We Are All Lonely - Now Can We Be Friends?
• 07. How to Make It Through
• 08. 12 Signs That You Are Mature in the Eyes of Psychotherapy
• 09. The Breast and the Mouth
• 10. A Test to Measure How Nice You Are
• 11. What Hypochondriacs Aren't Able to Tell You
• 12. The Origins of Sanity
• 13. The Always Unfinished Business of Self-Knowledge
• 14. Learning to Laugh at Ourselves
• 15. A Simple Question to Set You Free
• 16. Locating the Trouble
• 17. Who Knows More, the Young or the Old?
• 18. Beyond Sanctimony
• 19. The Ingredients of Emotional Maturity
• 20. When Illness is Preferable to Health
• 21. What Should My Life Have Been Like?
• 22. Why We Need to Go Back to Emotional School
• 23. The Point of Writing Letters We Never Send
• 24. Self-Forgiveness
• 25. Why We Must Have Done Bad to Be Good
• 26. Finding the Courage to Be Ourselves
• 27. What Regret Can Teach Us
• 28. The Importance of Adolescence
• 29. How to Love Difficult People
• 30. On Falling Mentally Ill
• 31. Splitting Humanity into Saints and Sinners
• 32. Becoming Free
• 33. Learning to Listen to the Adult Inside Us
• 34. The Ultimate Test of Emotional Maturity
• 35. Can People Change?
• 36. When Home is Not Home...
• 37. Learning to Lay Down Boundaries
• 38. You Could Finally Leave School!
• 39. When Do You Know You Are Emotionally Mature? 26 Signs of Emotional Maturity
• 40. How to Lengthen Your Life
• 41. We Only Learn If We Repeat
• 42. The Drive to Keep Growing Emotionally
• 43. On Bittersweet Memories
• 44. Small Triumphs of the Mentally Unwell
• 45. The Importance of Atonement
• 46. How To Be a Mummy's Boy
• 47. On Consolation
• 48. The Inner Idiot
• 49. The Dangers of the Good Child
• 50. Why None of Us are Really 'Sinners'
• 51. How We Need to Keep Growing Up
• 52. Are Humans Still Evolving?
• 53. On Losers – and Tragic Heroes
• 54. On the Serious Role of Stuffed Animals
• 55. Why Self-Help Books Matter
• 01. Living Long Term With Mental Illness
• 02. Suffering From A Snobbery That Isn’t Ours
• 03. How to Recover the Plot
• 04. Why We Have Trouble Getting Back To Sleep
• 05. When, and Why, Do We Pick up Our Phones?
• 06. What is the Unconscious - and What Might Be Inside Yours?
• 07. Complete the Story – and Discover What's Really On Your mind
• 08. Complete the Sentence – and Find Out What's Really on Your Mind
• 09. The One Question You Need to Understand Who You Are
• 10. Six Fundamental Truths of Self-Awareness
• 11. Why Knowing Ourselves is Impossible – and Necessary
• 12. Making Friends with Your Unconscious
• 13. Do You Believe in Mind-Reading?
• 14. Questioning Our Conscience
• 15. A Bedtime Meditation
• 16. How to Figure Out What You Really, Really Think
• 17. Why You Should Keep a Journal
• 18. In Praise of Introspection
• 19. What Brain Scans Reveal About Our Minds
• 20. What is Mental Health?
• 21. The One Question You Need to Ask to Know Whether You're a Good Person
• 22. Eight Rules of The School of Life
• 23. No One Cares
• 24. The High Price We Pay for Our Fear of Being Alone
• 25. 5 Signs of Emotional Immaturity
• 26. On Knowing Who One Is
• 27. Why Self-Analysis Works
• 28. Knowing Things Intellectually vs. Knowing Them Emotionally
• 29. The Novel We Really Need To Read Next
• 30. Is Free Will or Determinism Correct?
• 31. Emotional Identity
• 32. Know Yourself — Socrates and How to Develop Self-Knowledge
• 33. Self-Knowledge Quiz
• 34. On Being Very Normal
• 01. How History Can Explain Our Unhappiness
• 02. How Lonely Are You? A Test
• 03. The Wisdom of Tears
• 04. You Don't Always Need to Be Funny
• 05. On Suicide
• 06. You Have Permission to Be Miserable
• 07. The Pessimist's Guide to Mental Illness
• 08. Why Do Bad Things Always Happen to Me?
• 09. Why We Enjoy the Suffering of Others
• 10. The Tragedy of Birth
• 11. What Rothko's Art Teaches Us About Suffering
• 12. Our Tragic Condition
• 13. The Melancholy Charm of Lonely Travelling Places
• 14. Nostalgia for Religion
• 15. Parties and Melancholy
• 16. Why Very Beautiful Scenes Can Make Us So Melancholy
• 17. On Old Photos of Oneself
• 18. Are Intelligent People More Melancholic?
• 19. Strangers and Melancholy
• 20. On Post-Coital Melancholy
• 21. Sex and Melancholy
• 22. Astronomy and Melancholy
• 23. Nostalgia for the Womb
