eBook - ePub

The Imagined Empire

Name: The Imagined Empire
ISBN: 9780822981954

Balloon Enlightenments in Revolutionary Europe

Mi Gyung Kim,

English
ePUB (mobile friendly)
Available on iOS & Android

eBook - ePub

The Imagined Empire

Balloon Enlightenments in Revolutionary Europe

Mi Gyung Kim,

About this book

The hot-air balloon, invented by the Montgolfier brothers in 1783, launched for the second time just days before the Treaty of Paris would end the American Revolutionary War. The ascent in Paris—a technological marvel witnessed by a diverse crowd that included Benjamin Franklin—highlighted celebrations of French military victory against Britain and ignited a balloon mania that swept across Europe at the end of the Enlightenment. This popular frenzy for balloon experiments, which attracted hundreds of thousands of spectators, fundamentally altered the once elite audience for science by bringing aristocrats and commoners together.

The Imagined Empire explores how this material artifact, the flying machine, not only expanded the public for science and spectacle but inspired utopian dreams of a republican monarchy that would obliterate social boundaries. The balloon, Mi Gyung Kim argues, was a people-machine, a cultural performance that unified and mobilized the people of France, who imagined an aerial empire that would bring glory to the French nation. This critical history of ballooning considers how a relatively simple mechanical gadget became an explosive cultural and political phenomenon on the eve of the French Revolution.

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Yes, you can access The Imagined Empire by Mi Gyung Kim in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Biological Sciences & European History. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.