Revolutionary Rhetoric Research Articles

Liberty or Death: Patrick Henry, Theatrical Song, and Transatlantic Patriot Politics

abstract: This “Consider the Source” piece examines the origins of Patrick Henry’s well-known phrase “Give me liberty or give me death!” It suggests that Henry may have borrowed from one of the least elevated of literary contexts: a comedic musical interlude from the London stage. This potential connection both affirms the transatlantic nature of American revolutionary rhetoric and shows that the locus of this rhetorical exchange was socially broad, occurring across “low” as well as elite genres.

The Greek Military Dictatorship: Revisiting a Troubled Past, 1967–1974 by Othon Anastasakis and Katerina Lagos, eds.

<i>The Greek Military Dictatorship: Revisiting a Troubled Past, 1967–1974</i> by Othon Anastasakis and Katerina Lagos, eds.

Una historia de la emancipación negra: Esclavitud y abolición en la Argentina

The abolition of Latin American slavery has long been recognized as a complex and contentious process stretching over several decades. Historians who study that process face the challenge of incorporating into their stories multiple actors: state officials, lawyers, journalists, activists, and, not least, enslaved people actively seeking freedom. That approach has generated a rich historiography, ranging from early work by Emília Viotti da Costa, Robert Conrad, Rebecca Scott, and others up through recent books by scholars such as Jeffrey Needell, Angela Alonso, and Yesenia Barragan. Based on deep and meticulous research and clearly and effectively written, Magdalena Candioti's Una historia de la emancipación negra is a worthy addition to that literature.Candioti begins her story with the profoundly destabilizing impacts of national independence on the institution of slavery. Revolutionary rhetoric that compared Spanish rule to enslavement and that promised to strike off the chains of colonial rule inevitably raised the question of whether that promise included the chains of slavery. Since many, and probably most, independence leaders were themselves slave owners, this question struck uncomfortably close to home. The contradiction between national freedom and continuing enslavement produced first the abolition of the African slave trade in 1812 and then the Free Womb Law (Ley de Libertad de Vientres) the following year. The law decreed that children of enslaved mothers would continue to serve their mothers' enslavers until reaching the age of majority (16 for females, 20 for males), at which point they would achieve full freedom.One ambiguity of the new law was whether children of enslaved mothers were born free (and were therefore ingenuos) or whether they were born enslaved and then immediately freed (and were therefore libertos). The Reglamento de Libertos, approved a month after the initial law, settled that question and laid out the regulations governing this new class of persons. In 1840, a court in Tucumán found that “los derechos y obligaciones que tiene el patrono [enslaver of the child's mother] respecto del liberto son los mismos que tiene un amo respecto de un esclavo; . . . ambos tienen el derecho de servirse y sacar del liberto y esclavo una justa utilidad” (p. 88; emphasis in original). Patronos were also free to sell their libertos (after the age of two) to other owners, and Candioti finds many instances of slave parents going to the police to request assistance in getting their children back, “con suerte dispar” (p. 86).Meanwhile, those Africans and Afro-Argentines who had been enslaved at the time of the Free Womb Law's passage remained enslaved. They continued to pursue freedom in the same ways that they had pursued it under colonial rule, through negotiating with their enslavers and accumulating the savings with which to buy their freedom. Candioti finds that the same system of coartación (enslaver and enslaved person agreeing in advance on a fixed purchase price) that existed in Cuba, Peru, and other countries operated in Argentina as well, and that, as in other countries, women were clearly favored over men in grants of manumission (pp. 111–12).Independence further undermined slavery by opening another route to freedom, through military service. Several thousand slaves were conscripted into rebel armies and then into provincial forces during the civil wars that followed independence. Slaves could also volunteer for service, and many did so. Conscription was no guarantee of freedom, however, since many draftees died or returned from service broken in health.With no new slaves being born or imported from Africa, by the 1840s slavery's days in Argentina were clearly numbered. Reviewing the debates in the constitutional assembly of 1852–53, Candioti finds that Article 15, which abolished slavery, was approved with zero discussion, no voices speaking either for or against the measure. The constitution made no provision for compensation to former enslavers, but several provinces did institute programs that compensated owners for their liberated property.Throughout her book, Candioti stresses the tensions and disconnects between legal principles and daily lived reality, and the constant process of negotiation among enslaved persons, libertos, enslavers, and state officials. She has dug deep into administrative, judicial, and church archives and into nineteenth-century newspapers, and has made excellent use of the outpouring of research in recent years on Black and subaltern history in Argentina. Finally, rather than confining herself to Buenos Aires, she surveys conditions and practices throughout Argentina while simultaneously calling for further research on those provinces. All these aspects make the book a signal achievement and the obligatory reference for how slavery came to an end in Argentina.

