How did people communicate before the invention of email, texting, or even phone calls? Well they sent a letter of course! While the United States Postal Service has only existed since 1971 as an independent agency, there has been a mail system in the United States since before it became a country. In fact while Benjamin Franklin might be known for his scientific and political achievements, one of his first leadership roles was as postmaster. Initially he was Postmaster of Philadelphia from 1737 to 1753 before being elevated to Deputy Postmaster General of the British North American Colonies in 1753. Due to his American sympathies (especially regarding the Hutchinson Affair where Franklin shared letters from Thomas Hutchinson requesting more British troops to stop American rebels with prominent American politicians) in 1774 he was removed from the post by British government officials. Finally the Continental Congress offered him the job of Postmaster General for the new country in 1775. Overall he spent almost 40 years involved in the mail system!

Franklin made a number of systemic improvements during his time as postmaster, but some stand out more than others. His biggest changes were expanding the number of postal routes, having mail riders run at night, simplifying prices, and posting them in easy to see places. Before Franklin, many local postmasters did not display simple pricing guides, which made it hard to know how much sending your letter cost. Benjamin Franklin also mandated that every newspaper that was paid for had to be delivered. Previously, many postmasters also owned newspapers and would make more money by not allowing their competitors to use the mail service. He even started a practice of printing lists of uncollected mail in newspapers to decrease the number of undelivered letters. At the time, mail had to be picked up from the post office and did not need to be paid for beforehand. Whenever someone failed to pick up a letter, that usually meant that the post office made no money on it. Franklin’s idea increased the number of people who collected their mail and led to decreased  revenue losses.

Benjamin Franklin was a strong believer in the civic duty of everyone to assist their community. The post office gave him yet another way to help his fellow citizens; however that does not mean he did not use it to his benefit as well. By running the post office, Franklin could send free mail (called the franking privilege). He chose to send his own newspaper for free, saving his printing business money. His ability to send free mail also helped grow the scientific community within the Thirteen Colonies and strengthen their connections to Europe as Franklin would send many letters to scientists, politicians, and natural philosophers all over the world and help connect them to each other.

This is not to say that the post office was perfect in Franklin’s time. In addition to the changes and unjust privileges discussed above, the post office still had many issues to address. For one, mail delivery was based on distance and especially for far away locations the cost would be quite high. Only more developed areas even had mail routes and nowhere could you send anything bigger than a newspaper for a reasonable price. Paper was also expensive. Added to that, was the fact that the unreliability of the postal service meant people would send multiple copies of a letter to ensure that one arrived. These factors all helped to raise the price of mail and put it out of range of non-elites. Since then, many changes have taken place to fix some of these issues and to expand the offerings of the post office. The Universal Service Obligation of the USPS ensures that everyone gets equal access to the sending and receiving of mail at a reasonable rate, so whether you live in the center of New York City or the remote villages of Alaska you are guaranteed access to the Postal Service. Since 1856 mail must be prepaid, which means the sender pays ahead of time (in the form of a stamp) to send mail. Beginning in 1863 cities meeting certain criteria could have free home delivery of mail instead of picking it up at the post office and eventually this expanded to everyone in 1902. Beginning in 1913 Parcel Post allowed packages to be sent. From 1911 to 1966, some post offices even offered a bank savings system.

All of this goes to show how important the mail system is. It is a vital part of America and is so important, it is specifically mentioned in Article I, Section 8, Clause 7 of the Constitution as a power of Congress. While today cars are used instead of horses and computer records instead of paper ones, the core purpose of the postal system has not changed since its founding making it a reliable form of communication for over 250 years for everything from postcards to medicine to mail-in ballots. Also unlike email or texting, you do not need to worry about having cell reception or electricity!

This set of activities and resources gives you the chance to work with Franklin’s ledgers and see what it would have been like to be a postal employee in the 18th century. There was mail coming in and going out to and from all over and communication between postmasters was often poor. Franklin helped improve the system by devising a series of ledgers to be used to standardize postage and improve record keeping. This system made it easier for postmasters to keep track of who owed money, where mail was coming from, and where it needed to go. Additionally, if all the postmasters were using the same ledger, they could easily compare records and improve interactions between post offices.

