The Courant was Boston's third newspaper, a weekly. James Franklin, Ben's brother, began publication in 1721, three years into Ben's apprenticeship. The paper made its reputation opposing inoculation for smallpox, but is best remembered now for Benjamin Franklin's occasional contributions under the pseudonym of "Silence Dogood". James was arrested in 1722 for lampooning the Massachusetts government and the paper was shut down in 1723 when he printed a thinly-veiled mockery of Cotton Mather. It ceased publication in 1726. The Silence Dogwood papers could be found, at the time these notes were made, at HistoryCarper.com.

Franklin's newspaper, which he assumed from Samuel Keimer and first published October 2, 1729. Besides printing the news of the day, it was Franklin's platform for essays on religious, social and political matters; as well as the writings of "Poor Richard".

Proposals relating to the Education of Youth in Pennsylvania, published anonymously in 1749. The Academy of Philadelphia opened in 1751. It established the first medical school in the colonies in 1765 and began styling itself the "University of Pennsylvania" in 1792.

Established in 1743 and still active today. It currently has about 900 members. Franklin was a leading early member; his reputation as a scientist rubbed off on the APS. The Society was inactive during the Revolution, but was revitalized by Francis Hopkinson and Samuel Vaughn afterward.

Franklin was appointed Postmaster General for a group of the colonies in 1753. He inherited a slow, tradition-impaired system which he reorganized and put on a profitable basis. Communications among the main colonial cities was still slow, but twice as fast as it had been.

The territory between Maryland and New York was granted to William Penn, the Quaker, by Charles II, as settlement of an old loan by Penn's father, in 1681. Except for a short period after the Glorious Revolution, Pennsylvania was the personal fiefdom of the Penn family until 1776. The Penns were referred to as "the Proprietors". Tension between the Proprietors and the Pennsylvania Assembly, which had important right from early charters, continued for most of the colony's history. The Crown had the right to negate any laws of the Assembly, and the family was in a position to request such favors. Until 1763, the Penns governed through deputies; thereafter, the Governor was a member of the family.

In 1763, a small group of frontier militia, most from Paxton, a village near Harrisburg, attacked and massacred a band of Conestoga Indians in Lancaster County. The raid was the culmination of frustration on the part of the frontiersmen with the perceived lack of protection offered by the Pennsylvania Assembly against Indians, the most recently against Pontiac. The Governor (a Penn by this time) issued warrants for the militiamens' arrest, but no one wanted to enforce them. The Paxton Boys, as they have come to be known, made a second attack on an Indian camp near Bethlehem. The Christianized Indians there fled to Philadelphia where the government gave them protection. This led in 1764 to a march by the Paxton Boys on Philadelphia. They were met outside the city by Franklin and others, and the situation was diffused, although Franklin lost his seat in the Assembly over it.

The Stamp Act of 1765 was seen as a minor piece of business-as-usual in Parliament and as an act of oppression in the Colonies. It established taxes on government filings and court pleadings and almost every other kind of document necessary to do business in England and America; to add insult to injury, it also taxed newspapers and playing cards. The Act's purpose was to offset the "expences of defending, protecting" the colonies, "and securing the same"; and it 'merely' extended the system of stamp taxes already in use in England. The Act was widely resisted -- often deliberately ignored -- in America and was a unifying factory bringing the colonies into concerted opposition to England.

Thomas Hutchinson was Governor of Massachusetts from 1771 and one of his Lieutenant Governors was Andrew Oliver. They engaged in an extended correspondence with Thomas Whately, private secretary to the Prime Minister Grenville. Though considered to be private correspondence, the letters caused a great stir when they were stolen after Whately's death. They ended up in Franklin's hands, and Franklin sent them to Thomas Cushing, speaker of the Massachusetts Assembly. The letters showed the men's conviction that the colonies could not continue to exist without a suppression of rights and the posting of more British soldiers.

Franklin's only son, William Franklin was illegitimate. Franklin educated him well. William took a degree at Oxford, was admitted to the bar, and at the age of 32 was appointed Royal Governor of New Jersey. At the time the Autobiography was begin, Franklin was on good terms with his son. William was a staunch Tory, though, and relations between the two after 1776 were never as cordial as this introduction seems to indicate. Benjamin Franklin willed most of is estate to William's son, William Temple Franklin, who sided with the Americans and accompanied his grandfather to France.

Small, cheap editions. They were usually 24 pages, without cover. So called because they were sold by peddlers called chapmen. Modern "chap books" are similar.

This was Defoe's first published work. It was written in 1692 or 1693 and published in 1697. It dealt with diverse proposals for public works, including schools for girls, road improvements and banking reform. It is available online.

The collection of Cotton Mather is still considered one of the most important social documents of colonial times. It exhorted Americans to heed their religious duty while at the same time working to succeed economically and making sure to support the needs of the less fortunate.

The Spectator, a daily periodical of social and literary news, comment, essays and entertainment written mainly by Joseph Addision and Richard Steele, 1711-1714. Most days the paper consisted of an essay and some sort of "correspondence", usually humorous. The whole series is online. The third volume probably covered 1713-14.

