This post is a long time in the making, and spurred on by the significance of today's date (July 4th!) and a recent post made by ETL about the Revolutionary War series (http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/3307499/posts). (I'm a first-time poster of a thread, so hopefully got this down right!) While I’m busy watching the very first episode of this excellent historic series, on this night of July 4th, 2015, as fireworks go off in the distance, and seeing graphical representations of events leading up to our own Revolutionary War (such as the turning of Franklin’s political sensibilities toward the American cause while in...