Clarke Peters
speaker
443 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 11 Jun
Clarke Peters’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
The year is 1706.
A biting cold New England winter presses up against the windows of a modest townhouse.
In an upstairs room, a baby boy fills his lungs for the first time.
The newborn is wrapped in blankets and passed to his mother, a 39-year-old woman called Abiah Franklin.
Abiah has a name for the baby, Benjamin.
No one can know it yet, but this child, the son of a humble soap and candle maker, will grow up to be one of the most consequential figures of his age.
Both Abiah and her husband, Josiah, are old hands at this.
Benjamin is her eighth child, his 15th.
They'll welcome a further two babies in the coming years,
A home overflowing with children is pretty common in early 18th century Boston, a young, bustling city where productivity is always encouraged.
Like the Massachusetts colony as a whole, Boston is only a few decades old.
Its founding was dominated by Puritans, austere Protestants who preach moral strictness and embrace a direct relationship with God, devoid of elaborate ceremony.
They are, in many ways, spiritual kin with other English settlers of the time.
The famous Mayflower Pilgrims of Plymouth Rock, for instance.
Religious radicals searching for land in which to build their vision of a perfect society.
Abiah is Massachusetts born and raised.
Her father came here from England when King Charles I began a campaign of anti-Puritan persecution in the 1630s.
Josiah, Benjamin's father, is also an English immigrant, though like countless others, he came to America more in search of prosperity rather than religious freedom.
Faith and finances, the twin engines of the American colonies.
The origins of British America date back to English-led expeditions in the late 15th century, when Europeans first encountered what they called the New World.
Showing 61–80 of 443 · page 4 of 23
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