This 1678 publication, which went into over 100 editions in the 18th century, was the standard text for arithmetic in England and the colonies. It was (probably) written by Edward Cocker (1631-1676) and published posthumously.

John Locke's 1690 book An Essay Concerning Human Understanding is heavy reading for a 16 year-old. It deals with how humans think, and is probably the first "cognitive model" in English literature. Locke describes two broad categories of thought, "sensation" and "reflection". The first involves reaction to the physical world; the second to ideas the mind has already formed.

Logic or The Art of Thinking was written in the late 17th century by Antoine Arnauld (1612-1694) and Pierre Nicole of the Jansenist Port-Royal Abbey. It discoursed widely in logic, language, ways of knowing and metaphysics, with a decidedly Jansenist slant. This is way over the head of many scholars, let alone 16 year-old boys.

This was a coin minted at Utrecht and the common unit of Dutch trade until the introduction of the Guilder in 1694. In the colonies in the 1720 it was worth a bit more than 2 shillings.

Collections of foreign, rare, unusual or otherwise noteworthy articles were a fad of early 18th century England. The coffee-house of Don Saltero at Chelsea boasted 10,000 items ("Gimcracks", Richard Steele called them), including "Pontius Pilate's Wife's Chambermaid's Sister's hat".

Thevenot was the author of "The Art of Swimming" (1696), one of the first books to describe swimming techniques. It was translated into English in 1699 and remained for a long time the standard text on the subject. Thevenot is credited with first describing the form of breast-stroke with face above water and below-water arm retrieval. The breast-stroke was undoubtedly one which Franklin knew.

Anticipating a transfer of ownership from the Penn family to the Crown, Governor Keith acted after 1718 in ways that put him in conflict with the Proprietors. He made enemies of Hannah Penn and James Logan and they drove him from office in June, 1726. His replacement was a Major Patrick Gordon.

Deism is not a religion but a rejection of revealed religion. Albert Einstein's beliefs were close to Deism:

My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds. That deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God.

The Junto existed for 40 years and was eventually incorporated into the American Philosophical Society. As the core of the Philadelphia mercantile and intellectual community, it led to the first American lending libraries, volunteer fire departments, public hospitals and paved streets.

This is a sextant, a device used to measure the angle of a celestial body above the horizon. It is named for John Hadley who invented it (or perhaps stole the idea) in England independently and about the same time as did Thomas Godfrey in Philadelphia.

Franklin wrote 8 of these for Bradford, much in the spirit of the "Silence Dogood" papers he had written for the Courant. At the time these notes were made, the papers were available at HistoryCarper.com: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8.

This is the Pennsylvania Gazette referred to in note 2 above.

This is the original manuscript given by Franklin to his son, James Franklin. It was lost during the War of Independence when young Franklin, the loyalist governor of New Jersey, was forced to flee. There is no record how the papers came into Abel James's hands.

This is a paraphrase of some lines from the Tusculan Disputations. A translation might be "O Philosophy, thou guide of life! Teacher of virtue, caster out of evil! One day of good and of living by thy guidance, is to be preferred to an eternity of error".

The actual passage, from book V, is

0 vitae philosophia dux, o virtutis indagatrix expultrixque vitiorum! quid non modo nos, sed omnino vita hominum sine te esse potuisset? Tu urbis peperisti, tu dissipatos homines in societatem vitae convocasti, tu eos inter se primo domiciliis, deinde coniugiis, tum litterarum et vocum communione iunxisti, tu inventrix legum, tu magistra morum et disciplinae fuisti; ad te confugimus, a te opem petimus, tibi nos, ut antea magna ex parte, sic nunc penitus totosque tradimus. Est autem unus dies bene et ex praeceptis tuis actus peccanti inmortalitati anteponendus.

Franklin hear means "litera scripta manet", part of a familiar Latin aphorism "Vox audita perit, literscript manet" or, loosely, "The spoken word perishes, the written word endures".

The Dunkers were German Baptist sects which practiced full immersion in baptism and abstained from politics. Their spiritual descendants are found all over North America in the Brethren Churches.

This is a familiar verse from the 10th Satire of Juvenal as translated by Dryden. The point is that people, and a nation, are responsible for taking their own future in hand.

This was the first of five attempts to capture Ft. Saint-Frédéric at the southern end of Lake Champaign. The fort, one of the strongest in North America, stood on a peninsula called Point à la Couronne (Crown Point). The 1755 attempt was abandoned when the plans for it were captured by the French on the defeat of General Braddock at Ft. Duquesne. Crown Point was finally taken by the British in 1759.

In 1765 the Granville government succeeded in passing the Stamp Act which stirred great resentment in America. Grenville was dismissed soon after and his successor Rockingham got the Act annulled. The price of the annulment, though, was the Declaratory Act in which the government and legislature asserted "the British parliament had, hath, and of right ought to have all power and authority to legislate for the colonies in all cases whatsoever."