All Program Dates
July 14, 2026 | 6:00pm - 7:30pm
July 28, 2026 | 6:00pm - 7:30pm
August 11, 2026 | 6:00pm - 7:30pm
August 25, 2026 | 6:00pm - 7:30pm
September 8, 2026 | 6:00pm - 7:30pm
Registration
Tuition for this course is $300. Members receive exclusive discounts on our programs and courses. Not a member? Learn more.
Please check your spam folder for your email confirmation. If you have questions, please call (215) 732-1600 or email rsvp@rosenbach.org.
This program is for those 18 and older.
To promote access to onsite and virtual Rosenbach experiences, we offer scholarships for each Signature Program. To inquire, email Sunstein Senior Manager of Digital Initiatives Edward G. Pettit at epettit@rosenbach.org.
Description
In this course, we'll explore the extraordinary deeds as well as the incomparable words of Philadelphia's Benjamin Franklin. Each session will focus on an era and set of writings found in J.A. Leo Lemay's Library of America volumes of Franklin's writings. We'll explore Franklin's autobiography, a text of many parts and many secrets, and still one of the most read and widest studied works written in the 18th century. We'll explore Franklin's years in Boston and his first writings for publication. Then we'll follow the young runaway from Massachusetts Bay to the Delaware Valley, seeing how he reshaped his new home with words and actions. We'll see Franklin and his contemporaries, free and enslaved. We'll see Franklin's developing ideas about family and gender. And we will read the emerging public Franklin: founder of clubs and societies, always looking for ways to improve the world around him. That world expanded as he began to explore first books and then scientific inquiry, creating ideas, then a name for himself in the Atlantic World. All of these events of his lifetime led to a growing political role in the British empire, and eventually, leadership in the newly created United States of America.
Instructor
George Boudreau is a cultural historian of early Anglo-America, specializing in the history of Philadelphia, the work of Benjamin Franklin, and public history. He has published extensively, and his 2012 book Independence: A Guide to Historic Philadelphia (Westholme 2012, paperback 2016) explores the sites related to the nation’s founding and the diverse people who lived within them. Boudreau was the founding editor of the journal Early American Studies and has won six major grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities to educate teachers about Benjamin Franklin and the 18th century. In addition, he has been awarded research fellowships from Historic Jamestown Rediscovery and the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture at Williamsburg, as well as the International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello, the Library Company of Philadelphia, Winterthur Museum and Library, the American Philosophical Society, and the David Library of the American Revolution. In 2019, he was appointed to a six-month postdoctoral research fellowship at the George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon. From 2020-22 he was the Paideia Teaching Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, working with Ezekiel Emanuel to create a course on Penn’s founder, Benjamin Franklin. A 1998 PhD from Indiana University, he has been Executive Director of the Ebenezer Maxwell Mansion since 2023.