age of revolution, with particular attention to the transnational influences that shaped modern national politics. He received his PhD in history from Columbia University in 2011, with a dissertation on epistolarity and revolutionary organizing, and published a first book on a different topic in 2015: Citizen Sailors: Becoming American in the Age of Revolution. That book, which argues that American sailors of the revolutionary era had an unknown and significant role in the formation of modern practices of national identification, won the Society for French Historical Studies’ Gilbert Chinard Prize, for “a distinguished scholarly book published in North America in the history of themes shared by France and North, Central, or South America.”
Perl-Rosenthal applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Age of Revolutions and the Generations Who Made It, and reported the following:
The ninety-ninth page of The Age of Revolutions and the Generations Who Made It drops you into a gathering political crisis in the city of Cuzco, high in the Andes mountains of South America, in 1783. I have admit that this page is not half bad as an introduction to the book’s scope, characters, and themes. Cuzco and Peru are main settings for the book—I return to them repeatedly throughout its pages, alongside examinations of North America, Haiti, France, and the Netherlands. This page describes a struggle for power between Spanish royal officials and Cuzco criollos (American-born Spaniards). Conflicts of this sort appear over and over in the book. And the main figure on this page, Madre Maria de la Concepción Rivadeneyra, is one of the six amazing individuals around whom I built a large part of the book’s story. (Spoiler alert: she was a noblewoman-turned-nun, fond of chocolate, mother-of-pearl, and high-stakes legal maneuvers!)Learn more about The Age of Revolutions at the Basic Books website.
Still, this page is something of an outlier in the book. The political confrontation it describes is acute, while the book’s approach to politics is generational. That is, I aim to show how political change in the age of Atlantic revolutions (circa 1760 to 1825) unfolded over the course of decades, not weeks, months or even years. These long revolutionary processes had to start somewhere—sometimes with the sort of acute conflict that we see on page 99—but their full unfolding took years. A second oddity of this page, in the context of the book, is that there is not much in it about political organizing. The argument of The Age of Revolutions, in a nutshell, is that revolutionaries before 1800 had a very difficult time organizing sustained mass movements, especially across lines of class and racial difference, but that after 1800, as a new generation took command, sustained mass political movements became easier to form and keep together. To see how Madre Maria fits into this thesis, though, all you have to do is read the rest of chapter four (pp.79-104)!
--Marshal Zeringue
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