George Washington's False Teeth: An Unconventional Guide to the Eighteenth Century

Robert Darnton

ISBN 10: 0393337472 / ISBN 13: 9780393337471

Published by W. W. Norton & Company May 2003, 2003

About this Item

Seller Inventory # 246805

Bibliographic Details

• Title: George Washington's False Teeth: An Unconventional Guide to the Eighteenth Century
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company May 2003
• Publication Date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0393337472
• ISBN 13: 9780393337471
• Binding: Paper Back
• Condition: New
• Seller catalogs:
  • History/General Topics

About this title

Synopsis

A master historian's excavations into the past unearth a world that is unexpected and compelling.

George Washington was inaugurated as president in 1789 with one tooth in his mouth, a lower left bicuspid. The Father of His Country had sets of false teeth that were made of everything but wood, from elephant ivory and walrus tusk to the teeth of a fellow human. With characteristic learning and bracing insight, Robert Darnton shows us that the Enlightenment had false teeth alsothat it was not the Father of Our Modern World, responsible for all its advances and transgressions. In restoring the Enlightenment to human scale, Darnton locates its real aims, ambitions, and significance. So too with the French Revolution, another icon of the eighteenth century, approached here through the gossip, songs, and broadsides that formed the political nervous system of Paris in the Old Regime. Figures we think we knowVoltaire, Jefferson, Rousseau, Condorcet, even historians themselvesemerge afresh in Darnton's hands, their vitality, if not their teeth, intact. 17 b/w illustrations.

About the Author

Robert Darnton is the author of many award-winning works in French cultural history, and taught for years at Princeton and Harvard. He is a chevalier in the Légion d’Honneur, and winner of the National Humanities Medal.