David A. Bell

Who Built France?

A new history explores France’s empire from the perspective of the indigenous and enslaved people who participated, willingly or not, in its creation.

A Baleful Legacy

Enlightenment writers who proposed ways of improving and even perfecting the human species laid the theoretical foundations of modern racism.

My Freedom, My Choice

A new book illuminates how freedom became associated with choice and questions whether that has been a good thing—for women in particular.

Piety & Power

A lively biography of Marie de Vignerot, the niece, confidante, and heiress of Cardinal Richelieu, sheds light on the religious passions and political intrigues of seventeenth-century France.

In My Mother’s Archive

Researching my mother’s friendships with Truman Capote and Elizabeth Bishop, her love affair with Dylan Thomas, and her own writing career, I discovered that she had led a courageous early life. 

An Unlikely Life

Ridley Scott’s Napoleon is a biopic that manages to omit or distort most of the central elements of Napoleon’s life and career.

Ego-Histories

The more that historians make their own experiences an explicit part of their work, the harder it will become to let the sources speak clearly.

Paris Transformed

Although Esther da Costa Meyer deplores the human costs of urban renewal in Paris during the Second Empire, she cannot disguise her appreciation for what was accomplished.

The End of the Terror

Colin Jones gives an hour-by-hour account of the Ninth of Thermidor, a day that marked a turning point in the French Revolution.

Rousseau & Slavery

Whose Freedom?

Tyler Stovall demonstrates the potent and noxious ways that people have conflated freedom with whiteness but pays too little attention to the force of freedom as a concept.

A Haunted Patrimony

Through their art collecting wealthy Jews staked a claim to being French, but the nation they loved savagely betrayed them.

The Duchess & the Jews

Did Britain Win the American Revolution?

The Contagious Revolution

In 1791 enslaved people in the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue—now called Haiti—staged the largest and most successful slave revolt in history.

From Readers to Revolutionaries

The Many Lives of Liberalism

Three new books illuminate the fragile nature of the ideas underlying rights-based liberal democracy.

‘Pity Is Treason’

The French Revolution: An Exchange

A Very Different French Revolution