Benjamin Franklin and the Ends of Empire (original) (raw)
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My purpose today, however, is not to provide a historiographical account of the treatment of the Revolution, but to look at a particular aspect of what might be called the American national myth. Here I am using myth in the sense of the collection of stories that America tells about itself, how it came to be, and what America means; that which, in Carla Mulford’s words, ‘takes shape outside the parameters of controlled discourse and is highly and haphazardly impressionistic’. Movies, half-remembered school lessons, theatres, postage stamps, novels, plays, songs… all these help to shape how a nation is imagined or remembered. In particular, I will look at Franklin’s place in this story, a place not always as prominent as Adams feared, and concentrate on the role of the public exhibition, concluding with some remarks on my own experience of curating an exhibition, albeit small, but also from the British standpoint. I will suggest that Franklin has been repackaged for different ages, firstly as a man of character, then as a personality, and finally as an icon and role model. Exhibitions also fulfill different functions over time, and in the time available I will look at the process of mounting an exhibition in 1906, the mid-twentieth-century and today.
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