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

By Robert Darnton

Book Overview

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393337472
• ISBN13: 9780393337471
• Release Date: May 2003
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 228 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Enjoyable

The unconventional in the subtitle "An Unconventional Guide to the Eighteenth Century" is a little deceiving. This reader expected to find curiosities large and small, such as Mr. Washington's false teeth in an exegesis to show how different that century was from the ones we grew up in. The unconventianility is really Mr. Darnton's insinuation of himself into the text with many allusions from the 18th century to ours. It's ok - it's a historian's sin he cheerily admits up front. So Paris's informal political communication networks of gossip, handbills, songs, subversive literature, et al. focuses on ... well ... the King's sex life. There's more to it than that, of course, but still, in all a lot like the internet and a certain recent president. The last chapter, "The Skeletons in the Closet: How Historians Play God" is worth the price of admission.