There’s no better primary source for illuminating the intellectual, cultural, political, and economic life of Philadelphia in the mid-18th century than an issue – any issue — of Ben Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette.  It doesn’t much matter which number you pick – there are more telling details about life in that prosperous, bustling, contentious, connected colonial world in one printing of that newspaper than it would be possible to explore, or even to “cover,” in a week’s worth of lectures or course discussions. For class a couple of weeks ago, I picked a number at random from Franklin’s paper and used Read more