Revolutions Without Borders: The Call to Liberty in the Atlantic World - Softcover

Polasky, Janet

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0300219849 ISBN 13: 9780300219845

Publisher: Yale University Press, 2016

Synopsis

A sweeping exploration of revolutionary ideas that traveled the Atlantic in the late eighteenth century

Nation-based histories cannot do justice to the rowdy, radical interchange of ideas around the Atlantic world during the tumultuous years from 1776 to 1804. National borders were powerless to restrict the flow of enticing new visions of human rights and universal freedom. This expansive history explores how the revolutionary ideas that spurred the American and French revolutions reverberated far and wide, connecting European, North American, African, and Caribbean peoples more closely than ever before.
 
Historian Janet Polasky focuses on the eighteenth-century travelers who spread new notions of liberty and equality. It was an age of itinerant revolutionaries, she shows, who ignored borders and found allies with whom to imagine a borderless world. As paths crossed, ideas entangled. The author investigates these ideas and how they were disseminated long before the days of instant communications and social media or even an international postal system. Polasky analyzes the paper records―books, broadsides, journals, newspapers, novels, letters, and more―to follow the far-reaching trails of revolutionary zeal. What emerges clearly from rich historic records is that the dream of liberty among America’s founders was part of a much larger picture. It was a dream embraced throughout the far-flung regions of the Atlantic world.

About this title

About the Author

Janet Polasky is Presidential Professor of History, University of New Hampshire.

Edition details

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0300219849
• ISBN 13: 9780300219845
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 392