All for Liberty: The Charleston Workhouse Slave Rebellion of 1849 by Jeff Strickland

Reviewed by: All for Liberty: The Charleston Workhouse Slave Rebellion of 1849 by Jeff Strickland William D. Jones All for Liberty: The Charleston Workhouse Slave Rebellion of 1849. By Jeff Strickland. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Pp. xiv, 276. Paper, $29.99, ISBN 978-1-108-71691-8.) Jeff Strickland has written an excellent account of a little-known slave rebellion that took place in the public workhouse of Charleston, South Carolina, in July 1849. Some twenty enslaved people fought and defeated the guards of the workhouse and engineered the escape of thirty-seven people imprisoned there. The inciting event occurred in the morning, when an enslaved man named Nicholas and some allies defended an unnamed enslaved woman from a slave trader, who had arrived at the workhouse to retrieve her for medical treatment and eventual sale. The jailers and city authorities were slow to respond, providing Nicholas and others with time to organize and arm themselves with tools. Though white militiamen captured most of the escapees within hours of the uprising, and the Charleston Courts of Magistrates and Freeholders tried and executed Nicholas and other accused leaders two days later, the rebellion at the workhouse influenced local politics. Strickland argues that the incident encouraged jail and policing reforms, raised nativist fears, and led enslavers to further question the position of the church in a slave society. He also contends that the city annexed the Charleston Neck because of the rebellion, since the new workhouse in the Neck became the only place [End Page 144] for Charleston enslavers to imprison enslaved people while the old one was under renovation. Strickland weaves together two strands of historical analysis. On the one hand, he contextualizes the 1849 workhouse rebellion, understanding it as a product of the workhouse conditions, urban enslavement, and the revolutionary thought that circulated in the Atlantic world. To understand the rebellion, he contends, the reader must also understand the highly policed nature of urban enslavement and the place of the workhouse in Charleston’s system of racial slavery. Charleston enslavers sent enslaved people to the workhouse to be whipped. Authorities imprisoned fugitive enslaved people there. The work-house was also on the site of the city’s slave market, so slave traders often confined people in it before and after sale. Other elements important to nineteenth-century southern history, including revolutionary rhetoric, slave rebellions, and the domestic slave trade, are likewise important to the story of this uprising. On the other hand, readers must understand who Nicholas was, and Strickland provides the best biography of the rebellion’s leader possible. Born enslaved, Nicholas at a young age fell into the hands of William Kelly, a plasterer, who trained Nicholas in his trade and often hired him out to others. When Nicholas was a young adult in the mid-1840s, Kelly left Charleston for New Orleans and took the people he enslaved to Louisiana with him. There, Kelly allowed Nicholas latitude in his labor arrangements, so much so that when Kelly returned to South Carolina, he left Nicholas behind to continue his lucrative work. After Kelly discovered that Nicholas was withholding the wages he earned in New Orleans, the enslaver transported him back to Charleston against his will. As Kelly tried to sell Nicholas there, the enslaved man resisted a search of his body and assaulted an employee of a slave trader, which landed Nicholas in the workhouse. Strickland’s accessible prose, narrative style, and comprehensive contextualization mix well with his fascinating and enlightening analyses of the workhouse and urban enslavement. All for Liberty: The Charleston Workhouse Slave Rebellion of 1849 will be excellent to teach with. As contemporary public rhetoric emphasizes prison and policing reform, the intertwined histories of the enslavement and the incarceration of Black people that Strickland depicts is as revelatory as it is harrowing. For as much as All for Liberty has to say about the nineteenth-century United States, the story of the 1849 workhouse rebellion may have even more to say about the country today. William D. Jones Rice University Copyright © 2023 The Southern Historical Association

Legitimation in revolutionary discourse

Abstract This paper analyzes the legitimation strategies used by Jerry John Rawlings, a Ghanaian revolutionary leader, to license his revolutionary actions, including political enemy executions and a crackdown on corrupt practices. It adapts and extends van Leeuwen’s legitimation framework by demonstrating how Rawlings exploited historical memory and the notion of sacrifice in conjunction with the strategies of authorization, rationalization and moralization to formulate his revolutionary rhetoric. The analysis reveals that the legitimation strategies enabled Rawlings to project a patriot-cum-nationalist identity as well as construct himself as a noble revolutionary mandated by the people of Ghana to represent their interests, protect them from evildoers and lead the process of social transformation. The study illustrates the persuasive power of revolutionary discourses in terms of how they function ideologically in the message they communicate (or exaggerate) and conceal.

