Imo the greatest issue surrounding modern socio-political discourse is our extreme presentism. We assume the way we think & act now -- literally at this exact moment -- is the way everyone everywhere throughout all of history has thought and acted, and not contingent on a certain confluence of factors which aren't objective truths but subjectively part of a certain time and place. Darnton does a great job of exploding this notion, showing how people of all strata of French society during the so-called "Age of Enlightenment" viewed their world in a distinctly alien way from us now. Fairy tales helped peasants make sense of a violent world which appears to have changed little since the High Middle Ages, printers' apprentices violently murder cats as a protest against their working conditions (again, the cultural connotations of cats was vastly different than it is now), and a bourgeois man expresses his adorably fervent parasocial love for Rousseau (, as he calls him)