The decades following the French Revolution saw unprecedented political and social experimentation. As the Napoleonic and Restoration regimes attempted to build a stable order, ordinary city dwellers began to create their own sense of how society operated through everyday activities. Interactions between men and women--in theaters, cafes, and other public settings--helped to fashion new social norms.

In this extensively researched work, Denise Z. Davidson offers a powerful reevaluation of the effects of the French Revolution, especially on women. Arguing against the view that the Revolution forced women from the public realm of informed political discussion, Davidson demonstrates that women remained highly visible in urban public life. Women of all classes moved out of the domestic sphere to participate in the spectacle of city life, inviting frequent commentary on their behavior. This began to change only in the 1820s, when economic and social developments intensified class distinctions and made the bourgeoisie fear the "dangerous classes."

This book provides an important corrective to prevailing views on the ramifications of the French Revolution, while shedding light on how ordinary people understood, shaped, and contested the social transformations taking place around them.

The Mongol conquest of north China between 1211 and 1234 inflicted terrible wartime destruction, wiping out more than one-third of the population and dismantling the existing social order. In the Wake of the Mongols recounts the riveting story of how northern Chinese men and women adapted to these trying circumstances and interacted with their alien Mongol conquerors to create a drastically new social order. To construct this story, the book uses a previously unknown source of inscriptions recorded on stone tablets.

Jinping Wang explores a north China where Mongol patrons, Daoist priests, Buddhist monks, and sometimes single women—rather than Confucian gentry—exercised power and shaped events, a portrait that upends the conventional view of imperial Chinese society. Setting the stage by portraying the late Jin and closing by tracing the Mongol period’s legacy during the Ming dynasty, she delineates the changing social dynamics over four centuries in the northern province of Shanxi, still a poorly understood region.