Pushed into Consciousness

This essay reflects on Laurie Lambert’s study Comrade Sister: Caribbean Feminist Revisions of the Grenada Revolution (2020), which investigates contemporary Caribbean literary reimaginings of the Grenadian Revolution and makes visible how that history impacts Grenada today. Comrade Sister asks readers to wrestle with historical ghosts and uncomfortable truths that undergird liberation movements, including Grenada’s. For Lambert, those ghosts manifest as ancestral knowledge. This essay explores ancestral knowledge as an ontological project that, at its core, is concerned with pushing-into-consciousness revolutionary narratives that have been forgotten, hidden, or overlooked because they were produced outside of or do not align with revolutionary rhetoric and official accounts. By retrieving what has been lost, ancestral knowledge demonstrates how revolutionary tales can be told another way and, thus, how revolutions can be enacted differently.

Wives Not Slaves: Patriarchy and Modernity in the Age of Revolutions by Kirsten Sword

Wives Not Slaves places marital disputes at the center of the history of patriarchy in the British Atlantic and early United States. Tales of deserting wives and abusive husbands, local court battles, and public accusations—the gendered conflicts of everyday life—show how patriarchy retained its grip and resisted efforts to transform it. The book’s subtitle raises expectations of a broader study and even an interdisciplinary one. Instead, Sword focuses on patriarchal law and legal culture in the context of economic change, racial slavery, revolutionary ideology, and the press. Her detailed analysis historicizes the workings of patriarchy and women’s defiance in ways that feminist theory and other disciplinary perspectives may overlook.Sword examines local legal cases in England and the American colonies that reveal a patchwork of jurisdictions, courts, and decisions addressing domestic disputes. Despite their femme covert status, wives not only had a degree of legal redress in the seventeenth century, but courts were also inclined to take a back seat to kin and neighbors who mediated conflicts. By the mid-eighteenth century, however, published legal commentaries, especially about the precedent set by Manby v. Scott (1663), narrowed wives’ ability to claim consideration under coverture. Invoking “ancient precedents” of male privilege masked legal innovations that deepened husbands’ authority over dependent wives, children, servants, and enslaved people. Legal commentaries thus created essentialized understandings of patriarchy, even as they reshaped it for a modern world.Husbands and wives had another way to address their domestic grievances, the press. They advertised against each other to avoid the legal system, influence public opinion, and reach beyond local communities. Modeled on advertisements for runaway slaves, husbands’ ads addressed deserting wives. They accused women of shirking their duty, announced their refusal to pay their wives’ bills, and offered forgiveness to wives who returned. These ads especially reveal men’s increased vulnerability in a risky credit-based economy, a significant context for understanding patriarchal law. Women, in turn, condemned husbands’ abusive behavior and attempts to control their property. As Sword emphasizes, such was the disruptive “new media” in early America. When legal remedies were unavailing, women articulated their oppression through advertising.“If I am your Wife, I am not your Slave,” declared Eunice Davis in a 1762 advertisement (3). Such statements opened possibilities for changing the balance of gendered power. They reflect the revolutionary rhetoric of the eighteenth century, as well as the culture of sensibility, which condemned male violence and women’s powerlessness, urging marital love and companionship. Some women writers, however, offered a pointed call for greater female autonomy, joining sentimental fiction to the revolutionary ideology of independence. Although largely the purview of elite women, these sentiments sometimes appeared in the language of ordinary women’s advertised complaints. Their claims made little headway, however, except to move men toward enlightened paternalism. “Revolutionary legal culture gave husbands and masters expansive rights,” Sword explains. “The culture of sensibility pushed them to exercise them quietly” (284).Nineteenth-century feminists saw the emancipation of wives and slaves as parallel paths to modernity, but Sword shows how much the interests of white wives and enslaved people were at odds as racial slavery became entrenched in the early United States. Affluent white women claimed property rights in the enslaved as they resisted despotic husbands. Free Black men sued for their wives’ freedom, arguing that their own patriarchal authority took precedence over slaveholders’ rights. Ironically, slave states and antislavery activists both had their reasons for opposing divorce.What is most striking in Sword’s analysis, indeed dispiriting, is how much the stories of male abuse and marital conflict repeat themselves over time, even as women found new ways to give voice to their discontent. Progress narratives and Enlightenment assumptions notwithstanding, patriarchy has been a shape-shifter, adapting to legal, political, and economic challenges yet continuing to maintain masculine authority. This excellent, fine-grained study connects legal regimes to patriarchy’s quotidian preservation.

