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WCED Lecture. Politics Goes Pear Shaped. Old Regime Cultures and Revolutionary Politics, ca. 1792-1825

Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, associate professor of history and spatial sciences, University of Southern California
Monday, April 15, 2019
4:00-5:30 PM
1010 Weiser Hall Map
Can the story of a pear help us understand the rise of democracy in the West? This talk uses the career of Louis-Augustin Bosc, a French revolutionary and botanist—and namesake of the familiar pear—to explore the ambiguous political legacy of the Atlantic revolutions. The talk argues that revolutionary movements in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were united not just by a set of similar political structures and ideologies but by their reliance on a matrix of old regime, eighteenth-century cultural practices. These old regime practices left a common and illiberal stamp on the polities and political traditions that they helped to create.

Nathan Perl-Rosenthal is a 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 then in 2015 published a first book on a different topic: "Citizen Sailors: Becoming American in the Age of Revolution" (Belknap/Harvard). His current book project is a wide-angle cultural history of the Atlantic age of revolutions, from the 1760s through the 1820s, which rethinks the era’s role in creating modern democratic politics. Nathan also maintains interests in early modern legal history; historical methods and historiography; and histories of material culture.

If you are a person with a disability who requires an accommodation to attend this event, please reach out to weisercenter@umich.edu at least 2 weeks in advance of this event. Please be aware that advance notice is necessary as some accommodations may require more time for the university to arrange.
Building: Weiser Hall
Event Type: Lecture / Discussion
Tags: Democracy, European, History, International, Politics
Source: Happening @ Michigan from Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies, Center for European Studies, International Institute