The Expanding Blaze: How the American Revolution Ignited the World, 1775-1848 - Softcover

Israel, Jonathan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0691195935 ISBN 13: 9780691195933

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2019

Synopsis

A major intellectual history of the American Revolution and its influence on later revolutions in Europe and the Americas

The Expanding Blaze is a sweeping history of how the American Revolution inspired revolutions throughout Europe and the Atlantic world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Jonathan Israel, one of the world's leading historians of the Enlightenment, shows how the radical ideas of the American founders set the pattern for democratic revolutions, movements, and constitutions in France, Britain, Ireland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Poland, Greece, Canada, Haiti, Brazil, and Spanish America. The book traces how American efforts to implement Radical Enlightenment ideas drove revolutions abroad, as foreign leaders followed the American example and espoused American democratic values. The first major new intellectual history of the age of democratic revolution in decades, The Expanding Blaze returns the American Revolution to its global context.

About this title

About the Author

Jonathan Israel is professor emeritus of modern history at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. His many books include Revolutionary Ideas and A Revolution of the Mind (both Princeton).

From the Back Cover

"Jonathan Israel reveals an American Revolution radical in its philosophical inspiration, global in its impact, and universal in its conviction that the cause of America is the cause of all humankind. With a sweep that brings black emancipation, the expropriation of native populations, and revolutions on three continents into a worldwide panorama, The Expanding Blaze illuminates a past that we only thought we knew. This is the Revolution as America's founders and their far-flung successors experienced it."--Matthew Stewart, author of Nature's God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic

"With The Expanding Blaze, Jonathan Israel more than makes good his claim to be the only real successor to Enlightenment historians Peter Gay and R. R. Palmer. Indeed, Israel surpasses both, by joining their themes and ambitions in a single totalizing vision. His book combines a sweeping interpretation of the Enlightenment and a comprehensive account of the age of democratic revolution."--Johnson Kent Wright, Arizona State University

Edition details

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0691195935
• ISBN 13: 9780691195933
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 768