Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin: The Price of Representative Personality

It might seem difficult to find more disparate personalities than Cotton Mather, the alternately tortured and punishing epitome of American Puritanism and Benjamin Franklin, the liberal and affable American philosopher. This opposition is not an objective historical judgement but what Franklin himself wished to communicate to readers. Though he promoted himself, his opinions and his actions as a release from the discipline Mather represented, Franklin owes a greater intellectual and emotion...