About this item
Highlights
- 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.
- About the Author: Jonathan Israel is professor emeritus of modern history at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
- 768 Pages
- Philosophy, Political
Description
Book 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.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
Review Quotes
"Honorable Mention for the 2018 PROSE Award in U.S. History, Association of American Publishers"
"One of Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Books of 2017 in American History"
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).