The Spectral Summit
This podcast looks at historic literature and figures from the past. We'll start with a 16-year-old Ben Franklin pranking his brother James in 1722 by writing essays as a middle-aged New England widow who savagely critiques colonial Boston and Harvard. Future episodes include interviews with Warren G. Harding, FDR, Eleanor Roosevelt and Edgar Allen Poe. Stay tuned!
The Spectral Summit
Latest Episodes
Silence Dogood Essay 12 - On the Vice of Drunkenness
In her twelfth letter to the New-England Courant (September 1722), the widow Silence Dogood turns her sharp wit to a subject as old as taverns themselves: what happens to a man once he's had a bit too much to drink. With her signature ...
Silence Dogood - Essay 11 - A Remedy for Forlorn Maidens
This satirical essay tackles the social and financial anxieties of aging unmarried women. Silence Dogood shares a letter from a fictional petitioner named Margaret Aftercast. Margaret reflects on her youth, admitting that she was vanity-...
Silence Dogood Essay 10 - Insuring a Widow's Future
In her tenth letter to the New England Courant, Silence Dogood turns her sharp eye to a problem colonial society preferred not to discuss: what happens to a woman when her husband dies and takes the family's security with him. Her proposal — a ...
Silence Dogood - Essay No. 9 - Religious Hypocrites
Benjamin Franklin published fourteen Silence Dogood essays in the New-England Courant in 1722, slipping them under the print shop door so his brother James wouldn't know who wrote them. It's the first case of a founding father not only...
Episode 10 - Dorothy Parker - A Telephone Call
Join us as we explore the wit and dark humor of Dorothy Parker who is best remembered for her razor wit. "A Telephone Call" which originally appeared in the January 1928 issue of The Bookman, is one of her most psychologically raw inte...
