Twenty-second Lewis Walpole Library Lecture

October 6, 2016

Mr. Boswell Goes to Corsica: Charismatic Authority in the Age of Democratic Revolutions

David A. Bell
Sidney and Ruth Lapidus Professor, Department of History, Princeton University

Thursday, October 6, 2016

5:30 pm

The Yale Center for British Art Lecture Hall
1080 Chapel St, New Haven, CT 06520

The lecture examines how new ways of imagining political leadership emerged during the Enlightenment, across the Atlantic world, using as a case study the way the Corsican independence leader Pasquale Paoli become an unexpected hero in Britain and its American colonies. It then speculates on the way these ways of imagining political leadership helped shape the character of the great Atlantic revolutions of the century’s end.