The Imagined Empire

Auteur

Mi Gyung Kim is professor of history at North Carolina State University. She is the author of Affinity, That Elusive Dream: A Genealogy of the Chemical Revolution.

Texte du rabat

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. It ignited a balloon mania that swept across Europe. This volume explores how this material artifact not only expanded the public for science and spectacle but inspired utopian dreams of a republican monarchy that would obliterate social boundaries.