Product Description: A History of Everyday Things is a pioneering essay by one of the world's leading cultural historians that sheds light on the origins of the consumer society, and thereby the birth of the modern world. Things that we regard as the everyday objects of consumption have not always been so: how, therefore, have people in the modern world become "prisoners of objects," as Rousseau put it? Daniel Roche answers this fundamental question of historical anthropology, and imaginatively explores the origins of the daily furnishings of modern life...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: A panorama of a whole civilization, a world on the verge of cataclysm, unfolds in this magisterial work by the foremost historian of eighteenth-century France. Since Tocqueville's account of the Old Regime, historians have struggled to understand the social, cultural, and political intricacies of this efflorescence of French society before the Revolution...read more

In a candid memoir of his 'starter marriage', the author--who has already re-married--returns to the memory of his first marriage by inviting both wives out for Indian food. Reprint. AB. LJ. PW. K.

A portrait of American marriage and divorce is presented through the author's chronicles, in which he describes his first marriage, divorce, second marriage, and coming to terms with both wives. 17,500 first printing. (view table of contents)

Product Description: This book is a study of dress in France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In it Roche discusses general approaches to the history of dress, locates the subject within current French historiography and uses a large sample of inventories to explore the differences between the various social classes in the amount they spent on clothes and the kind of clothes they wore...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

An eighteenth-century Frenchman describes life in Paris, the events of the French Revolution, and his own fondness for pranks and jokes

Explains the role of printing in the French Revolution and the establishment of the revolutionary government

Product Description: In his collective portrait of the common people, Roche offers a rich and fascinating description of their lives--their housing, food, dress, financial dealings, literature, domestic life, and leisure time. Roche's highly readable style and use of contemporary quotations enliven the reader's view of eighteenth-century Paris and Parisians...read more