Brooke Sylvia Palmieri is a Philadelphia native living in London, working toward a Ph.D. at the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters at the University College London. Her dissertation details the reading, writing, and publication habits of Quakers at the end of the seventeenth century and how they circulated their ideas from London across the sea to the British colonies in the West Indies and North America.
Well before the Declaration of Independence, in 1743 Benjamin Franklin (1706-90) and his friend the Quaker botanist John Bartram (1699-1777) established the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia as a declaration of scientific independence from Great Britain’s scientific domination. The APS developed from a group of local intellectuals keen on expanding human knowledge to serve ...
In Philadelphia in 1727 Benjamin Franklin (1706-90) founded the Junto as a club for “mutual improvement,” inviting acquaintances to meet weekly to discuss intellectual and moral issues. From these discussions emerged inspiration for many Philadelphia institutions including the American Philosophical Society, the Library Company of Philadelphia, a fire company, and the University of ...
Connecting the Past with the Present, Building Community, Creating a Legacy