Franklin's letters to his sister to be Kuroda lecture topic

The loving but long-distance relationship of Benjamin Franklin and his sister Jane Mecom will be the subject of the public lecture that opens Skidmore?s annual Kuroda Seminar in Early American Politics and Culture. Titled ?Poor Richard?s Poor Jane: Benjamin Franklin and His Ill-Starred Sister,? the lecture will be delivered by Jill Lepore, a Harvard historian noted for her research on language, cruelty, race, and the writing of history, and for her award-winning books on early American history. Free and open to the public, the lecture will begin at 5 p.m. Friday, April 17, in Gannett Auditorium of Palamountain Hall.

Franklin wrote hundreds of letters to his sister?far more than he wrote to anyone else? including the last he penned before being sequestered for the Constitutional Convention and the first after the convention adjourned. ?Between 1723, when Benjamin ran away from home at the age of seventeen, and 1790, when he died, he and his sister saw one another only seven times; each visit lasted only a matter of days,? said Lepore. ?Instead, they wrote letters, page upon page, filled with family news, word of politics, thoughts about books, debates about God.? In her lecture, Lepore will talk about ?those letters, that friendship, and the story they tell about American history.?

Lepore is the David Woods Kemper ?41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and chair of Harvard?s History and Literature Program. She is also a staff writer at The New Yorker and co-founder of the online magazine, Common-place. Her most recent book, New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan (2005), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in history and won the New York City Book Prize and the Anisfield-Wolf Award; it was named to the American Library Association?s annual Notable Book List. Her 1998 work, The Name of War: King Philip?s War and the Origins of American Identity, won the Bancroft Prize, the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award, and the Berkshire Prize. Other published works also include A is for American: Letters and Other Characters in the Newly United States (2002) and Encounters in the New World: A History in Documents (1999). In 2008, Lepore published a mock 18-century novel, written with Brandeis historian Jane Kamensky, titled Blindspot: A Novel by a Gentleman in Disguise and a Lady in Exile.

Lepore, who is currently writing a biography of Benjamin Franklin and Jane Mecum, received a Ph.D. in American studies from Yale University in 1995, preceded by an M.A. in American culture from the University of Michigan and a B.A. in English from Tufts University. Her research has been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Pew Foundation, among others. She lives in Cambridge, Mass., with her husband, three sons, and, she adds, ? an extraordinarily large and formidable dog of entirely mysterious extraction.?