Nathan Perl-Rosenthal - "The Age of Revolutions: And the Generations Who Made It" - Eric Slauter

Nathan Perl-Rosenthal will discuss The Age of Revolutions: And the Generations Who Made It. He will be joined in conversation by Eric Slauter. A Q&A and signing will follow the discussion.

Presented in partnership with Karla Scherer Center

At the Co-op

RSVP HERE (Please note that your RSVP is requested but not required.)

About the Book: In The Age of Revolutions: And the Generations Who Made It, 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. 

About the Author: Nathan Perl-Rosenthal is an historian of the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Atlantic world. He focuses on the political and cultural history of Europe and the Americas in the age of revolution, with particular attention to the transnational influences that shaped modern national politics. He received his PhD in history from Columbia University in 2011, with a dissertation on epistolarity and revolutionary organizing, and published a first book on a different topic in 2015: Citizen Sailors: Becoming American in the Age of Revolution (Belknap/Harvard). That book, which argues that American sailors of the revolutionary era had an unknown and significant role in the formation of modern practices of national identification, won the Society for French Historical Studies’ Gilbert Chinard Prize, for “a distinguished scholarly book published in North America in the history of themes shared by France and North, Central, or South America.”

His second book, The Age of Revolutions, will be published by Basic Books in early 2024. It is the first narrative history of the entire Atlantic revolutionary era, 1765 to 1825, to be based on primary sources. The book tells the story of the era’s interconnected revolutions, beginning in North America and continuing through Peru, France, the Netherlands, Italy, the Caribbean, and many other locations. 

About the Interlocutor: Eric Slauter is Deputy Dean of the Humanities and the Director of the Karla Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture at the University of Chicago. He is the author of The State as a Work of Art: The Cultural Origins of the Constitution.