6 - We Are the Sons of Mau Mau! Re-Assessing the Historiography of Resistance in Kenya, 1924-2008

Mungiki is a politico-religious group and a banned criminal organization in Kenya. The organisation, which apparently originated in the late 1980s, is secretive and bears some similarity to mystery religions. Specifics of their origin and doctrines are unclear. What is clear is that they favour a return to indigenous African traditions and reject Westernisation and all trappings of colonialism. These include; rejection of Christianity, and the practice by the Mungiki of forced female genital cutting. The ideology of the group is characterised by revolutionary rhetoric, Kikuyu traditions, and a disdain for modernization, which is seen as immoral corruption. Their participation in recent ethnic wars in Kenya has evoked serious academic concerns on the group. What is interesting is that the followers of the so-called Mungiki youth sect, whose 500,000 members see themselves as ‘the true sons of the Mau Mau’. By using interdisciplinary approaches, I intend to show the myriad ways in which youth construct their own identity and how they derive power and inspirations from the past (Mau Mau). I not only introduce problems surrounding conceptions of Mungiki and the generation, but also show how conflicts between the young (Mungiki) and older (Mau Mau) generations reconfigure power in society.

‘I Did Not Wash My Hand for Days’

This article focuses on the reception of revolutionary oratory in what was once known as The People’s Revolutionary Republic of Guinea. Sékou Touré, Guinea’s first president, captivated the nation with fiery, unscripted speeches lasting four, five, or six hours. Guinean audiences were enthralled by his sublime revolutionary rhetoric. In a 2008 coup, Captain Moussa Dadis Camara declared himself president, attempting to recreate the fervour of Guinea’s revolutionary days. Guinean citizens initially provided a willing revolutionary audience, though Camara’s oratory fell far short of Touré’s example. The article explores how the effects of shock and boredom that Ngai describes as ‘stuplimity’ (2005) emerged in reaction to Camara’s performances. Stuplimity was a halfway point between Guineans’ initial ‘revolutionary’ suspension of disbelief regarding the junta’s intentions and their subsequent rejection and anger, which led to the junta’s collapse less than a year after it took power.

POLICING THE DIGITAL REALMS: REFLECTION ON COMMUNITY POLICING DISCOURSES IN THE DIGITAL REALMS

This paper tends to reconceptualize community policing as the embodiment of community oriented policing related to the shifting definition of community. In response to these dynamics, the issue of the relationship between the digital realm and community policing that has been implemented is important to study. The study is expected to reflect thoughts on the issue of crime in the digital realm, concepts and models of community policing, as well as ways to increase the potential of contextual Community Policing. How to increase the potential for community policing so that it can be used in dealing with problems in the digital realm according to the development of the digital realms, especially the rhetoric of Revolution 4.0 in contemporary Indonesia.KEYWORDS: Community Policing, Community Virtual, Discourses

Disruptors’ dilemma? Thailand’s 2020 Gen Z protests

ABSTRACT This article offers a preliminary analysis of the hundreds of youth-inspired mass protests staged in Thailand during 2020. It argues that while calling for reforms and flirting with revolutionary rhetoric, the protestors lacked a clear programmatic agenda and were primarily engaged in disrupting dominant narratives about the country’s politics, especially in relation to the previously taboo question of the political role of the monarchy. Despite the ad hoc and sometimes incoherent nature of the protests, the students mounted a dramatic challenge to Thailand’s ruling elite. Ultimately, the conflict exemplified a generational divide: people from Generation Z, aged under 25, have radically different understandings of power, deference and legitimacy from older population groups. Whatever happens to the protest movement in the short term, the demonstrators have made a decisive break with the old social consensus that existed during the long reign of the late King Bhumibol (1946–2016).