• 24. Melancholy and the Feeling of Being Superfluous
• 25. Pills & Melancholy
• 26. Melancholy: the best kind of Despair
• 27. On Melancholy
• 01. The Impulse to Sink Our Own Mood – and Return to Sadness and Worry
• 02. We Are Made of Moods
• 03. Why Sweet Things Make Us Cry
• 04. Overcoming Manic Moods
• 05. Learning to Feel What We Really Feel
• 06. Exercise When We're Feeling Mentally Unwell
• 07. Why You May Be Experiencing a Mental Midwinter
• 08. Living Long-Term with Mental Illness
• 09. The Role of Sleep in Mental Health
• 10. The Role of Pills in Mental Health
• 11. Mental Illness and Acceptance
• 12. Mental Illness and 'Reasons to Live'
• 13. Taming a Pitiless Inner Critic
• 14. Reasons to Give Up on Human Beings
• 15. The Window of Tolerance
• 16. On Realising One Might Be an Introvert
• 17. Our Right to be Miserable
• 18. How to Manage One's Moods
• 19. On Living in a More Light-Hearted Way
• 20. On Disliking Oneself
• 21. Of Course We Mess Up!
• 22. Learning to Listen to One's Own Boredom
• 23. On Depression
• 24. In Praise of the Melancholy Child
• 25. Why We May Be Angry Rather Than Sad
• 26. On Not Being in the Moment
• 27. 'Pure' OCD - and Intrusive Thoughts
• 28. Twenty Moods
• 29. How the Right Words Help Us to Feel the Right Things
• 30. The Secret Optimism of Angry People
• 31. On Feeling Depressed
• 32. The Difficulty of Being in the Present
• 33. On Being Out of Touch with One's Feelings
• 34. Our Secret Thoughts
• 35. The Psychology of Colour
• 36. On Self-Pity
• 37. On Irritability
• 38. On the Things that Make Adults Cry
• 39. On Anger
• 40. Detachment
• 01. When It's Extremely Hard to Choose
• 02. On Those Ruined by Success
• 03. The Demand for Perfection in Love
• 04. The Secret Lives of Other Couples
• 05. How the Wrong Images of Love Can Ruin Our Lives
• 06. Self-Forgiveness
• 07. How Perfectionism Makes Us Ill
• 08. Reasons to Give Up on Perfection
• 09. Are My Expectations Too High?
• 10. Of Course We Mess Up!
• 11. Expectations - and the 80/20 Rule
• 12. Good Enough is Good Enough
• 13. The Perfectionist Trap
• 14. A Self-Compassion Exercise
• 15. On Perfectionism
• 01. How Good Are You at Communication in Love? Questionnaire
• 02. How Prone Might You Be To Insomnia? Questionnaire
• 03. How Ready Might You Be for Therapy? Questionnaire
• 04. The Attachment Style Questionnaire
• 01. Why It Can Take Us So Long to Understand How Unwell We Are
• 02. Intergenerational Trauma
• 03. How the Unfinished Business of Childhood is Played Out in Relationships
• 05. Can Childhoods Really Matter So Much?
• 06. What Some Childhoods Don’t Allow You to Think
• 07. The Legacy of an Unloving Childhood
• 08. Why You Don’t Need a Very Bad Childhood to Have a Complicated Adulthood
• 09. When People Let Us Know What the World Has Done to Them
• 10. The Healing Power of Time
• 11. You Are Freer Than You Think
• 12. On Parenting Our Parents
• 13. Letting Go of Self-Protective Strategies
• 14. How to Tell If Someone Had a Difficult Childhood...
• 15. Childhood Matters, Unfortunately!
• 16. How Should We Define 'Mental Illness'?
• 17. Taking Childhood Seriously
• 18. Sympathy for Our Younger Selves
• 19. How Music Can Heal Us
• 20. What Your Body Reveals About Your Past
• 21. Why Adults Often Behave Like Children
• 22. How to Live Long-Term With Trauma
• 23. Should We Forgive Our Parents or Not?
• 24. Reparenting Your Inner Child
• 25. The Agonies of Shame
• 26. How Trauma Works
• 27. Why Abused Children End Up Hating Themselves
• 28. Why We Sometimes Feel Like Curling Up Into a Ball
• 29. How to Get Your Parents Out of Your Head
• 30. Why Parents Bully Their Children
• 31. On Projection
• 32. Self-Archaeology
• 33. It's Not Your Fault
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• 36. Why Those Who Should Love Us Can Hurt Us
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• 41. A Self-Hatred Audit
• 42. How Mental Illness Impacts Our Bodies
• 43. Two Reasons Why People End up Parenting Badly
• 44. What is Emotional Neglect?
• 45. How Unloving Parents can Generate Self-Hating Children
• 46. How Mental Illness Closes Down Our Minds
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How a Founding Father Helped Create Modern American Philanthropy