Additional Sources Used

• https://www.gao.gov/new.items/d05261.pdf
• https://www.uspsoig.gov/sites/default/files/document-library-files/2015/rarc-wp-15-001_0.pdf
• https://about.usps.com/publications/pub100.pdf
• https://postalmuseum.si.edu/exhibition/out-of-the-mails-the-franking-privilege/the-hutchinson-letters
• https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-05-02-0048
• https://muse.jhu.edu/article/406720
• https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postal-history/on-this-day.pdf
• https://www.census.gov/history/pdf/colonialbostonpops.pdf

Help Expand These Records

Postal records like these can be hard to find because they sometimes weren't considered valuable enough to put in an archive! But to tell a fuller story about relationships between people and places in colonial British North America, we'd love to be able to connect our records from Philadelphia to similar postal records from the other twelve colonies. We could use your help! If you know of any account books, postal records, or other data sources related to the postal service prior to 1800, please let us know at [email protected].

Written by Craig Fox, Museum Guide, with the assistance of Bethany Farrell, APS Digital Franklin Fellow, and Cynthia Heider, Digital Projects Specialist

APS Fellow Julie Fisher has taken on the task of transcribing early minutes of the APS, covering between 1774 and 1787. Her transcriptions, or copy of what was documented in these written records, will present, for the first time, an unabridged edition of the Society's early meeting minutes. Not only does this edition provide a new way to examine or interrogate the Society's early history, it also allows the opportunity to align these records with current standards. This project ends up covering both history content and historical research skills through the minutes themselves and the process of transcribing, respectively. 

About the APS

“The first drudgery of settling new colonies is now pretty well over,” wrote Benjamin Franklin in 1743, ''and there are many in every province in circumstances that set them at ease, and afford leisure to cultivate the finer arts, and improve the common stock of knowledge.” The scholarly society he hinted at here became a reality that year, in the form of the American Philosophical Society (APS). The dual influences of Franklin and the Enlightenment along with the needs of American colonists led the Society to pursue equally "all philosophical Experiments that let Light into the Nature of Things, tend to increase the Power of Man over Matter, and multiply the Conveniencies or Pleasures of Life." At the time of its founding, natural philosophy, the study of nature, comprised the kinds of work now considered as science, technology, and the humanities. Early members included doctors, lawyers, clergymen, and merchants interested in science, and also many artisans and tradesmen like Franklin. Members of the APS encouraged America's economic independence by improving agriculture, manufacturing, and transportation. Notably, however, this group was largely limited to white men of wealth and privilege.

The period covered in this project, 1774-1787, comes after a period of fits and starts for the Society. It wasn’t until after the 1769 Transit of Venus that the Society really achieved international status and acclaim. The scientific endeavor of mapping the path of Venus across the sun was led by prominent Member, David Rittenhouse. With one of his telescopes, erected on a platform behind the State House (now Independence Hall), he successfully marked the celestial pathway during this rare phenomenon. Achieving this large feat and coordinating the American efforts, he successfully attracted the recognition of the scholarly world. 

This achievement led to the revival of the APS during the American Revolution. Francis Hopkinson, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and Samuel Vaughan, a recent immigrant, led the APS through this era of growth. In 1780, Pennsylvania had granted the APS a charter guaranteeing that the Society might correspond with learned individuals and institutions "of any nation or country" on its legitimate business at all times "whether in peace or war." This charter lends an international scope to the conversations of the Society, which is reflected in the minutes. The state also deeded to the Society a portion of present-day Independence Square, on which it erected Philosophical Hall in 1785-1789. The construction of this building brings in conversations and historical figures in Philadelphia that floated outside of the Society’s more scholarly crowd. 

