Paris, one of the world's great cities, has a long and rich tradition of embracing people of diverse ethnic backgrounds. For over two centuries, African Americans have been among the racial and cultural mosaic that has thrived in Paris and helped to make the city a world-renowned centre of imagination and creativity. Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Ada 'Bricktop' Smith, Sidney Bechet, Victor Sejour, Josephine Baker, Henry O Tanner, and numerous other African Americans have lived, worked, and played in Paris, and while doing so contributed significantly to the city's legacy of achievement in art, literature, science, business, sport, social reform, political science, and numerous other fields. This book takes the reader on six walking tours through historic districts of Paris where the African-American presence has been prominent. The authors have assembled a vast amount of information about the lives and works of many of Paris's most prominent African Americans, and all who walk the city's neighbourhoods with 'Paris Reflections' in hand will become intimately familiar with the stage and exact locations upon which so much of the area's vibrant African-American history has played out. Each walk is accompanied by a clear and detailed map that will help the reader easily navigate the intricate streets and buildings of the City of Light. The book provides a pithy introduction to the African-American experience in Paris. A selection of original colour art by Christiann Anderson, and a listing of sources of additional information about the subject of the book, contribute additional dimensions to this handsome and graceful handbook.

"Stuart Gilbert's friendship with James Joyce began in Paris in 1927 after Gilbert read several pages from a forthcoming French translation of Ulysses in the window of Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Company book shop and went in to tell Beach that the translation was poorly done. She reported the encounter to Joyce, who subsequently sought out Gilbert. Their meeting began a literary collaboration and friendship that lasted until Joyce's death in 1941." "This journal is a chronicle of that remarkable and productive friendship. Stuart Gilbert records many amusing anecdotes and provocative opinions regarding Joyce's social life, his relationship with his wife, Nora, and his compositional techniques for Finnegans Wake. Also included in the book are some of Joyce's previously unpublished letters to Gilbert (also reproduced in photographs), numerous unpublished photographs, and a typically dyspeptic 1941 essay on Joyce, Paul Leon, and Herbert Gorman by Gilbert. The volume is fully annotated and contains an introduction by noted Joyce scholar Thomas F. Staley." "These materials from the Stuart Gilbert Archive of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin offer new perspectives on literary Paris of the 1920s and 1930s. They will be important for everyone interested in the modernist period."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

In the 1820s, several years before Braille was invented, Therese-Adele Husson, a young blind woman from provincial France, wrote an audacious manifesto about her life, French society, and her hopes for the future. Through extensive research and scholarly detective work, authors Catherine Kudlick and Zina Weygand have rescued this intriguing woman and the remarkable story of her life and tragic death from obscurity, giving readers a rare look into a world recorded by an unlikely historical figure. Reflections is one of the earliest recorded manifestations of group solidarity among people with the same disability, advocating self-sufficiency and independence on the part of blind people, encouraging education for all blind children, and exploring gender roles for both men and women. Resolutely defying the sense of "otherness" which pervades discourse about the disabled, Husson instead convinces us that that blindness offers a fresh and important perspective on both history and ourselves. In rescuing this important historical account and recreating the life of an obscure but potent figure, Weygand and Kudlick have awakened a perspective that transcends time and which, ultimately, remaps our inherent ideas of physical sensibility

In this work Alan Forrest brings together some of the recent research on the Revolutionary army that has been undertaken on both sides of the Atlantic by younger historians, many of whom look to the influential work of Braudel for a model. Forrest places the armies of the Revolution in a broader social and political context by presenting the effects of war and militarization on French society and government in the Revolutionary period. Revolutionary idealists thought of the French soldier as a willing volunteer sacrificing himself for the principles of the Revolution; Forrest examines the convergence of these ideals with the ordinary, and often dreadful, experience of protracted warfare that the soldier endured.

One of the greatest historians of French history reflects on the ways that the French Revolution continues to resonate in France and throughout the world.