An Appraisal of SekouToure’s Ideological and Integral Nationalism

The paper examines the political philosophy of SekouToure on ideological and integral Nationalism in Guinea. The study started with discussing structures of biographical and social experience of Toure and the concept of ideological and integral Nationalism. The study threads his philosophical reflections by illustrating and examining Party and State, National Democracy and African socialism. Toure refined, re-emphasized, enriched updated and strengthened these fundamental elements. The paper submit that his ideological positions is central to nation-building, and ideological education as essential for welding together Guinea from disparate ethnic groups and instilling patriotism those ideas. The paper is analytical and adopted the use of secondary method of data collection. Despite some of the positive advancements in the social infrastructure-education, health, the evolution of confidence in the Guinea women, the development of national languages, the popular resistance of the Guinean laboring masses and progressive sections of the petty bourgeoisie against revolution from above, underscore the fact that the emancipation of the working peoples must be the task of the working classes themselves. The findings on the philosophy of Toure show that, the post-independence Guinea was caught up in a political and economic crisis originating from Guinea's continued integration into the world-wide capitalist system; its further exposes that the crisis is compounded by an ideological confusion, and revolutionary rhetoric, based on the revolutionary myth of Ahmed Toure as an institution synonymous with the Democratic Party of Guinea.

Woman in the urban guerrilla: gender problem and the Tupamaros Movement in Uruguay (1962—1972)

The Tupamaros Movement in the 1960s — early 1970s, despite its military nature, stood out among the rest of the left Uruguayan organizations by high participation rate of women. That means that the movement was attractive to the politically active women. This article is the first in Russian historiography attempt to throw light on the situation of women in the Tupamaros Movement. This work analyzes structures of masculinity and femininity in the discourse and practice of the movement. Gender is regarded as socially constructed phenomenon. The author reveals the principal causes of the joining of women in the organization, considers the revolutionary rhetoric of the group concerning the gender problem and compares this rhetoric with the practice. Furthermore, the article investigates the influence of the second-wave feminism on the Uruguayan public opinion and reveals the opinion of the Tupamaros’ men and women on this socio-political current.

Following Radical and Mainstream African-American Interest Groups on Social Media

Groups across the political spectrum use social media as a tool for effecting change. This article analyzes posts on the micro-blogging platform Twitter to compare the online advocacy of the NAACP—one of the oldest and most established racial justice organizations—to Black Youth Project 100 (BYP100)—a newer organization that emerged at the start of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2013. Using data from an original dataset composed of 4,094 tweets posted from April 2016 to December 2016, I show that the NAACP is exponentially less likely than BYP100 to address issues related to gender and sexuality but significantly more likely to advocate for electoral political strategies like voting. Newer organizations do better at addressing a diverse African American constituency, but can neglect effective yet incremental reform strategies in favor of revolutionary rhetoric and action. This article encourages a consideration of how Black social movement organizations that are ostensibly very different can leverage multiple movement frames in service of a collective goal to combat racial violence and inequality. I conclude by considering organizational constraints that explain the differential rates with which these organizations discuss certain issues and the relative values of radical and mainstream political organizing.

Terror and Self-Evidence: Robespierre and the General Will

ABSTRACTThis essay looks at the relationship between two apparently conflicting features of revolutionary rhetoric, especially during and leading into the French Revolution. On the one hand, revolutionary rhetoric is regularly premised on its own inescapable obviousness, symptomatically declaring “truths” that are ratified by their very self-evidence. On the other, it is premised on the will to persuade, on a countervailing confidence that it can effect change only through constant struggle and wide-scale organization. I argue that this antinomic duality in modern revolutionary rhetoric is sustained by a limited conception of “self-evidence,” one that impairs revolutionary agency in ways that make the Terror inevitable. I conclude by considering one possibility for resolving this impairment.

Влияние идей Ф. Ницше и Л. Фейербаха на феномен богостроительства в России

The article is aimed at reconstruction and analysis of the process of the formation of the God-building theory in Russia of the early 20th century. The significant role that German philosophy, primarily the ideas of L. Feuerbach and F.&nbsp;Nietzsche, played in this process is also under study. The author stresses that the Russian intellectuals who are known to have contributed to the theory of God-building, first of all Maksim Gorky, Anatoly Lunacharsky, Aleksandr Bogdanov, and Vladimir Bazarov, creatively interpreted the teachings of German philosophers to find grounds for their own position. The historical, philosophical, and anthropological con­texts of the formation of the God-building theory are described and examined. The author shows why this theory appeared, what ideological niche it found to be an element of the political discourse of Bolshevism. It is proved that Gorky’s worldview was directly or indirectly influenced by German philosophers, mainly Nietzsche. This could be both the result of direct reception of their ideas, and the product of indirect assimilation due to the impact on the writer of his environment. In addition, revolutionary rhetoric and a large-scale transformation of the socio-cultural context had a great influence on the formation of Gorky’s worldview and the theory of God-building. It is noted that the origins of Gorky’s cultural experience, which is regarded in the article as the basis of the God-building theory, cannot be comprehensively reconstructed, since such a reconstruction would require turning to the sources that have been lost. Nevertheless, it is obvious that to gain a philosophical comprehension of the cultural experience of God-building is necessary in view of the crisis of ideology in modern Russia.