Michael meyer on the sources of benjamin franklin’s altruism.

The word project is one of the nouns Franklin used most in his memoir, appearing thirty times. Ingenious and ingenuity crop up seventeen times, usually to describe his father, uncles, and other craftsmen Franklin admired. While his contributions to electrical and political science are well-documented, Franklin’s role as a catalyst of modern American philanthropy is often overlooked. As we will see, he inspired at least one Gilded Age tycoon to create the template of contemporary giving.

But who inspired Benjamin Franklin’s charity? Despite—or because of—his lack of schooling, Franklin found his first role models on the shelf. “All the little Money that came into my Hands,” he wrote of his Boston childhood, “was ever laid out in Books.” His favorite title then was The Pilgrim’s Progress, followed by Shakespeare’s plays and Milton’s Paradise Lost.

“There was also a Book of Defoe’s,” Franklin remembered in his memoir, “called An Essay on Projects, and another of Dr. Mather’s, call’d Essays to do Good which perhaps gave me a Turn of Thinking that had an Influence on some of the principal future Events of my Life.” That modest “perhaps” understated the fact that Franklin lifted from their pages the kernels of his earliest philanthropic ideas.

A bankrupt Daniel Defoe wrote An Essay upon Projects while hiding in Bristol from a London creditor empowered to imprison him. Published in 1697, two decades before Robinson Crusoe brought him fame, Projects laid out Defoe’s ideas for social improvement. These included the education of women, the creation of unemployment benefits, a lottery to benefit charity, fire insurance, proportional taxation based on income, mortgage interest capped at 4 percent, and a public assistance scheme called the Friendly Society for Widows. As Silence Dogood, a sixteen-year-old Franklin transcribed thirteen hundred words of Defoe’s text—without crediting him in an essay proposing an “Office of Ensurance for Widows” for Boston.

Defoe had also suggested the formation of “friendly societies,” or “people entering into a mutual compact to help one another in case any disaster or distress fall upon them.” The Reverend Cotton Mather had made a similar suggestion in his Essays to Do Good and formed twenty neighborhood mutual benefit societies (one for every church) across Boston. Franklin’s father, Josiah, had joined one. Meetings began with a set of questions put to the group, asking which community problems needed solving and whether anyone had been observed behaving scandalously. The twenty-two-year-old Franklin would borrow this idea to create, in Philadelphia, his Junto, which discussed less ecumenical matters. Its bylaws also required pauses between questions long enough to drink a glass of wine.

