A New World Begins
The History of the French Revolution

Sometimes, you just want a perfectly solid history of a major event, informed by recent research. Here you go. This is easy to read, if not a Gibbonesque masterpiece; it includes Haiti, and women, and slavery, without pointing giant fingers at itself to make you aware of its own moral rectitude; it......more

The French Revolution is a massive contradiction. It was one of the most progressive movements of all time. Revolutionary France was: The first European state to decriminalize homosexuality. The first to declare nonwhites citizens. The first to have universal manhood suffrage. The first to have nonwhite......more

Perhaps more than a non-historian really needs to get a decent overview of France during the period 1787-1800 (from the fracturing of the ancien regime's grip on power, through the revolution, the reign of terror, and the Republic's decadence, to the consolidation of Napoleon's hold on power), it is......more

Popkin's lifetime of scholarship brings a richness and depth to material, that, for a former scholar of the 18th century like myself, I thought I knew inside out. Because of his knowledge of Haitian history and his use of new understandings of disease, health and history, Popkin shed light on the Fr......more