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Also by Michael Meyer:

Benjamin Franklin's Last Bet, May 2023
Hardcover / e-Book
The Year that Changed the World, September 2009
Hardcover
The Last Days of Old Beijing, July 2008
Hardcover

Benjamin Franklin's Last Bet
Michael Meyer

The Favorite Founder's Divisive Death, Enduring Afterlife, and Blueprint for American Prosperity

Mariner Books
May 2023
On Sale: April 25, 2023
368 pages
ISBN: 0063268566
EAN: 9780063268562
Kindle: B09721CKD1
Hardcover / e-Book
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Women's Fiction Historical

The incredible story of Benjamin Franklin’s parting gift to the working-class people of Boston and Philadelphia—a deathbed wager that captures the Founder’s American Dream and his lessons for our current, conflicted age.

Benjamin Franklin was not a gambling man. But at the end of his illustrious life, the Founder allowed himself a final wager on the survival of the United States: a gift of two thousand pounds to Boston and Philadelphia, to be lent out to tradesmen over the next two centuries to jump-start their careers. Each loan would be repaid with interest over ten years. If all went according to Franklin’s inventive scheme, the accrued final payout in 1991 would be a windfall. 

In Benjamin Franklin’s Last Bet, Michael Meyer traces the evolution of these twin funds as they age alongside America itself, bankrolling woodworkers and silversmiths, trade schools and space races. Over time, Franklin’s wager was misused, neglected, and contested—but never wholly extinguished. With charm and inquisitive flair, Meyer shows how Franklin’s stake in the “leather-apron” class remains in play to this day, and offers an inspiring blueprint for prosperity in our modern era of growing wealth disparity and social divisions.

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