“When I was a Boy,” a seventy-eight-year-old Franklin wrote to Cotton Mather’s son, “ Essays to do Good gave me such a Turn of Thinking as to have [an] Influence on my Conduct thro’ Life; for I have always set a greater Value on the Character of a Doer of Good, than on any other kind of Reputation; and if I have been, as you seem to think, a useful Citizen, the Publick owes the Advantage of it to that Book.”

In Philadelphia, a young Franklin had quickly learned a lesson that remains applicable to philanthropy today. At the time, giving was more commonly called charity (the word Franklin used), and donations were usually collected by a church. In 1730, as the twenty-six-year-old attempted to raise money to build the colonies’ first library, Franklin realized that people were reluctant to donate to a cause that would elevate his reputation above their own.

“I therefore put my self as much as I could out of sight,” he related in his autobiography, “and stated it as a Scheme of a Number of Friends, who had requested me to go about and propose it to such as they thought Lovers of Reading. In this way my Affair went on more smoothly, and I ever after practis’d it on such Occasions; and from my frequent Successes, can heartily recommend it. The present little Sacrifice of your Vanity will afterwards be amply repaid.”

In the current era of virtue signaling and philanthropic grandstanding, Franklin’s advice to silently do good seems quaint. It is true that, as he later admitted, the library did benefit himself, perhaps more than any other Philadelphian. Like many autodidacts, Franklin’s lack of formal schooling remained a phantom limb that he constantly scratched. “This Library,” he wrote, “afforded me the means of Improvement by constant Study, for which I set apart an Hour or two each Day; and thus repair’d in some Degree the Loss of the Learned Education my Father once intended for me.”

When raising funds to build the Philadelphia Academy, Franklin told potential donors that the college was “not as an Act of mine, but some publick-spirited Gentlemen; avoiding as much as I could, according to my usual Rule, the presenting of myself as the Author of any Scheme for Benefit.”

From the itinerant preacher George Whitefield, who compelled his audience of commoners to contribute the coins in their pockets to fund the construction of an orphanage, Franklin learned the cumulative power of small donations. The Penns and colonial gentry were not given to large contributions; the term noblesse oblige would not enter the lexicon until 1837. Yet, Franklin realized, much could be accomplished when the public pitched in pence upon shillings, and pistoles upon pounds.

As much as he downplayed his own philanthropy, Franklin came to realize that sometimes the best way to get people to donate to your cause was to publish the names of those who had already contributed. Friends would not want to appear miserly, and foes would not want to look outspent. He noted, too, a trend that remains unchanged in America today: those with the least money usually give the most readily, just as a young Franklin had done. “Perhaps,” he reflected, “thro’ fear of being thought to have but little.”

When raising money to build the Pennsylvania Hospital, the project’s progenitor, Dr. Thomas Bond, had urged Franklin to make public his own donation. “The subscriptions afterwards were more free and generous,” Franklin recalled. By convincing the state assembly to match any amount raised up to £2,000, Franklin secured “an additional motive to give, since every man’s donation would be doubled… The subscriptions accordingly soon exceeded the requisite sum.”

The colony’s assembly, Franklin gleefully recorded, “conceiv’d they might have the credit of being charitable without the expense.” But he had outfoxed them. “I do not remember any of my political maneuvers, the success of which gave me at the time more pleasure.” He had invented the matching grant.

This burst of philanthropic ingenuity arrived in the aftermath of his retirement from printing, at the age of forty-two. Just as he had not named his projects after himself, Franklin did not boast about his giving. He was not above some self-effacing moralizing, however. In a letter to his sister Jane, he reprinted a poem that portrayed Faith, Hope, and Charity (the rungs of Jacob’s ladder, which led to heaven) as the floors of a house. “Don’t delight so much to dwell in these lower Rooms,” Franklin told her, “but get as fast as you can into the Garret; for in truth the best Room in the House is Charity. For my part, I wish the House was turn’d upside down; ’tis so difficult (when one is fat) to get up Stairs; and not only so, but I imagine Hope and Faith may be more firmly built on Charity, than Charity upon Faith and Hope. ”

The plumper middle-aged Franklin told his mother that in his retirement, “I read a great deal, ride a little, do a little Business for my self, more for others.” This 1750 letter includes prescient updates on William, then nineteen, who had “acquir’d a Habit of Idleness, but begins of late to apply himself, and I hope will become an industrious Man.” The seven-year-old Sally was his opposite, an avid reader and dancer who “grows a fine girl. Perhaps I flatter my self too much; but I have hopes that she will prove an ingenious sensible notable and worthy woman.”

