BiblioVault - Books about Revolution

Dandyism in the Age of Revolution

The Art of the Cut

Elizabeth Amann

University of Chicago Press, 2014

From the color of a politician’s tie, to exorbitantly costly haircuts, to the size of an American flag pin adorning a lapel, it’s no secret that style has political meaning. And there was no time in history when the politics of fashion was more fraught than during the French Revolution. In the 1790s almost any article of clothing could be scrutinized for evidence of one’s political affiliation. A waistcoat with seventeen buttons, for example, could be a sign of counterrevolution—a reference to Louis XVII—and earn its wearer a trip to the guillotine.

In Dandyism in the Age of Revolution, Elizabeth Amann shows that in France, England, and Spain, daring dress became a way of taking a stance toward the social and political upheaval of the period. France is the centerpiece of the story, not just because of the significance of the Revolution but also because of the speed with which its politics and fashions shifted. Dandyism in France represented an attempt to recover a political center after the extremism of the Terror, while in England and Spain it offered a way to reflect upon the turmoil across the Channel and Pyrenees. From the Hair Powder Act, which required users of the product to purchase a permit, to the political implications of the feather in Yankee Doodle’s hat, Amann aims to revise our understanding of the origins of modern dandyism and to recover the political context from which it emerged.

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Daughter of the Revolution

The Major Nonfiction Works of Pauline Hopkins

Dworkin, Ira

Rutgers University Press, 2007

Pauline E. Hopkins (1859–1930) came to prominence in the early years of the twentieth century as an outspoken writer, editor, and critic. Frequently recognized for her first novel, Contending Forces, she is currently one of the most widely read and studied African American novelists from that period.

While nearly all of Hopkins’s fiction remains in print, there is very little of her nonfiction available. This reader brings together dozens of her hard-to-find essays, including longer nonfiction works such as Famous Men of the Negro Race and The Dark Races of the Twentieth Century, some of which are published here for the first time in their entirety.

Through these works, along with two juvenile essays from the 1870s, a personal letter, and two speeches, readers encounter a voice that is committed to constructing an international discourse on race, recovering the militant abolitionist tradition to combat Jim Crow, celebrating black political participation during and after the Reconstruction era, articulating the connections between race and labor, and insisting on equal rights for women. Hopkins’s writing will challenge contemporary scholars to rethink their understanding of black activism and modernity in the early twentieth century.

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The Demands of Liberty

Civil Society in France since the Revolution

Pierre Rosanvallon

Harvard University Press, 2007

How does France reconcile the modern movement toward pluralism and decentralization with a strong central governing power? One of the country's most distinguished political historians offers a radical new interpretation of the development of democracy in France and the relationship between government and its citizens.

Since the publication of Tocqueville's Ancient Regime and the Revolution, French political structures have been viewed as the pure expression of a native Jacobinism, itself the continuation of an old absolutism. This interpretation has served as both a diagnosis of and an excuse for the inability to accept pluralism and decentralization as norms of a modern democracy, as evidenced in such policies as the persistence of the role of prefects and the ban on headscarves in schools.

Pierre Rosanvallon, by contrast, argues that the French have cherished and demonized Jacobinism at the same time; their hearts followed Robespierre, but their heads turned toward Benjamin Constant. The Demands of Liberty traces the long history of resistance to Jacobinism, including the creation of associations and unions and the implementation of elements of decentralization. Behind the ideological triumph of the state lies the conflicting creation of an active civil society.

In exploring these tensions, Rosanvallon takes the debate far beyond traditional views of liberalism versus republicanism and offers an innovative analysis of why the French system has worked despite Jacobinism.

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Democracy and Revolution

Latin America and Socialism Today

D. L. Raby

Pluto Press, 2006

Is socialism dead since the fall of the Soviet Union? What is the way forward for the Left? D. L. Raby argues that Cuba and, above all, Venezuela provide inspiration for antiglobalization and anticapitalist movements across the world. Another World Is Possible, but only through an effective political strategy to win power on a popular and democratic basis.

Raby argues passionately that the way forward for progressives is not the dogmatic formulae of the Old Left, nor in the spontaneous autonomism of Antonio Negri. Instead, it is to be found in broad popular movements with bold leadership. Examining key leaders, including Hugo Chávez and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, Raby shows that it is more necessary than ever to take power, peacefully where possible, but in all cases with the strength that comes from popular unity backed by force where necessary. In this way it is possible to build democratic power, which may or may not be socialist depending on one's definition, but which represent the real anti-capitalist alternative for the twenty-first century.

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Democracy is the Answer

Egypt's Years of Revolution

Alaa Al Aswany

Gingko, 2014

As the Egyptian revolution unfolded throughout 2011 and the ensuing years, no one was better positioned to comment on it—and try to push it in productive directions—than best-selling novelist and political commentator Alaa Al-Aswany. For years a leading critic of the Mubarak regime, Al-Aswany used his weekly newspaper column for Al-Masry Al-Youm to propound the revolution’s ideals and to confront the increasingly troubled politics of its aftermath.

This book presents, for the first time in English, all of Al-Aswany’s columns from the period, a comprehensive account of the turmoil of the post-revolutionary years, and a portrait of a country and a people in flux. Each column is presented along with a context-setting introduction, as well as notes and a glossary, all designed to give non-Egyptian readers the background they need to understand the events and figures that Al-Aswany chronicles. The result is a definitive portrait of Egypt today—how it got here, and where it might be headed.

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Dispatches from the Revolution

Russia 1916-1918

Morgan Philips Price

Duke University Press, 1998

A special correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, Morgan Philips Price was one of the few Englishmen in Russia during all phases of the Revolution. Although his Bolshevik sympathies accorded him an insider’s perspective on much of the turmoil, his reports were often heavily revised or suppressed. In Dispatches from the Revolution, Tania Rose collects for the first time Price’s correspondence from Russia—official and unofficial, published and unpublished—to reveal a side of Russian life and politics that fell largely unreported in the years before, during, and after the Revolution.
This collection includes Price’s pre-censored observations and comment, written for a range of British publications, as well as letters, postcards, and other writings. A foreword by Eric Hobsbawm and introductory material by Rose place Price’s observations in biographical and historical context. Dispatches from the Revolution offers an account of the Russian Revolution from an eyewitness whose political commitment, fluency in Russian, and extensive travel far beyond the cities permitted him to write, uniquely, not only of metropolitan news and politics, but also of the experiences and issues signficant to ordinary peasants, workers, and soldiers in remote areas of the Russian empire.
An important source to scholars of Russian history, this book will also appeal to general readers with interests in Russia, journalism, and world affairs.

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A Documentary History of Communism and the World

From Revolution to Collapse

Edited by Robert V. Daniels

Brandeis University Press, 1994

In the ten years since the last edition of this book, the world has undergone tremendous and, seemingly irrevocable change. With the virtual demise of the international communist movement and the increasing isolation of the remaining old-style regimes, communism has become history. Robert V. Daniels has updated his definitive work to chronicle the last years of international communism. It contains a new chapter with 22 documents pertaining to such key ideas and events as perestroika, the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, and the Tiananmen Massacre. Together with his Documentary History of Communism in Russia, this book provides a complete documentary history of the communist movement from Lenin and world revolution to Gorbachev and the end of world communism.

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