George Washington's False Teeth: An Unconventional Guide to the Eighteenth Century

George Washington's False Teeth: An Unconventional Guide to the Eighteenth Century image
ISBN-10:

0393337472

ISBN-13:

9780393337471

Author(s): DARNTON, Robert
Edition: Illustrated
Released: May 17, 2003
Format: Paperback, 228 pages
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Description:

A master historian's excavations into the past unearth a world that is unexpected and compelling. George Washington was inaugurated as president in 1789 with one tooth in his mouth, a lower left bicuspid. The Father of His Country had sets of false teeth that were made of everything but wood, from elephant ivory and walrus tusk to the teeth of a fellow human. With characteristic learning and bracing insight, Robert Darnton shows us that the Enlightenment had false teeth alsothat it was not the Father of Our Modern World, responsible for all its advances and transgressions. In restoring the Enlightenment to human scale, Darnton locates its real aims, ambitions, and significance. So too with the French Revolution, another icon of the eighteenth century, approached here through the gossip, songs, and broadsides that formed the political nervous system of Paris in the Old Regime. Figures we think we knowVoltaire, Jefferson, Rousseau, Condorcet, even historians themselvesemerge afresh in Darnton's hands, their vitality, if not their teeth, intact. 17 b/w illustrations.











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