The forty-four-year-old Franklin concluded, “So the Years roll round, and the last will come; when I would rather have it said, He lived usefully, than, He died rich. ” The new steward of Franklin’s parting gift to his birthplace held the opposing view.

___________________________________

Excerpted from Benjamin Franklin’s Last Bet: The Favorite Founder’s Divisive Death, Enduring Afterlife, and Blueprint for American Prosperity by Michael Meyer. Copyright © 2022. Available from Mariner Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

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Biography of Washington Irving, Father of the American Short Story

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Washington Irving (April 3, 1783–November 28, 1859) was a writer, essayist, historian, biographer, and diplomat most famous for the short stories " Rip Van Winkle " and " The Legend of Sleepy Hollow ." These works were both a part of "The Sketch Book," the collection of short stories that won him international recognition. Washington Irving has been called the father of the American short story because of his early and unique contributions to the form.

Fast Facts: Washington Irving

• Known For : Father of the American short story, biographer, historian, diplomat
• Also Known As : Dietrich Knickerbocker, Jonathan Oldstyle, and Geoffrey Crayon
• Born : April 3, 1783 in New York City
• Parents : William Irving and Sarah Sanders
• Died : November 28, 1859 in Tarrytown, New York
• Education : Elementary school, law school
• Published Works :  A History of New York, The Sketch Book (including the stories Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow ), Bracebridge Hall, The Alhambra, The Life of George Washington
• Fiancée : Matilda Hoffmann
• Notable Quote : "There is a certain relief in change, even though it be from bad to worse; as I have found in travelling in a stage-coach, that it is often a comfort to shift one's position and be bruised in a new place."

Early Life and Education

Washington Irving was born on April 3, 1783, in New York City. His father William was a Scottish-American merchant, and his mother Sarah Sanders was the daughter of an English clergyman. At the time of his birth, the American Revolution was just ending.

His parents were patriotic. His mother said upon the birth of her 11th child, "[General] Washington's work is ended and the child shall be named after him." According to Irving biographer Mary Weatherspoon Bowden, "Irving maintained close ties with his family his entire life."

Washington Irving read a great deal as a boy, including " Robinson Crusoe ," " Sinbad the Sailor ," and "The World Displayed." His formal education consisted of elementary school until he was 16, where he performed without distinction.

Early Writing Career

Irving began writing when he was 19 as a journalist using the pseudonym Jonathan Oldstyle. As a reporter for his brother Peter’s newspaper The Morning Chronicle , he covered Aaron Burr’s treason trial.

Irving traveled widely in Europe from 1804 to 1806 on a "grand tour," paid for by his family. After returning, using the pseudonym Dietrich Knickerbocker, Irving published the 1809 comic history of Dutch life in New York, "A History of New York." Some literary scholars consider this work of burlesque fiction to be his greatest book. He then studied law and he passed the bar in 1807.

Washington Irving was engaged to marry Matilda Hoffmann, the daughter of a prominent local family. She died of consumption on April 26, 1809, at the age of 17. Irving never became engaged or married anyone after the tragedy.

This loss indeed scarred his life. In response to an inquiry about why he had never married, Irving wrote in a letter, saying: "For years I could not talk on the subject of this hopeless regret; I could not even mention her name, but her image was continually before me, and I dreamt of her incessantly."

Europe and Literary Acclaim

Irving returned to Europe in 1815 and lived there for 17 years. In 1820, he published "The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent," a collection of stories including his best-known works, "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." These stories are thought to be the first examples of the genre of the short story, and they are both gothic and humorous.

