Gleason, Philip. "Trouble in the Colonial Melting Pot." Journal of American Ethnic History 2000 20(1): 3-17. ISSN 0278-5927 Fulltext online in Ingenta and Ebsco. Considers the political consequences of the remarks in a 1751 pamphlet by Franklin on demographic growth and its implications for the colonies. He called the Pennsylvania Germans "Palatine Boors" who could never acquire the "Complexion" of the English settlers and to "Blacks and Tawneys" as weakening the social structure of the colonies. Although Franklin apparently reconsidered shortly thereafter, and the phrases were omitted from all later printings of the pamphlet, his views may have played a role in his political defeat in 1764.
Lawrence, D. H. Studies in Classic American Literature" (1923) scathing ridicule of Franklin's religious ideas by famous British author online version
Olson, Lester C. Benjamin Franklin's Vision of American Community: A Study in Rhetorical Iconology. U. of South Carolina Press, 2004. 323 pp.
Skousen, W. Cleon. The Five Thousand Year Leap (1981). Brief summary on 28 ideas implemented into the U.S. Constitution by the American Founding Fathers.
Schiff, Stacy. A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America (2005) (UK title Dr Franklin Goes to France)
Schiffer, Michael Brian. Draw the Lightning Down: Benjamin Franklin and Electrical Technology in the Age of Enlightenment. U. of California Press, 2003. 383 pp.
Michael Sletcher, 'Domesticity: The Human Side of Benjamin Franklin', Magazine of History, XXI (2006).
Waldstreicher, David. Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery, and the American Revolution. Hill and Wang, 2004. 315 pp.
Walters, Kerry S. Benjamin Franklin and His Gods. U. of Illinois Press, 1999. 213 pp. Takes position midway between D. H. Lawrence's brutal 1930 denunciation of Franklin's religion as nothing more than a bourgeois commercialism tricked out in shallow utilitarian moralisms and Owen Aldridge's sympathetic 1967 treatment of the dynamism and protean character of Franklin's "polytheistic" religion.
Benjamin Franklin Reader edited by Walter Isaacson (2003)
Houston, Alan, ed. Franklin: The Autobiography and other Writings on Politics, Economics, and Virtue. Cambridge U. Press, 2004. 371 pp.
Ketcham, Ralph, ed. The Political Thought of Benjamin Franklin. (1965, reprinted 2003). 459 pp.
Leonard Labaree, et al., eds., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, 37 vols. to date (1959-2006), definitive edition, through 1783. This massive collection of BF's writings, and letters to him, is available in large academic libraries. It is most useful for detailed research on specific topics. The complete text of all the documents are online and searchable; The Index is also online.
