Benjamin Franklin Explains the Stamp ACT Protests to Parliament, 1766

Benjamin Franklin Explains the Stamp Act Protests to Parliament, 1766 brings together a unique collection of primary source documents, organized and arranged as a dialogue, to examine the issues surrounding the Stamp Act. The selections–at the center of which is Benjamin Franklin’s examination in Parliament on February 13, 1766–are meant to be read as a continuous dialogue among leading colonists in America and politicians in England. While the individual documents were separated in time and space, here they are reconstituted as part of a consistent whole–a trans-Atlantic conversation about the nature of the empire, the rights of the colonists, and the powers of Parliament at a critical moment in American and British history. Some liberty has been taken in their editing in order to emphasize this conversational quality. A chronology preceding the documents indicates the sequence of their production, and a bibliographical essay at the end of the documents directs students to useful secondary sources.