The Enlightenment’s influence on the Society's charter and the location of Philosophical Hall adjacent to the seat of government clearly illustrate how closely the new nation linked learning and freedom, regarding each as the support and protection of the other. Until about 1840 the APS, though a private organization, fulfilled many functions of a national academy of science, national library and museum, and even patent office. Accordingly, political figures and presidents often consulted the Society. The Society also served as the prototype for a number of other learned societies, and gave birth to organizations for agriculture, chemistry, and history. For many years the Society's hall provided space for the University of Pennsylvania, Thomas Sully's studio, Charles Willson Peale's Museum, and several independent cultural and philanthropic organizations. Thus, politics and the deeper histories of Philadelphia organizations are also revealed in these minutes. 

About Transcription

An original note found within the early minutes of the Society leaps into a conversation on the importance of updating transcriptions. 

gentlemen as I have had the Care of the hall all most

tow year I shall esteem it as a faver if youl give me an order

to be pade I have had a long fit of illness and mony

will be very exseptabel to your frind

Isabella Hunt

friday night [jary] 27 1775

Skimming comes easily to researchers of all kinds, and it can be tempting to skip over difficult lettering or unfamiliar wording. Transcribing, however, provides no such refuge from the sticking points of the past. A transcriber must confront every strange turn of phrase, quirk in capitalization, or phonetic spelling. This practice of slow pacing is seemingly at odds with our reading habits today. What other benefits might this slowing down unlock for students? Notice the uneven line breaks, the misspellings, but also the content. A note like this would be among the items not included in the initial transcriptions of the minutes from the 19th-century. Historians today now see this as an essential piece of history. In order to copy a note like this, you have to read and write slowly, transcribing the text as it appears. This pace can connect the transcriber to the content more closely and in a more empathetic way than other types of reading. 

Learners should begin to interrogate historical records, both published and in manuscript form, early on -- this is a skill that should not only be left to graduate students and scholars. A researcher’s emotional responses to manuscripts, the conditions under which the researcher is transcribing, should all be considered. After all, give two people the same manuscript to transcribe and you may get two different transcriptions. What impact might choosing one over the other have on future researchers?   

Reading a heart-breaking petition in print can be sad enough; seeing such words put down in the petitioner’s own hand can pack an unexpected emotional punch. Most people from early America did not leave behind portraits, but the existence of such handwritten material can provide an all too rare glimpse into these lives, their emotions, educational level, and other personal details. 

Overall, transcription, and ultimately archives like those at and of the APS, are concerned with access to the past, in particular, who has access to which pasts and whose pasts are easily discovered. Another point of access is created while transcribing though: access to the historical figures themselves. Sometimes that figure happens to be a learned society! The APS invites learners of all ages to explore the Society’s early history and gain essential history skills by trekking through the early Minutes.

Written by Dr. Julie Fisher, APS Fellow, with the assistance of Mike Madeja, Head of Education Programs

Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) dedicated himself to research, invention, and sharing knowledge for the “benefit of mankind in general.” Franklin believed that all people could and should engage with science, and that science could transform society for the better. For these reasons, Franklin could be called America’s first citizen scientist.

Citizen, or community, science is a modern term that broadly refers to public participation in scientific research. It is science as practiced by nonprofessional scientists in collaboration with professional research teams. Free communication of results is fundamental to citizen science projects. People of all ages, abilities, and backgrounds can join in by volunteering their time to record and share local observations on topics of global importance. Citizen scientists believe that evidence-based science can be used to transform society for the better. In many ways, Benjamin Franklin expressed the values of a citizen scientist 200 years before the term came into use. 

Franklin was committed to being useful to others and freely shared his inventions and ideas. As a citizen scientist, he addressed some of society’s most pressing issues, from maritime navigation and counterfeit currency, to smallpox epidemics and destructive electrical storms. Franklin approached scientific challenges by drawing on both his theoretical knowledge and practical experiences. He turned any available space into a laboratory, including homes, workshops, and ships. Controlled experimentation and careful observation characterized Franklin’s scientific practice. Franklin also created institutions that used science to benefit and educate others. However, he participated in a system of knowledge production that often reinforced and produced inequality. 

In the 18th century, London was the scientific center of the British Empire. Colonists who desired to be taken seriously as scientists sought the recognition of London’s elite individuals and institutions. They sent letters describing their environment along with specimens—objects of scientific interest such as plants and animals—to contacts in England. Colonists imported books and scientific instruments to support their investigations. However, Europeans valued colonial North America more for its natural resources than the talents of the people who lived there.

Franklin participated in this transatlantic exchange of knowledge with great success. From Philadelphia, he built a network with connections on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. As the first American-born colonist to receive international praise for his research, Franklin ensured recognition for American science. 

His working-class origins and self-education distinguished Franklin from other elite scientists, known in the 18th century as natural philosophers. Franklin’s citizen science began in the home, where diverse people produced and exchanged useful knowledge. Household and trade sciences, often dismissed as the labor of women and tradespeople, shaped Franklin’s scientific practice even after he entered elite circles. His parents operated a soap- and candle-making business from their Boston residence. His mother-in-law, Sarah White Read, made medicines in their Philadelphia home where he and Deborah ran a press. All of these sciences turned his homes into laboratories and inspired his inventions. Franklin also used his Philadelphia, London, and Paris residences as scientific gathering places. The members of the Franklin households, including enslaved people, enabled his success. Because of his background, he recognized that science could take many forms and that all people could produce useful knowledge. 

In his youth, Franklin sought patrons to support his early scientific work. Patrons enabled scientists to conduct and publish their research by providing money, supplies, and access to scientific networks. Institutions such as the Royal Society of London and the French Royal Academy of Sciences were patrons for the advancement of knowledge. Wealthy supporters acted for personal glory, as they would be celebrated in resulting publications. This system favored educated, white men who could work within business and political networks to meet sponsors. Those who lacked connections due to their social status, including most women, men of the working classes, enslaved people, and Indigenous peoples, produced useful knowledge without support or recognition. Remembered as a singular genius, Franklin worked closely with family, friends, and enslaved members of his household. Operating within a society that privileged knowledge produced by elite white men, many of Franklin’s collaborators and sources went uncredited. 

Nevertheless, Franklin remained committed to advancing useful knowledge for “the Benefit of Mankind in General” even as his responsibilities as a public servant demanded more of his time. He believed that “there is no Rank in Natural Knowledge of equal Dignity and Importance with that of being . . . a good Neighbour or Friend, a good Subject or Citizen.” Franklin applied his privileged position to civic improvement by founding or patronizing institutions that promoted research and education, empowering the next generation of American citizen scientists. Many of these institutions still exist today, including the American Philosophical Society, the Library Company of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Hospital, and the University of Pennsylvania. Yet in his lifetime, the vast majority of people who benefited were elite, white men. When Franklin died, his work as a citizen scientist had made him the most recognizable American in the world. He had risen above his working-class origins and counted presidents and kings among his friends.

Franklin’s spirit of inquiry and legacy of civic improvement continue at the APS today. The APS remains committed to the belief that the pursuit of useful knowledge is inherently in the public interest and therefore essential to society. The APS continues to elect distinguished scientists, humanists, and leaders in civic and cultural affairs to Membership, and engages Members through annual Meetings. APS grants, fellowships, lectures, publications, and prizes encourage groundbreaking research, discovery, and public engagement.

Written by Dr. Janine Boldt, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow, with the assistance of Mike Madeja, Head of Education Programs

The American Philosophical Society’s 2020 Patrick Suppes Prize for Experimental or Mathematical Psychology was awarded to Elizabeth Loftus in recognition of her demonstrations that memories are generally altered, false memories can be implanted, and the changes in law and therapy this knowledge has caused. 

The presentation of the prize took place at the Society's virtual April 2021 Meeting.  In the video of the award ceremony above, APS president Linda Greenhouse introduces the prize and the chair of the prize selection committee, Richard Shiffrin, presents the prize to her.  In her acceptance speech Dr. Loftus shares her experience of the tremendous backlash against her findings, including death threats, as well as the satisfaction when the benefits of her findings helped prove the innocence of people imprisoned due to false memories.

Of all the world's cognitive scientists, Elizabeth Loftus has carried out research that has had the strongest and most important impact upon society. Beth received her Ph.D. from Stanford, took faculty positions at the New School in New York and the University of Washington and then moved to the University of California at Irvine, where she is now Distinguished Professor, and member of Psychological Science, Criminology Law and Society, Cognitive Science, and the School of Law. She studies human memory. Her experiments reveal how memories can be changed by things that we experience, that we rehearse after the fact, and that we are told. She is the world's authority on the field known as false memory. She has shown how suggestions after a memory has formed can alter that memory, research that has produced growing changes in the way that police interrogations are carried out, so that initially uncertain memories are not transformed into certain ones. Even more startling, she has shown how strong, vivid and compelling memories can be formed for personal experiences that never happened. For example, someone can form a vivid and certain memory of being saved from drowning when young, although no such event ever occurred. This research led to a revolution in the way certain psychiatrists have dealt with their patients; these therapists, convinced that adult problems were often the result of childhood sexual abuse, helped their patients form vivid memories of such abuse by their parents, abuse that never took place, leading to destructive family interactions, lawsuits against innocent parents, and worse.  Dr. Loftus and her research has almost single handedly stopped these practices. 

In related research Dr. Loftus demonstrated the uncertainties and ambiguities inherent in many instances of eyewitness testimony, leading to gradual change and reform in the fundamental bases of our legal system.  It is especially appropriate for Elizabeth Loftus to receive this Prize because Pat Suppes was Dr. Loftus' thesis advisor.  If Pat were living today he would be ecstatic to see Elizabeth receive this award.

The Patrick Suppes Prize honors accomplishments in three deeply significant scholarly fields, with the prize rotating each year between philosophy of science, psychology or neuroscience, and history of science. The Patrick Suppes Prize in Psychology or Neuroscience is awarded for a body of outstanding work which consists of at least three articles published within the preceding six years.  The work in psychology is to be either in mathematical or experimental psychology.

The committee members were Richard M. Shiffrin, Distinguished Professor, Luther Dana Waterman Professor, Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science, Indiana University; Susan T. Fiske, Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology, Professor of Public Affairs, Princeton University; John G. Hildebrand, Regents Professor of Neuroscience, University of Arizona; Jay McClelland, Lucie Stern Professor in the Social Sciences, Chair, Department of Psychology, Director, Center for Mind, Brain and Computation, Stanford University; and Elissa Newport, Director, Center for Brain Plasticity and Recovery, Professor of Neurology, Georgetown University.

Autumn General Meeting
Owen M. Fiss

The recipient of the 2020 Henry M. Phillips Prize in Jurisprudence is Owen M. Fiss, Sterling Professor Emeritus of Law and Professorial Lecturer in Law at Yale University.  The citation reads: “In recognition of his lifetime of contributions to American law and jurisprudence, most especially his inspirational interpretation of legal equality in terms of overcoming and resisting social stratification; his path-breaking explication of how courts might realize constitutional values in the real world of government institutions; his global writings illuminating human rights as ideals rooted in both universal principles and national self-determination; his mentorship of generations of legal scholars, both in the United States and abroad; and his abiding faith in the power of law to light our way toward a just future.”

In the course of his long, productive, and influential career, Owen Fiss has been a deep student of civil procedure, teaching the American legal system about judicial remedies addressing systemic wrongs as well as the essentials of public law adjudication. He led the way in proposing revolutionary new understandings of the theory and application of antidiscrimination law, advocating that it become an instrument for the removal of structural conditions of inequality. He has been a profound student of the war on terror, illuminating how it might be brought to heel by the values of the rule of law. He has been a force for legal reform throughout Latin America. He has proposed an influential reinterpretation of the First Amendment that emphasizes the social functions of speech in a democracy. He has authored important reinterpretations of American constitutional history. 

Established in 1888, the Henry M. Phillips Prize in Jurisprudence is awarded in recognition of outstanding lifetime contributions to the field of jurisprudence and important publications which illustrate that accomplishment.  In the 125 years since its inception, the Society has bestowed the prize only 26 times.

The selection committee was Linda Greenhouse, (chair), President of the American Philosophical Society and Knight Distinguished Journalist in Residence, Joseph Goldstein Lecturer in Law, Yale Law School; Jane C. Ginsburg, Morton L. Janklow Professor of Literary and Artistic Property Law, Columbia Law School; Martha Minow, 300th Anniversary University Professor, Distinguished Service Professor, Harvard University, Carter Professor of General Jurisprudence, Harvard Law School; Robert C. Post, Sterling Professor of Law, Yale Law School; Geoffrey R. Stone, Edward H. Levi Distinguished Service Professor, University of Chicago Law School; and David S.Tatel, United States Circuit Judge, United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

The 2020 Karl Spencer Lashley Award is awarded jointly to Winrich Freiwald and Doris Tsao “in recognition of their ground-breaking discoveries of primate cortical areas that selectively encode visual information about faces, the computational principles underlying face encoding in these areas, and the implications of these discoveries for social cognition.”

In a technical tour de force, Winrich Freiwald and Doris Tsao combined functional magnetic resonance imaging, electrophysiological recording, and anatomical tracing to define and characterize a set of cortical ‘patches’ in the primate visual cortex that selectively processes information about the faces of conspecific animals.  Along a posterior-to-anterior gradient in the cortex, the face patches shift from a general selectivity for faces to selectivity for the faces of specific individuals irrespective of the angle from which they are viewed.  In subsequent independent work, Freiwald explored the significance of this pathway for social cognition, and Tsao performed causal experiments using electrical microstimulation to show that the face patches exert a major influence on behavioral face perception.  The physiological sophistication, exquisite anatomical specificity, and computational coherence of this pathway provide some of the most elegant results in modern behavioral neuroscience.  

Winrich Freiwald is Professor of Neurosciences and Behavior at the Rockefeller University.  Doris Tsao is Professor of Biology, T&C Chen Center for Systems Neuroscience Leadership Chair, Investigator for Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and Director of the T&C Chen Center for Systems Neuroscience at Caltech.

The Karl Spencer Lashley Award was established in 1957 by a gift from Dr. Lashley, a member of the Society and a distinguished neuroscientist and neuropsychologist.  His entire scientific life was spent in the study of behavior and its neural basis.  Dr. Lashley’s famous experiments on the brain mechanisms of learning, memory and intelligence helped inaugurate the modern era of integrative neuroscience, and the Lashley Award recognizes innovative work that continues exploration in the field.

The members of the selection committee are William T. Newsome III (chair), Harman Family Provostial Professor, Vincent V. C. Woo Director of the Stanford Neurosciences Institute, Professor of Neurobiology and, by courtesy, of Psychology, Stanford University; John E. Dowling, Gordon and Llura Gund Research Professor of Neurosciences Emeritus, Harvard University; Catherine Dulac, Higgins Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology, Lee and Ezpeleta Professor of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University, and Investigator for Howard Hughes Medical Institute; Ann M. Graybiel, Institute Professor, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Investigator, McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; John G. Hildebrand, Regents Professor of Neuroscience, University of Arizona; Eric Knudsen, Sewell Professor of Neurobiology Emeritus, Stanford University School of Medicine; Edvard Moser, Professor of Neuroscience, Director, Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience, Norwegian University of Science and Technology; and Larry R. Squire, Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry, Neurosciences, and Psychology, University of California, San Diego, Research Career Scientist, Veterans Affairs Medical Center, San Diego.

The selected recipient for the 2020 Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History is Francesca Trivellato, Andrew W. Mellon Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, for her book The Promise and Peril of Credit: What a Forgotten Legend about Jews and Finance Tells Us about the Making of European Commercial Society, Princeton University Press, 2019.

This remarkable book ‘examines key episodes in the West’s millennium-long struggle to delineate the place that finance ought to occupy in the social and political order’.   It centers, as its title says, on the idea of credit, a word that suggests and requires faith but also makes people worry about whom to trust.  This ambivalence is at the center of Professor Trivellato’s work, where ‘the disruptive character of credit’ and ‘the hidden dangers of credit markets’ have to be negotiated alongside their obvious commercial merits.  How were ‘far-flung merchants’ in the 17th century to operate if they could not rely the scraps of paper known as bills of exchange?  How were they to modernize?  

