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

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.

Author: Robert Darnton
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 05/01/2003
Pages: 228
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.65lbs
Size: 8.50h x 5.50w x 0.52d
ISBN: 9780393337471

About the Author
Darnton, Robert: - Robert Darnton is the Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor Emeritus and University Librarian Emeritus at Harvard University. His honors include a MacArthur Prize, the National Humanities Medal, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and election to the French Legion of Honor. He is the author of Censors at Work, The Great Cat Massacre, and The Forbidden Bestsellers of Pre-Revolutionary France, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award.