Benjamin Franklin

From Ken Burns, a new four-hour documentary about Ben Franklin. Premieres April 4 on PBS.

Benjamin Franklin: A Film by Ken Burns

Ken Burns’s two-part, four-hour documentary, Benjamin Franklin, explores the revolutionary life of one of the 18th century’s most consequential and compelling personalities, whose work and words unlocked the mystery of electricity and helped create the United States. Franklin’s 84 years (1706-1790) spanned an epoch of momentous change in science, technology, literature, politics, and government — fields he himself advanced through a lifelong commitment to societal and self-improvement.

03.09.2022Tagged with:    

Newly Published Mark Twain Essay, ‘Concerning the Interview’

Essay by Mark Twain on being interviewed, published for the first time by PBS NewsHour.

No one likes to be interviewed, and yet no one likes to say no; for interviewers are courteous and gentle-mannered, even when they come to destroy. I must not be understood to mean that they ever come consciously to destroy or are aware afterward that they have destroyed; no, I think their attitude is more that of the cyclone, which comes with the gracious purpose of cooling off a sweltering village, and is not aware, afterward, that it has done that village anything but a favor.

07.08.2010Tagged with: