Jeremy D. Popkin

"Drawing on the theoretical work of contemporary critics of autobiography and the philosopher Paul Ricoeur, Popkin reads the autobiographical classics of Edward Gibbon and Henry Adams and the memoirs of contemporary historians such as Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Peter Gay, Jill Ker Conway, and many others. He reveals the contributions historians' life stories make to our understanding of the human experience. Historians' autobiographies, he shows, reveal how scholars arrive at their vocations, the difficulties of writing about modern professional life, and the ways in which personal stories can add to our understanding of historical events such as war, political movements, and the traumas of the Holocaust." "An overview of the way historians view themselves and their profession, History, Historians, and Autobiography will be of interest to readers concerned with the ways in which we understand the past, as well as anyone interested in the art of life-writing."--Jacket.

This concise survey of the French Revolution and Napoleonic period offers an alternative to the long, detailed texts more suited to advanced study. Author Jeremy D. Popkin introduces readers to the major events that comprise the story of the French Revolution, to the different ways in which historians have interpreted them, to the political, social, and cultural origins of the Revolution, and to the latest methodological approaches. Beginning with the prerevolutionary crisis, Popkin leads readers through the dramatic events that led to the storming of the Bastille in 1789. Along the way, he discusses the effort to create a constitutional regime, the collapse of the new constitution, and the overthrow of the monarchy. This newly revised edition provides expanded discussion of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen and the king's trial. In addition, A Short History of the French Revolution: explores the Jacobin dictatorship and the Reign of Terror; examines the search for stability under the Directory; features in-depth coverage of Napoleon's Consulate and Empire; and looks at the long-term consequences of the Revolution for France and the world.

As television screens across America showed Chinese students blocking their government's tanks in Tiananmen Square, or the fall of the Berlin Wall, or those first missiles of the Gulf War searching their targets in Bagdad, the connection between media and revolution seemed more significant than ever. In this book, thirteen prominent scholars examine the role of the communication media in revolutionary crises - from the Puritan Revolution of the 1640s to the upheaval in former Czechoslovakia that remains unresolved today. Their central question: Do the media in fact have a real influence on the unfolding of revolutionary crises? On this question, the contributors diverge. In his examination of the power of the newspaper in the French Revolution, Pierre Retat argues that the press does not bring about the revolution but is a part of the revolutionary process. Popkin shares Retat's conviction that changes in media praxis are essential symbols of the nature of revolutionary upheaval. Jeffrey Wasserstrom, taking the opposite view, argues that the extensive attention paid to the effects of worldwide television coverage of the demonstrations in Tiananmen Square masks the fact that the Chinese students were essentially reworking protest rituals rooted in their country's history and culture long before the modern media era. Owen Johnson, in his essay on the Czechoslovak press during the "Velvet Revolution," likewise downplays the role of the media.

"The French Revolution was the 'big bang' out of which all the elements of modern politics and social conflicts were formed. Democracy, populism, liberalism, conservatism, socialism, nationalism, feminism, and abolitionism are all heirs to the momentous upheaval that began in Paris in 1789. Historian Jeremy Popkin offers a riveting account of the Revolution that puts the reader in the thick of the debates and the turmoil that led to the overthrow of the monarchy and the establishment of a new society. Going beyond the typical cast of Robespierre, Danton, and Mirabeau, Popkin includes the women who demanded equal rights and the enslaved blacks who wrested freedom from revolutionaries to recount how people sought to make themselves 'free and equal in rights.' From the drafting of the Declaration of the Rights of Man to the rise of Napoleon out of the ashes of the Reign of Terror, [this book] is a history of the French Revolution for our own time. Even after more than two hundred years, Popkin argues, the principles of the French Revolution continue to guide the search for a just society. Based on decades of scholarship, A New World Begins is a magisterial account of the revolution that created the modern world."--Dust jacket flap.

"Richard H. Popkin (1923-2005) transformed the study of the history of philosophy in the second half of the twentieth century. His History of Scepticism and his many other publications demonstrated the centrality of the problem of skepticism in the development of modern thought, the intimate connections between philosophy and religion, and the importance of contacts between Jewish and Christian thinkers. In this volume, scholars from around the world assess Popkin's contributions to the many fields in which he was interested. The Legacies of Richard Popkin provides a broad overview of Popkin's work and demonstrates the connections between the many topics he wrote about. A concluding article, by Popkin's son Jeremy Popkin, draws on private letters to provide a picture of Popkin's life and career in his own words, revealing the richness of the documents now accessible to scholars in the Richard Popkin papers at the William Andrews Clark Library in Los Angeles."--Back of dust jacket.

"The abolitions of slavery in the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue in 1793 and in revolutionary France in 1794 were the first dramatic blows against an institution that had shaped the Atlantic world for three centuries and affected the lives of millions of people. Based on extensive archival research, You Are All Free provides the first complete account of the dramatic events that led to these epochal decrees, and also to the destruction of Cap Francais, the richest city in the French Caribbean, and to the first refugee crisis in the United States. Taking issue with earlier accounts that claim that Saint-Domingue's slaves freed themselves, or that French revolutionaries abolished slavery as part of a general campaign for universal human rights, the book shows that abolition was the result of complex and often paradoxical political struggles on both sides of the Atlantic that have frequently been misunderstood by earlier scholars"--