Revolutions and Generations: A Conversation With Nathan Perl-Rosenthal and David G. Troyansky

This conversation brings together the authors of two recent books that both address themes of revolution and generation. They ask overlapping but distinct questions. How should we characterize different cohorts’ experiences of revolution, whether they had grown up in a pre-revolutionary era, matured in time of revolution, or operated in the longer-term aftermath of revolution? University of Southern California Professor Nathan Perl-Rosenthal’s The Age of Revolutions and the Generations Who Made It (New York: Basic Books, 2024) examines two generations of revolutionaries in late–18th- and early–19th-century Europe and the Americas, while Brooklyn College Professor of History David G. Troyansky’s Entitlement and Complaint: Ending Careers and Reviewing Lives in Post-Revolutionary France (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023) explores careers and memories across the first half of the 19th century. What did it mean to be a revolutionary? How did individuals make revolutions, survive revolutions, and build identities in the shadow of revolution? And how did revolutionary pasts feed into the creation of institutions associated with the modern political world?

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