"The Sketch-Book" was a milestone in American literary history because it was the first piece of American writing to garner European recognition. James Fenimore Cooper was the only other contemporary American writer to receive international acclaim. Later in his life, Irving would encourage the careers of great American authors Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allen Poe, and Herman Melville.

In 1832 while living in Spain, Irving published "Alhambra," which described the history and stories of Moorish Spain. After a few years back in the United States, Irving returned to Spain, serving as the U.S. minister to Spain from 1842–1845 under President John Tyler.

Other Writing

Irving returned to the United States in 1846 and moved back to his home of Sunnyside in Tarrytown, New York. In his later years, he wrote less fiction. His works include essays, poetry, travel writing, and biography. Over his lifetime, he published biographies of poet Oliver Goldsmith, the prophet Muhammad, and Christopher Columbus.

Irving's contributions to the American idiom include coining the word “Gotham” as a nickname for New York City. Irving was also the first to use the phrase “the almighty dollar.” 

Later Years and Death

With his popularity high, Irving kept up with work and correspondence into his 70s. He completed his five-volume biography of his namesake George Washington only eight months before his death.

Washington Irving died of a heart attack in Tarrytown, New York on November 28, 1859. He seemed to foretell his death, as he said before going to bed: "Well, I must arrange my pillows for another weary night! If this could only end!" Irving was, fittingly, buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery.

American literary scholar Fred Lewis Pattee summarized Irving's contributions as follows:

"He made short fiction popular; stripped the prose tale of its didactic elements and made it a literary form solely for entertainment; added richness of atmosphere and unity of tone; added definite locality and actual American scenery and people; brought a peculiar nicety of execution and patient workmanship; added humor and lightness of touch; was original; created characters who are always definite individuals; and endowed the short story with a style that is finished and beautiful."

In 1940, Irving was the first author to be featured on the “Famous Americans” series stamps. 

• “ Concerning Washington Irving .”  The Washington Irving Inn , 9 May 2019.
• Gallagher, Edward J. " Background: Irving the 'Historian .'"
• “ Washington Irving .”  Short Stories and Classic Literature .
• Weatherspoon Bowden, Mary. Washington Irving. Macmillan Publishing Company, Incorporated, 1981.
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• The Cambridge History of the American Essay

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From the country's beginning, essayists in the United States have used their prose to articulate the many ways their individuality has been shaped by the politics, social life, and culture of this place. The Cambridge History of the American Essay offers the fullest account to date of this diverse and complex history. From Puritan writings to essays by Indigenous authors, from Transcendentalist and Pragmatist texts to Harlem Renaissance essays, from New Criticism to New Journalism: The story of the American essay is told here, beginning in the early eighteenth century and ending with the vibrant, heterogeneous scene of contemporary essayistic writing. The essay in the US has taken many forms: nature writing, travel writing, the genteel tradition, literary criticism, hybrid genres such as the essay film and the photo essay. Across genres and identities, this volume offers a stirring account of American essayism into the twenty-first century.

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The Cambridge History of the American Essay pp i-ii

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The Cambridge History of the American Essay - Title page pp iii-iii

Copyright page pp iv-iv, contents pp v-viii, acknowledgments pp ix-x, notes on contributors pp xi-xviii, introduction pp 1-12.

• By Christy Wampole

Part I - The Emergence of the American Essay (1710–1865) pp 13-146

1 - essays to do good: puritanism and the birth of the american essay pp 15-31.

• By Jan Stievermann

2 - Prattlers, Meddlers, Bachelors, Busy-Bodies: The Periodical Essay in the Eighteenth Century pp 32-45

• By Richard Squibbs

3 - The Federalist and the Founders pp 46-60

• By Matthew Garrett

4 - American Nature Writing: 1700–1900 pp 61-80

• By Noah Rawlings

5 - The Essay and Transcendentalism pp 81-95

• By Laura Dassow Walls

6 - Old World Shadows in the New: Europe and the Nineteenth-Century American Essay pp 96-113

• By Philip Coleman

7 - Poet-Essayists and Magazine Culture in the Nineteenth Century pp 114-128

• By John Michael

8 - Antebellum Women Essayists pp 129-146

• By Charlene Avallone

Part II - Voicing the American Experiment (1865–1945) pp 147-334

9 - writing freedom before and after emancipation pp 149-165.

