The Age of Revolutions and the Generations That Shaped It

The revolutions that shook Europe and the Americas over seven decades, from 1760 to 1825, shaped the modern world. The revolutionaries smashed empires, overthrew social hierarchies, and established a world of republics. But while these major political shifts have emerged across oceans, old grievances have persisted, and powerful engines of revolutionary change have produced new and insidious forms of inequality.Through a variety of familiar and unknown lives-from John Adams, Toussaint Louverture, and Napoleon to an ambitious French naturalist or even a seditious Peruvian nun-the historian Nathan Pearl Rosenthal narrates this revolutionary saga in an original way: a vast generational history spanning three continents.It focuses specifically on issues of social inclusion, seeking to understand the links that may have existed between different revolutions and their leaders. To this end, it traces their projects, failures, limitations, and contradictions.