A Benjamin Franklin Reader by Walter Isaacson
By Walter Isaacson
Chosen and annotated by way of the writer of the acclaimed Benjamin Franklin: An American existence, this number of Franklin's writings exhibits why he used to be the bestselling writer of his day and is still America's favourite Founder and wit.
As a twelve-year-old apprentice in his brother's print store, Benjamin Franklin taught himself to be a author via taking notes at the works of significant essayists akin to Addison and Steele, jumbling them up, after which attempting to recreate them in his personal phrases. through that procedure, he recalled in his Autobiography, he used to be inspired to imagine he may well turn into a "tolerable" author. in truth, he turned the simplest, most well-liked, and such a lot influential author in colonial the US. His direct and sensible prose formed America's democratic personality, and his homespun humor gave beginning to the nation's targeted model of crackerbarrel wisdom.
This ebook collects dozens of Franklin's delight-ful essays and letters, in addition to an entire model of his Autobiography. It contains an introductory essay exploring Franklin's lifestyles and effect as a author, and every piece is followed by way of a preface and notes that supply historical past, context, and research. throughout the writings and the introductory essays, the reader can hint the advance of Franklin's considering, in addition to the start of the country he and his pen helped to invent.
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Jews in the liquor trade were thus positioned both to help their fellow Jews (since they had access to more capital) and to strengthen the Jewish entrepreneurial presence in mainstream business circles. For some, success in the alcohol business gave them the means to respond to social anti-Semitism. A few years after a hotelier denied the banker Joseph Seligman a room at the exclusive Union Hotel in Saratoga, New York, and an owner of another elite resort on Coney Island announced that he would exclude Jews from his hotel as well—anti-Semitic incidents that unnerved acculturated Jews all over the country—the distiller Charles Fleischmann purchased sixty acres of land in Griffin’s Corners, several counties to the south of Saratoga.
40 The presence of a few Jewish whiskeymen in a city could have a profound effect on the occupational choices of other local Jews. Isaac Wolfe Bernheim entered the whiskey trade in this fashion, by finding opportunity with Bloom and Loeb. 41 The surest line to a job, in any field, was through family ties. Once established, an entrepreneur often hired a relative to work alongside him in the business. These employees might later open their own concerns, not only with their former boss’s blessing but with his assistance as well.
Wise took great pride in Dreyfus’s status as the “king of the Anaheim winemakers,” extolling Dreyfus’s contributions to the industry in general and to the nation’s Jewish population in particular. The successful promotion of domestically produced wines, kosher or otherwise, “is mostly due to the firm of B. , of our country,” Wise proclaimed in 1882. This industry was “one of our greatest interests,” he wrote, although he was not likely to be enthusiastic about a California kosher wine industry facilitating increased observation of Jewish law.