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The Expanding Blaze is a sweeping history of how the American Revolution inspired revolutions throughout Europe and the Atlantic world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Jonathan Israel, one of the world´s leading historians of the Enlightenment, shows how the radical ideas of American founders such as Paine, Jefferson, Franklin, Madison, and Monroe set the pattern for democratic revolutions, movements, and constitutions in France, Britain, Ireland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Poland, Greece, Canada, Haiti, Brazil, and Spanish America. The first major new intellectual history of the age of democratic revolution in decades, The Expanding Blaze returns the American Revolution to its global context.

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"Six decades after R. R. Palmer´s epic Age of the Democratic Revolution, Jonathan Israel has revived and powerfully extended the argument about the world-shaking reach of the radical ideas of the American Revolution - universal and equal rights, democratic republicanism, secular rather than religious rule, and justice for all. In a shrewd, captivating analysis of the Atlantic-wide contest between the moderate and radical elements of the Enlightenment from the American Revolution to the revolutions of 1848, Israel shows that while the lamp of radical Enlightenment ideas could be deplored, dampened, and suppressed, it was impossible for generations to extinguish what Thomas Paine called sparks from the altar of Seventy-six.´"--Gary B. Nash, author of The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America

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Jonathan Israel is professor emeritus of modern history at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. His many books include Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution from "The Rights of Man" to Robespierre and A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy (both Princeton).

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