The Age of Revolutions Quotes

“To understand why the first and second generations of American revolutionaries embedded class and racial hierarchies into US politics, that is, requires looking beyond the United States.”
― Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, The Age of Revolutions: And the Generations Who Made It

“all the revolutionary movements were coalitions between members of the elite and groups of ordinary people.”
― Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, The Age of Revolutions: And the Generations Who Made It

“For the first generation, who dominated the revolutions from the 1760s through the mid-1790s, the central challenge was overcoming the hierarchical reflexes of the mid-eighteenth-century Atlantic old regime in which they had grown up.”
― Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, The Age of Revolutions: And the Generations Who Made It

“was a world of emerging republics, growing mass cultures, and emancipation—but also of repressive dictatorships, deepening racism, and exclusion”
― Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, The Age of Revolutions: And the Generations Who Made It

“Washington was a pure product of the first half of the eighteenth century. The serene self-confidence in his own superior social position that he had imbibed as a youth never really left him.”
― Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, The Age of Revolutions: And the Generations Who Made It

“After 1810, Common Sense enjoyed a sudden revival in Spanish America. The reasons were obvious: Paine’s denunciation of a far-off monarchy and the vices of hereditary kingship were directly applicable to the situation in which Spanish America found itself in the wake of Napoleon’s invasion of Spain.”
― Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, The Age of Revolutions: And the Generations Who Made It

“As the democrats realized by now, the trouble was not merely that conservatives were resisting revolutionary change; that was entirely predictable. It was that the dispositions of the Genoese lower orders also made them quite chary of reform and ready to collaborate with the conservatives”
― Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, The Age of Revolutions: And the Generations Who Made It

“The author’s central argument was a denunciation of the “inequality of fortunes.” An aristocracy of wealth, he argued, “will one day become… [a] political aristocracy.” To”
― Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, The Age of Revolutions: And the Generations Who Made It

“The patriot leadership had the ability and willingness to pay higher prices for goods in order to make a political point. But they could not count on others to do the same.14”
― Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, The Age of Revolutions: And the Generations Who Made It

“The American Revolution was haunted, to be sure, by the specters of slavery and racial prejudice. Each of the era’s revolutions was shadowed by its own old regime, by its protagonists’ habits and ways of seeing the world.”
― Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, The Age of Revolutions: And the Generations Who Made It

“mass movements that took off after 1800, in sum, fulfilled some of the greatest dreams of the early revolutionary era but only by dint of abandoning or betraying others.”
― Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, The Age of Revolutions: And the Generations Who Made It

“The enslaved, free people of color, and Native peoples were pushed out of the charmed circle of the polity in order to permit equality to reign within.”
― Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, The Age of Revolutions: And the Generations Who Made It

“Having grown accustomed to sharing social and cultural spaces, elite and working-class revolutionaries after 1800 were far more comfortable than their forebears had been taking part in mixed-class political movements.”
― Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, The Age of Revolutions: And the Generations Who Made It