Поэтика и контекст оды Михаила Кузмина «Враждебное море» (1917) [“Vrazhdebnoe more” (“The Hostile Sea,” 1917) by Mikhail Kuzmin: The Ode’s Poetics and Context

The article explores Mikhail Kuzmin’s poem The Hostile Sea ( Vrazhdebnoe More ) in the context of the poet’s attitude to the First World War and the Russian Revolution. It brings into focus the poem’s main images and themes in their relation to the revolutionary rhetoric and Kuzmin’s poetic system. Particular attention is paid to the dialogue between Kuzmin and Vladimir Mayakovsky as reflected in this poem. In addition, the article traces the history of the poem from its creation in 1917 to the poem’s first publication in 1918. KEYWORDS: 20 th -Century Russian Literature, Mikhail Kuzmin (1872—1936), Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893—1930), Vrazhdebnoe more (1917), Close Reading, History of Literature.

Evolving Chinese Nationalism: Using the 2015 Military Parade as a Case

Nationalist discourse has long been an important apparatus in modern politics. This paper showed a sharp, yet subtle departure of the Chinese government in its current manipulation of nationalism. Instead of the hardcore revolutionary rhetoric, the new phase of nationalist discourse incorporated many elements of Confucianism to better consolidate the communist regime. Using the 2015 military parade as an example, this paper analyzed how the Chinese central government evoked sentiments and consciousness of nationalism by utilizing and interweaving Confucianism elements of family value, benevolent (Ren), propriety (Li), equilibrium, and harmony into the party-state’s official nationalist discourse. Significance of such organized endeavors in political discourse is discussed.

Review: The Architecture of Percier and Fontaine and the Struggle for Sovereignty in Revolutionary France, by Iris Moon

Iris Moon The Architecture of Percier and Fontaine and the Struggle for Sovereignty in Revolutionary France London: Routledge, 2017, 186 pp., 10 color and 40 b/w illus. $160 (cloth), ISBN 9781472480163 “Relationships,” Iris Moon tells us, “are a form of paperwork” (13). In this fascinating book, she asserts that bureaucracy of various kinds underpins our understanding of how the architectural team of Charles Percier and Pierre-Francois-Leonard Fontaine established their mutual practice, continuing it against the odds through dramatic regime changes in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century France. More important, however, paper itself—as maddeningly contingent material substrate, as substitute for solid buildings, and as money—emerges here as a determining force. With so many projects unrealized or unrealizable during the French Revolution and Empire, architecture took to the page. Moon's focus is how interior decoration provided new ways of giving shape to hitherto unimaginable forms of modern sovereignty while simultaneously realizing architectural ambitions that were otherwise thwarted. This concentration on the interior marks a notable departure from much scholarship on the Revolution's visual culture. Internalizing revolutionary rhetoric about the virtues of transparent political spaces, scholars have tended to accentuate that culture's more monumental public-facing forms, masking an unease about revolutionary architecture's perceived lack of substance and betraying a suspicion that its facades concealed little of note. However, Moon is eager to stress that Percier and Fontaine's remarkable designs for interiors should not be read as mere compensation for a paucity of resources. Rather, their attention to mobile objects such as furniture was bound to more profound historical dynamics: the Revolution's destruction of buildings and the way architectural spaces and the objects they contained were rendered fungible by the new commercial opportunities that followed the Terror. Moon argues compellingly that Percier and Fontaine's development of an aesthetic of classical order made sense as a bulwark against the motility of visual signs, the instability of materials, and the processes of repurposing and making do that characterized the politically and commercially insecure climate of postrevolutionary Paris. …

Rachel Carson and the Rhetoric of Revolution

Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring is justly remembered as a landmark in the history of modern environmentalism. It is, however, a more complicated text than cultural memory tends to acknowledge. Blending conservative and traditional elements with more progressive and pioneering ones, Silent Spring is marked by a complexity that extends to its reception and legacy. This article argues that—in a seeming paradox—it was the more conservative elements of Silent Spring that allowed it to be considered a revolutionary book. Carson carefully constructed her argument in ways that facilitated its initial acceptance. But those same decisions made it easier for supporters to de-emphasize its more radical implications, even as they granted it revolutionary status.