Baker, an experienced historian on Early Modern Europe and J.E. Wallace Sterling Professor in Humanities at Stanford University, aims to 'make sense of those 'sublime words of the prophet-Marat,' the radical journalist and martyred deputy who notorious calls for blood gave voice to some of the most frightful impulses of the French Revolution.'
We tend to think of the five-day workweek as a law of nature, as certain as the rising of the sun. But it's nothing of the sort. The five-day workweek is a human invention that was introduced just over a century ago to solve the specific problems of the industrial age. By now it's so ingrained in our lives that we've forgotten we created it in the first place-but we did create it and we can also un-create it.
