TY - JOUR
AU - Botein, Stephen
AB - BOOK REVIEWS | 54/ The Private Franklin; The Man and His Family by Claude-Anne Lopez and Eugenia W. Herbert. New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 3-97^.—xvii, }6j. pp. $31.97. Though the publishers of this book may have hoped that it would appeal to prurient Bicentennialists, the potential significance of its topic to historians is considerable. Biographies of Benjamin Franklin abound, but Lopez and Herbert have made a spe­ cialized effort to illuminate his complex interactions with family and a few close female friends. Because their investigation has focused on a "great man," at a time when practitioners of the "new social history" are conducting quantitative demographic re­ search to show early American family life "from the bottom up," The Private Franklin is vulnerable to the usual charges of elitism and obsolescence that fill history periodi­ cals. Lopez, a biographer with a background in literature and long experience editing Franklin's papers, seems indifferent to such criticisms—to judge by her self-styled "subjective" preface. Herbert is a historian, however, and has contributed an "objec­ tive" preface justifying the enterprise on the grounds that the unusually rich documen­ tation of Franklin's life represents the varieties of domestic experience with far more specificity 
TI - The Private Franklin: The Man and His Family, by Claude-Anne Lopez and Eugenia W. Herbert
JO - Political Science Quarterly
DO - 10.2307/2148966
DA - 1976-09-15
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/the-private-franklin-the-man-and-his-family-by-claude-anne-lopez-and-aZapd0rGAJ
SP - 547
EP - 548
VL - 91
IS - 3
DP - DeepDyve
ER -