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.

罗伯特·达恩顿（Robert Darnton,1939—），美国当代著名历史学家。1960年，毕业于哈佛大学，1964年获得牛津大学历史学博士学位，曾任普林斯顿大学教授、美国历史协会主席。主要研究领域为文化史、18世纪法国史和书籍史，曾出版《屠猫狂欢》、《启蒙运动的生意》、《法国大革命前的畅销禁书》、《华盛顿的假牙》等多部新文化史著作。