0
Mi compra 0
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN'S LAST BET

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN'S LAST BET

THE FAVORITE FOUNDER'S DIVISIVE DEATH, ENDURING AFTERLIFE, AND BLUEPRINT FOR AMERICAN PROSPERITY

MICHAEL MEYER

Q. 230
IVA incluido
Disponible
Editorial:
HARPER
Año de edición:
2023
ISBN:
978-0-06-326856-2
Páginas:
368
Q. 230
IVA incluido
Disponible
Añadir a favoritos

The incredible story of Benjamin Franklin’s parting gift to the working-class people of Boston and Philadelphia—a deathbed wager that captures the Founder’s American Dream and his lessons for our current, conflicted age.

Benjamin Franklin was not a gambling man. But at the end of his illustrious life, the Founder allowed himself a final wager on the survival of the United States: a gift of two thousand pounds to Boston and Philadelphia, to be lent out to tradesmen over the next two centuries to jump-start their careers. Each loan would be repaid with interest over ten years. If all went according to Franklin’s inventive scheme, the accrued final payout in 1991 would be a windfall.

In Benjamin Franklin’s Last Bet, Michael Meyer traces the evolution of these twin funds as they age alongside America itself, bankrolling woodworkers and silversmiths, trade schools and space races. Over time, Franklin’s wager was misused, neglected, and contested—but never wholly extinguished. With charm and inquisitive flair, Meyer shows how Franklin’s stake in the “leather-apron” class remains in play to this day, and offers an inspiring blueprint for prosperity in our modern era of growing wealth disparity and social divisions.

Artículos relacionados

  • A HISTORY OF THE WORLD IN SIX PLAGUES
    A HISTORY OF THE WORLD IN SIX PLAGUES
    EDNA BONHOMME
    A deeply reported, insightful, and literary account of humankind’s battles with epidemic disease, and their outsized role in deepening inequality along racial, ethnic, class, and gender lines—in the vein of Medical Apartheid and Killing the Black Body.Epidemic diseases enter the world by chance, but they become catastrophic by human design. With clear-eyed research and lush pr...
    Disponible

    Q. 310

  • AN AFRICAN HISTORY OF AFRICA
    AN AFRICAN HISTORY OF AFRICA
    ZEINAB BADAWI
    Already a major international bestseller, Zeinab Badawi's sweeping and much-needed survey of African history traces the continent's extraordinary legacy from prehistory to the present from the African perspective. "Equal parts gripping and galvanizing. . . . Researched across more than 30 countries, it brings the dazzling civilizations of pre-colonial Africa vividly to life. A ...
    Disponible

    Q. 340

  • BOOK AND DAGGER
    BOOK AND DAGGER
    ELYSE GRAHAM
    The untold story of the academics who became OSS spies, invented modern spycraft, and helped turn the tide of the war At the start of WWII, the U.S. found itself in desperate need of an intelligence agency. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a precursor to today's CIA, was quickly formed--and, in an effort to fill its ranks with experts, the OSS turned to academia for recr...
    Disponible

    Q. 220

  • NO ROAD LEADING BACK
    NO ROAD LEADING BACK
    CHRIS HEATH
    This by turns shattering and hope-giving account of prisoners who dug their way to freedom from the Nazis is both a stunning escape narrative and an object lesson in the ways we remember and continually forget the particulars of the Holocaust.No Road Leading Back is the remarkable story of a dozen prisoners who escaped from the site where more than 70,000 Jews were shot in the ...
    Disponible

    Q. 250

  • THE BOOK-MAKERS
    THE BOOK-MAKERS
    ADAM SMYTH
    "A celebration of 550 years of the printed book told through the lives of eighteen extraordinary men and women who took the book in radical new directions: printers and binders, publishers and artists, paper-makers and library founders. This is a story of skill, craft, mess, cunning, triumph, improvisation, and error"-...
    Único ejemplar, sujeto
    a disponibilidad

    Q. 330

  • THE CLEOPATRAS
    THE CLEOPATRAS
    LLOYD LLEWELLYN-JONES
    The definitive story of the seven Cleopatras, the powerful goddess-queens of ancient Egypt One of history's most iconic figures, Cleopatra is rightly remembered as a clever and charismatic ruler. But few today realize that she was the last in a long line of Egyptian queens who bore that name.      In The Cleopatras, historian Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones tells the dramatic sto...
    Disponible

    Q. 350