“A tour de force.”—Gordon S. Wood, New York Times Book ReviewHow were human rights invented, and how does their tumultuous history influence their perception and our ability to protect them today? From Professor Lynn Hunt comes this extraordinary cultural and intellectual history, which traces the roots of human rights to the rejection of torture as a means for finding the truth. She demonstrates how ideas of human relationships portrayed in novels and art helped spread th...

"A fascinating historiographical essay. . . . An unusually lucid and inclusive explication of what it ultimately at stake in the culture wars over the nature, goals, and efficacy of history as a discipline."—Booklist

We justify our actions in the present through our understanding of the past. But we live in a time when politicians lie brazenly about historical facts and meddle with the content of history books, while media differ wildly in their reporting of the same event. Frequently, new discoveries force us to re-evaluate everything we thought we knew about the past.So how can any certainty about history be established, and why does it matter? Lynn Hunt shows why the search for truth about t...

Redrawing the map and resetting the clock of the Age of RevolutionsIn 2015, Bryan Banks and Cindy Ermus launched Age of Revolutions, a website offering critical reconsideration of the foundational concept of revolution and centered on three key questions: What was the Age of Revolutions? Where was the Age of Revolutions? And are we still living in an Age of Revolutions? This collection represents the best of scholars’ answers to these expansive, urgent questions. T...

In this groundbreaking collection of essays, historians and literary theorists examine how, between 1500 and 1800, pornography emerged as a literary practice and a category of knowledge intimately linked to the formative moments of Western modernity and the democratization of culture. The first modern writers and engravers of pornography were part of the demimonde of heretics, freethinkers, and libertines who constituted the dark underside of the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, the...

An illuminating exploration of the tensions between self and society in the age of revolutions.Since the eighteenth century, one of the defining concerns of modern life has been the tension between the self and society: we believe in a person’s autonomy, but we also acknowledge that people are shaped by social and cultural forces. The Revolutionary Self delves into this paradox, turning to the eighteenth century as an era when new ideas about the self, soc...

In this book Lynn Hunt and Jack R. Censer lucidly trace events from 1789 until the fall of Napoleon, stressing the global dimensions of the French Revolution and offering balanced coverage of both its causes and outcomes. In doing so, Hunt and Censer reaffirm its huge significance for the modern political world in the process.Hunt and Censer give due attention to global competition, fiscal crisis, slavery and the beginnings of nationalism alongside more traditional topics, such as ...

Two French Protestant refugees in eighteenth-century Amsterdam gave the world an extraordinary work that intrigued and outraged readers across Europe. In this captivating account, Lynn Hunt, Margaret Jacob, and Wijnand Mijnhardt take us to the vibrant Dutch Republic and its flourishing book trade to explore the work that sowed the radical idea that religions could be considered on equal terms.Famed engraver Bernard Picart and author and publisher Jean Frederic Bernard produced ...

Leading historian Lynn Hunt rethinks why history matters in today’s global world and how it should be written.Globalization is emerging as a major economic, cultural, and political force. In Writing History in the Global Era, historian Lynn Hunt examines whether globalization can reinvigorate the telling of history. She looks toward scholars from the East and West collaborating in new ways as they share their ideas. She proposes a sweeping reevaluation of ...

Lynn Hunt and Jack R. Censer's The French Revolution and Napoleon provides a globally-oriented narrative history of events from 1789 until the fall of Napoleon. It emphasizes the global origins and consequences of the French Revolution and explains why it is the formative event for modern politics.The book integrates global competition, fiscal crisis, slavery and the beginnings of nationalism with the more traditional emphases on human rights and constitutions, terror and ...

This latest work from an author known for her contributions to the new cultural history is a daring, multidisciplinary investigation of the imaginative foundations of modern politics. Hunt uses the term `Family Romance', (coined by Freud to describe the fantasy of being freed from one's family and belonging to one of higher social standing), in a broader sense, to describe the images of the familial order that structured the collective political unconscious. In a wide-ranging account that ...

Enter worlds of magic, love, pixies, and betrayal in this anthology by S. Lynn Hunt. Two lonely men meet on Halloween and need a little help getting things together. A warrior woman takes her young protégé on an outing that is much more than a test. A sorceress must fight her grief to lead a people bequeathed to her, and a traveler searches for the goddess that called her to the desert. Then read a sneak-peek of the first three chapters of the first book in the Strange Magic series: In Tou...