• By Kinohi Nishikawa

10 - Social Justice and the American Essay pp 166-181

11 - “zones of contention” in the genteel essay pp 182-196.

• By Jenny Spinner

12 - The American Comic Essay pp 197-217

• By David E. E. Sloane

13 - Nineteenth-Century American Travel Essays: Aesthetics, Modernity, and National Identity pp 218-234

• By Brigitte Bailey

14 - American Pragmatism: An Essayistic Conception of Truth pp 235-249

• By Jonathan Levin

15 - The Essay in the Harlem Renaissance pp 250-264

• By Shawn Anthony Christian

16 - The Southern Agrarians and the New Criticism pp 265-279

• By Sarah E. Gardner

17 - Subjective and Objective: Newspaper Columns pp 280-299

• By William E. Dow

18 - The Experience of Art: The Essay in Visual Culture pp 300-313

• By Tom Huhn

19 - The Essay in American Music pp 314-334

• By Kyle Gann

Part III - Postwar Essays and Essayism (1945–2000) pp 335-524

20 - the essay and the twentieth-century literary magazine pp 337-360.

• By Eleni Theodoropoulos

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Commentary | Remembering my father Frank Bramble a year…

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Commentary | Remembering my father Frank Bramble a year after his passing | GUEST COMMENTARY

Dad was born Francis Paul Bramble in Pimlico in June 1948. He was raised in a loving household and had a simple upbringing. He told me many times about his lunches of pasta and peas. He remembered it all affectionately. He remembered his parents giving him opportunity and freedom to live his own life. He felt this freedom most during his cherished four years at the Catholic boys’ high school Calvert Hall. These experiences helped forge his virtues. He was persistent, yet pragmatic. Loving and kind, but forceful.

As he grew older, my dad began to emerge on the Baltimore banking scene. He once told me that in his mid-30s he really felt that he began to be free and able to make things happen his own way. He had an extremely successful business career in banking, becoming head of two of Maryland’s largest banks, and later as a leader and benefactor for Catholic schools. He earned numerous awards throughout his career, and for his work toward the end of his life, he was made a Knight of St. Gregory by Pope Benedict XVI.

If all that makes Dad great by the world’s standard, a true liver of the American Dream, he was an even better father. From a young age, my dad taught me that family matters, to take it easy, to never give up, and to put my heart and soul into my work. I carry those lessons with me every day. My dad was a humble father, and he cared about what I thought, even when it came to strategy for our little parochial school basketball team at St. Pius. When I struggled and realized I wasn’t good enough to live out my hoop dreams at Calvert Hall, he invested in my other interests, including golf. We had so many fun matches out on the golf course, and he always put me in a position to succeed.

But he also always gave me the freedom to do things my own way. When I didn’t think I wanted to practice and play golf as much as he really wanted me to, he let me. Of course, dreamer that he was, he had visions of me becoming an academic all-American. But more than that, he had as a goal that I would become my own man. By giving me that kind of freedom, he let me grow up and be myself. All my mistakes were mistakes I emerged from stronger. He never put pressure on me to do what he wanted. When I decided to go to New York for college, he supported me. Later, when I started building my family, he never tried to make me do things his way. He always wanted me to succeed and to become strong enough to do things on my own. These simple memories offer one key truth: My dad always wanted to be his own man, and he always wanted me to be my own man.

Success of the kind that Dad experienced in the world sometimes makes people feel more important than everyone around them. And maybe Dad sometimes focused that sense of importance on me. But that was only to the extent that he liked me. My dad’s true love for me set me free. That was Dad’s great love for me. He always wanted me to be my own man and to try to be great my own way. I did not fully appreciate his love for me this way until now. He deeply wanted me to succeed in life in new and wonderful ways. And that is more than great. That is a type of perfection that we should all strive for. Indeed, that is the giving of true freedom, which I surmise is a hallmark of true love.

Greg Bramble lives in New York and is the son of Francis Paul “Frank” Bramble Sr., a prominent Maryland banking executive and Baltimore philanthropist who died in September 2023. 

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