A collection of essays that challenges how we interpret history by focusing on the nexus of two concepts— “power” and “time”—as they manifest in a wide variety of case studies.Time is the backdrop of historical inquiry, yet it is much more than a featureless setting for events. Different temporalities interact dynamically; sometimes they coexist tensely, sometimes they clash violently. In this innovative volume, editors Dan Edelstein, Stefanos Geroulanos, and Natas...

How an event once considered the greatest of all political dangers came to be seen as a solution to all social problemsPolitical thinkers from Plato to John Adams saw revolutions as a grave threat to society and advocated for a constitution that prevented them by balancing social interests and forms of government. The Revolution to Come traces how evolving conceptions of history ushered in a faith in the power of revolution to create more just and reasonab...

The age of Enlightenment and revolutions produced some of our best-known declarations of rights, but they did not create the idea of rights. Writers during this age did such a good job at declaring rights that many historians and politicians later believed that they invented them. The fourth volume of The Cambridge History of Rights shows that the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are better understood as a time of transformation, extending rights-making to meet the needs of a modernizin...

The "Arab Spring" was heralded and publicly embraced by foreign leaders of many countries that define themselves by their own historic revolutions. The contributors to this volume examine the legitimacy of these comparisons by exploring whether or not all modern revolutions follow a pattern or script. Traditionally, historians have studied revolutions as distinct and separate events. Drawing on close familiarity with many different cultures, languages, and historical transitions, this anth...

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...

There's something about people in old photographs. Maybe it's their smile—or lack of a smile, maybe it's the look in their eyes, or maybe it's the way they're posed. If you look closely, you'll see the photograph shows much more than just people. It is a microcosm of the time the picture was taken, a depiction of their when. As our modern eyes stare into their historic eyes, something passes between us, not only from the picture to us, but from their time to our time. When the picture was ...

Greetings from the Elsewhere Welcoming Committee. We're glad you made the journey and hope your stay here is exactly what you want it to be. Please feel free to roam wherever you want and take as long as you want. We have no timetables, no agendas, no schedules, no calendars, and no clocks. Time does not matter here. Normal rules do not apply. Restrictions are non-existent. No boundaries, no "Keep Out" signs. You are your own tour guide in a universe of anything. So, be sure to allow yours...

“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...

This book tells nothing less than the story of how the modern, Western view of the world was born. Cultural and intellectual historian Anthony Pagden explains how, and why, the ideal of a universal, global, and cosmopolitan society became such a central part of the Western imagination in the ferment of the Enlightenment - and how these ideas have done battle with an inward-looking, tradition-oriented view of the world ever since. Cosmopolitanism is an ancient creed; but in its modern form ...

A panoramic global history of the nineteenth centuryA monumental history of the nineteenth century, The Transformation of the World offers a panoramic and multifaceted portrait of a world in transition. Jürgen Osterhammel, an eminent scholar who has been called the Braudel of the nineteenth century, moves beyond conventional Eurocentric and chronological accounts of the era, presenting instead a truly global history of breathtaking scope and towering erudi...

The theory and practice of history and its relevance to the modern world, by Britains greatest radical historian.

Fascism, communism, genocide, slavery, racism, imperialism--the West has no shortage of reasons for guilt. And, indeed, since the Holocaust and the end of World War II, Europeans in particular have been consumed by remorse. But Pascal Bruckner argues that guilt has now gone too far. It has become a pathology, and even an obstacle to fighting today's atrocities. Bruckner, one of France's leading writers and public intellectuals, argues that obsessive guilt has obscured important realities. ...