The book begins with a 2002 quotation from Warren Buffett, and moves back to a close study of crucial earlier documents before returning to the present day.  It tells a story of financial facts but also of unshakable fantasies, all of them involving a supposed special relation between Jews and money.  This is the ‘legend’ that Professor Trivellato keeps invoking  -  the baseless but endlessly repeated notion that medieval Jews invented bills of exchange and marine insurance.  The legend is understood either as a tribute to their ingenuity or (more frequently) a sign of how manipulative they are.  The ‘anxieties created by Jews’ potential invisibility in the marketplace’, we learn, ‘could be mapped onto the increasing abstraction of the paper economy’, allowing the legend to ‘bring to the fore the misgivings that went hand in hand with the rise of capitalism and formal equality as pillars of European modernity’. 

They could be so mapped, and they were, since this legend ‘constituted conventional wisdom from the 1650s to the 1910s’.   The Jews’ ‘potential invisibility’ was for many people a matter of their ‘perceived ubiquity’, so the Jews could take the blame for ‘the perils lurking behind ever more complex financial markets’.  The Promise and Peril of Credit makes a very strong case for studying historical fantasies alongside historical facts.   ‘Tales that once held sway over people’s imagination’, Professor Trivellato writes, ‘disclose forgotten cultural models’, and ‘origin stories continue to fascinate historians, anthropologists, and literary critics, less for the veracity of their content than for what they tell us about shared beliefs of societies different from  ours’.   This claim is all the more powerful, we may think, when the content has no veracity, and the society in question is perhaps not as different from ours as we would like to think.

The Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History is awarded annually to the author whose book exhibits distinguished work in American or European cultural history.  Established by a former student of Jacques Barzun, the prize honors this historian and cultural critic who was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1984.   

The selection committee consisted of Michael Wood (chair), Charles Barnwell Straut Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Princeton University; David Hollinger, Preston Hotchkis Professor Emeritus, University of California, Berkeley; and Robert B. Pippin, Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor, Committee on Social Thought, Department of Philosophy, University of Chicago.

Keith Marshall Jones III

The 2019 recipient of the Society’s John Frederick Lewis Award is Keith Marshall Jones III in recognition of his book John Laurance: The Immigrant Founding Father America Never Knew (Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, Volume 108, Part 2).

This is the first substantial study of a little known immigrant to the New World who collaborated with Alexander Hamilton and James Madison in the creation of the American nation. Born in 1750 in Cornwall, he forged a legal career in New York. His association with Hamilton has obscured his contributions to the War for Independence and its Federalist aftermath.  He helped Hamilton in the passage of the treasury secretary’s transformative financial agenda and, together with Madison, converted the paper Constitution into the machinery of government in the vastly underappreciated First Federal Congress. This biography of John Laurance, who survived until 1810, restores important missing pieces to our nation’s founding narrative and exposes the Cornish émigré’s remarkable ascent into Federalist America’s governing inner circle. 

Keith Marshall Jones III is an independent scholar who has written several articles and books on the American Revolution. He is a direct descendant of Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall. Publications include Congress As My Government (2008), the “definitive account of Marshall’s military service in the War for Independence”; Framers Against the Crown (2002, 2014); and The Farms of Farmingville (2001). His article in 2017 on “John Laurance and the Role of Military Justice at Valley Forge” (Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography) re-introduced the forgotten immigrant New York lawyer to scholars. 

In 1935 the Society established the John Frederick Lewis Award with funds donated by his widow.  The award recognizes the best book or monograph published by the Society in a given year.  Members of the selection committee were Glen W. Bowersock (chair), Professor Emeritus of Ancient History, Institute for Advanced Study; Julia Haig Gaisser, Professor Emeritus of Latin, Eugenia Chase Guild Professor Emeritus in the Humanities, Bryn Mawr College; and Noel M. Swerdlow, Professor Emeritus of Astronomy and Astrophysics and of History, University of Chicago.