Revolutions and Generations

a conversation with Nathan Perl-Rosenthal and David G. Troyansky

Monday, September 16, 2:15-3:30 p.m.

Online; Zoom pre-registration required:

https://brooklyn-cuny-edu.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZ0ufuugrjopGdCRXCrmetCde0x_tSggFD-X

 

This conversation brings together the authors of two recent books that both address themes of revolution and generation.  They ask overlapping but distinct questions.  How should we characterize different cohorts’ experiences of revolution, whether they had grown up in a pre-Revolutionary era, matured in time of revolution, or operated in the longer-term aftermath of revolution?  University of Southern California Professor Nathan Perl-Rosenthal’s The Age of Revolutions and the Generations Who Made It (New York: Basic Books, 2024) examines two generations of revolutionaries in late-18th- and early-19th-century Europe and the Americas, while Brooklyn College Professor David G. Troyansky’s Entitlement and Complaint: Ending Careers and Reviewing Lives in Post-Revolutionary France (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023) explores careers and memories across the first half of the nineteenth century.  What did it mean to be a revolutionary?  How did individuals make revolutions, survive revolutions, and build identities in the shadow of revolution?  And how did revolutionary pasts feed into the creation of institutions associated with the modern political world?

 

Speakers:

Nathan Perl-Rosenthal is Professor of History, French & Italian, and Law at the University of Southern California.  His most recent book, The Age of Revolutions and the Generations Who Made It, a generational history of the Atlantic revolutionary era (1760s – 1820s) was published by Basic Books (US) in February 2024. He is now working on two books: a history of the “Long American Revolution,” told through a study of the thousands of surviving Fourth of July orations, to appear in 2026, and a global history of maritime prize law in the making and unmaking of European empires, ca. 1600-1850, both under contract with Basic.

 

David G. Troyansky is Professor of History at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.  He is author of Old Age in the Old Regime: Image and Experience in Eighteenth-Century France (Cornell University Press, 1989), Aging in World History (Routledge, 2016), and Entitlement and Complaint: Ending Careers and Reviewing Lives in Post-Revolutionary France (Oxford University Press, 2023) and co-editor of three books in French and Francophone Studies.  He is co-editing a 6-volume Cultural History of Old Age for Bloomsbury Press.

 

For more information: https://www.brooklyn.edu/event/revolutions-and-generations-a-conversation-with-nathan-perl-rosenthal-and-david-g-troyansky/