Age Of Revolutions

TO BE FEATURED IN A MOUNT VERNON BOOK TALK AND AUTHOR SIGNING DECEMBER 10, 2024

A sweeping and "persuasive and inspiring" (New Yorker) new history of the revolutionary decades from 1760 to 1825, spanning North America, Europe, Haiti, and Spanish America, demonstrating how progress and reaction intertwined.

The revolutions that swept across Europe and the Americas from 1760 to 1825 were foundational in creating the modern world. Revolutionaries dismantled empires, overturned social hierarchies, and established a world of republics. Yet, old injustices persisted, and the powerful forces of revolutionary change also gave rise to new and insidious forms of inequality.

In "The Age of Revolutions," historian Nathan Perl-Rosenthal presents the first comprehensive narrative history of this era. Through a vivid portrayal of both well-known and obscure figures—from John Adams, Toussaint Louverture, and Napoleon to an ambitious French naturalist and a rebellious Peruvian nun—he recounts the revolutionary saga as a generational story. The first generation of revolutionaries, driven by radical ideas, fought to break free from the hierarchical constraints of the old order. Their failures shaped a second generation, who were more adept at mass organization but carried an illiberal streak. The profound political changes they achieved after 1800 embedded social and racial inequalities into the very fabric of modern democracy.

Spanning three continents, "The Age of Revolutions" uncovers how the era's sweeping political transformations unfolded across oceans and, over generations, gradually and unevenly took shape.