Time is the crucial ingredient in history, and yet historians rarely talk about time as such. These essays offer new insight into the development of modern conceptions of time, from the Christian ...dating system (BC/AD or BCE/CE) to the idea of “modernity” as a new epoch in human history.
When this book was published in 1984, it reframed the debate on the French Revolution, shifting the discussion from the Revolution's role in wider, extrinsic processes (such as modernization, ...capitalist development, and the rise of twentieth-century totalitarian regimes) to its central political significance: the discovery of the potential of political action to consciously transform society by molding character, culture, and social relations. In a new preface to this twentieth-anniversary edition, Hunt reconsiders her work in the light of the past twenty years' scholarship.
When this book was published in 1984, it reframed the debate on the French Revolution, shifting the discussion from the Revolution's role in wider, extrinsic processes (such as modernization, ...capitalist development, and the rise of twentieth-century totalitarian regimes) to its central political significance: the discovery of the potential of political action to consciously transform society by molding character, culture, and social relations. In a new preface to this twentieth-anniversary edition, Hunt reconsiders her work in the light of the past twenty years' scholarship.
Situating the French Revolution in the context of early modern globalization for the first time, this book offers a new approach to understanding its international origins and worldwide effects. A ...distinguished group of contributors shows that the political culture of the Revolution emerged out of a long history of global commerce, imperial competition, and the movement of people and ideas in places as far flung as India, Egypt, Guiana, and the Caribbean. This international approach helps to explain how the Revolution fused immense idealism with territorial ambition and combined the drive for human rights with various forms of exclusion. The essays examine topics including the role of smuggling and free trade in the origins of the French Revolution, the entwined nature of feminism and abolitionism, and the influence of the French revolutionary wars on the shape of American empire.
The French Revolution in Global Perspectiveilluminates the dense connections among the cultural, social, and economic aspects of the French Revolution, revealing how new political forms-at once democratic and imperial, anticolonial and centralizing-were generated in and through continual transnational exchanges and dialogues.
Contributors:Rafe Blaufarb, Florida State University; Ian Coller, La Trobe University; Denise Davidson, Georgia State University; Suzanne Desan, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Lynn Hunt, University of California, Los Angeles; Andrew Jainchill, Queen's University; Michael Kwass, The Johns Hopkins University; William Max Nelson, University of Toronto; Pierre Serna, Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne; Miranda Spieler, University of Arizona; Charles Walton, Yale University
“Modernity” has recently been the subject of considerable discussion among historians. This article reviews some of the debates and argues that modernity is a problematic concept because it implies a ...complete rupture with “traditional” ways of life. Studies of key terms are undertaken with the aid of Google Ngrams. These show that “modernity,” “modern times,” and “traditional” —in English and other languages— have a history of their own. A brief analysis of the shift from a self oriented toward equilibrium to a self oriented toward stimulation demonstrates that modernity is not necessary to historical analysis
“Freedom of dress” is not usually counted as one of the inalienable human rights central to modern democratic politics. It might be related to Jefferson’s “pursuit of happiness” in the Declaration of ...Independence, but freedom of dress hardly seems central to life, liberty, or the protection of property. Even so, dress, with both its freedoms and constraints, turned out to be one of the most hotly contested arenas of revolutionary cultural politics. It provided the most visible marker of both adherence and resistance to new social and political conceptions, including notions of gender definition. Its powers of signification went far
Across the humanities and the social sciences, disciplinary boundaries have come into question as scholars have acknowledged their common preoccupations with cultural phenomena ranging from rituals ...and ceremonies to texts and discourse. Literary critics, for example, have turned to history for a deepening of their notion of cultural products; some of them now read historical documents in the same way that they previously read "great" texts. Anthropologists have turned to the history of their own discipline in order to better understand the ways in which disciplinary authority was constructed. As historians have begun to participate in this ferment, they have moved away from their earlier focus on social theoretical models of historical development toward concepts taken from cultural anthropology and literary criticism. Much of the most exciting work in history recently has been affiliated with this wide-ranging effort to write history that is essentially a history of culture. The essays presented here provide an introduction to this movement within the discipline of history. The essays in Part One trace the influence of important models for the new cultural history, models ranging from the pathbreaking work of the French cultural critic Michel Foucault and the American anthropologist Clifford Geertz to the imaginative efforts of such contemporary historians as Natalie Davis and E. P. Thompson, as well as the more controversial theories of Hayden White and Dominick LaCapra. The essays in Part Two are exemplary of the most challenging and fruitful new work of historians in this genre, with topics as diverse as parades in 19th-century America, 16th-century Spanish texts, English medical writing, and the visual practices implied in Italian Renaissance frescoes. Beneath this diversity, however, it is possible to see the commonalities of the new cultural history as it takes shape. Students, teachers, and general readers interested in the future of history will find these essays stimulating and provocative.
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