David G. Troyansky

Entitlement and Complaint explores the early history of the right to retirement and the shaping of the modern life course, applying cutting-edge insights from social, cultural, and political history as well as gerontology to an extraordinarily rich collection of retirement dossiers from the post-Revolutionary French Ministry of Justice. David G. Troyansky tells two intertwined stories. He traces the origins of state pensions in nineteenth-century France, which were increasingly understood by retirees as a right as opposed to a reward. Alongside the empirical data, Troyansky examines the ways retiring magistrates used their written requests for state pensions as an opportunity to engage in “life reviews.” Through the analysis of more than five hundred individual dossiers, Troyansky uncovers the personal narratives of those working in a multitude of French political regimes. As employees aged and one cohort replaced another, their attempts to make sense of their careers and lives formed a larger story of post-revolutionary survival.

In Aging in World History, David G. Troyansky presents the first global history of aging. At a time when demographic aging has become a source of worldwide concern, and more people are reaching an advanced age than ever before, the history of old age helps us understand how we arrived at the treatment of aging in the modern world. This concise volume expands that history beyond the West to show how attitudes toward aging, the experiences of the aged, and relevant demographic patterns have varied and coalesced over time and across the world. From the ancient world to the present, this book introduces students and general readers to the history of aging on two levels: the experience of individual men and women, and the transformation of populations. With its attention to cultural traditions, medicalization, decades of historical scholarship, and current gerontology, Aging in World History is the perfect starting point for an exploration of this increasingly universal aspect of human experience.

In Aging in World History, David G. Troyansky presents the first global history of aging. At a time when demographic aging has become a source of worldwide concern, and more people are reaching an advanced age than ever before, the history of old age helps us understand how we arrived at the treatment of aging in the modern world. This concise volume expands that history beyond the West to show how attitudes toward aging, the experiences of the aged, and relevant demographic patterns have varied and coalesced over time and across the world. From the ancient world to the present, this book introduces students and general readers to the history of aging on two levels: the experience of individual men and women, and the transformation of populations. With its attention to cultural traditions, medicalization, decades of historical scholarship, and current gerontology, Aging in World History is the perfect starting point for an exploration of this increasingly universal aspect of human experience.

This volume examines the issue of the timing of cultural change, problems of Revolutionary anticipations and reverberations, and the relationship between culture, politics, and society. Individual essays combine both old and new approaches, ranging from textual analysis to the study of local judicial records, from the psychohistorical to the demographic. But they all demonstrate the usefulness of linking social and cultural history, broadly conceived, and of interdisciplinary approaches to the study of events.Part One addresses directly the creation of French Revolutionary culture. The contributors describe the physical act of dismantling and redefining the culture of the Ancien Regime for revolutionary purposes, new conceptions of time, and generation relations in Revolutionary rhetoric and law. The second part identifies key cultural ingredients from the distant past. It reminds us of the extent to which the Revolution employed the huge storehouse of Western culture to create something original. Because the creation of a democratic culture implies a crisis of consciousness, Part Three brings together a range of investigations into the question of cultural crisis. Three essays see the Revolutionary era as engendering psychological dislocation. In Part Four, social historians reveal the variety of approaches they have taken in trying to understand eighteenth century France. The varied contributions exploit the sources that have become the stock-in-trade of modern social history. Poverty, crime, and population are among the leading topics in current historiography, but military and political institutions are also examined in new ways. This edited collection provides new insights into a critical period of world history and will be welcomed by all scholars of the French Revolution and its aftermath.