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THE AGE OF REVOLUTIONS

Nathan Perl-Rosenthal

And the Generations Who Made It

A panoramic new history of the revolutionary decades between 1760 and 1825, from North America and Europe to Haiti and Spanish America, showing how progress and reaction went hand in hand.
The revolutions that raged across Europe and the Americas over seven decades, from 1760 to 1825, created the modern world. Revolutionaries shattered empires, toppled social hierarchies, and birthed a world of republics. But old injustices lingered on and the powerful engines of revolutionary change created new and insidious forms of inequality. In The Age of Revolutions, historian Nathan Perl-Rosenthal offers the first narrative history of this entire era. Through a kaleidoscope of lives both familiar and unknown - from John Adams, Toussaint Louverture, and Napoleon to an ambitious French naturalist and a seditious Peruvian nun - he retells the revolutionary epic as a generational story. The first revolutionary generation, fired by radical ideas, struggled to slip the hierarchical bonds of the old order. Their failures molded a second generation, more adept at mass organizing but with an illiberal tint. The sweeping political transformations they accomplished after 1800 etched social and racial inequalities into the foundations of modern democracy. A breathtaking history spanning three continents, The Age of Revolutions uncovers how the period's grand political transformations emerged across oceans and, slowly and unevenly, over generations. Nathan Perl-Rosenthal is an associate professor of history at the University of Southern California. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, the Nation, and the Los Angeles Times. The award-winning author of Citizen Sailors, he lives in Los Angeles, California.
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Published 2024-02-20 by Basic Books

Comments

A tour de force of originality and erudition. A vivid new interpretation, in elegant prose, of the generations who transformed the Atlantic world.

This magisterial survey of the Age of Revolutions ranges boldly across time and space, exploring familiar sites like Philadelphia and Paris alongside others less known, like Indigenous Peru or Hasidic Poland. An impressive accomplishment.

Between 1760 and 1825, two generations of revolutionaries challenged old inequalities in Europe and the Americas. A fascinating book about the individual trajectories and the generational divides that contributed to this decisive era in the history of equality.

A beautifully written and deeply considered account stands with the best new work on this key era. Both panoramic and granular, The Age of Revolutions makes one really feel and experience the fraught changes seen by the many ages and stages, and most especially the diverse people, that made revolution.

The Age of Revolutions offers a vivid and insightful account of an era that did much to create the world we live in today. Drawing on a remarkable range of historical sources, Nathan Perl-Rosenthal carefully traces how radical ideas, political movements, and counter-revolutionary reactions flourished within and between societies.

Spanish: Pasada & Presente