Darnton, Robert Choate (1939– )

US historian. He gained a PhD from Oxford in 1964 and, after a spell as a journalist, he turned to teaching at Harvard and Princeton. His main field of interest was social history, especially that of pre-Revolutionary France.

He was born in New York City and educated at Harvard. He wrote for the New York Times in New York and England before entering academia. He published extensively on the social history of ideas, including The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (1984).