The Age of

Fall, 2014 Tuesdays, 2-4 Prof. James Oakes

In the 1960s and 1970s leading historians—R. R. Palmer, , David Brion Davis--began speaking of an “” extending from late eighteenth to the mid nineteenth centuries. The idea has recently been revived, but with a difference. The earlier generation focused almost exclusively on in Europe and North America. Today’s scholars have extended their sights to the broader Atlantic world, giving prominence to revolutions in Haiti and Latin America. They are more inclined to trace the connections between the Age of Revolution and the Age of Emancipation. This is a reading course that reviews some of the classic works in the field before moving on to some of the most recent scholarship on the American, French, Haitian, and Latin American revolutions, as well as the and the American .

Requirements: Final grades will be based on both written work and participation in weekly discussions. Students will write one paper of approximately 15 pages framed as an advanced undergraduate lecture on “The Age of Revolution.” The paper will be based entirely on the readings for the course, it should demonstrate your familiarity with the course material, but it cannot be a historiographical essay. You are writing an undergraduate lecture. It should therefore explain what the “Age of Revolution” was and develop two or three major themes using concrete examples. Your grade for the course will be based on the paper grade, raised or lowered to reflect the quality of your class participation.

Reading List:

Sept. 2 Crane Brinton, The Anatomy of Revolution

Jeremy Adelman, “An Age of Imperial Revolutions,” American Historical Review, v. 113, n. 2 (April, 2008), 319-140.

Sept. 9 R. R. Palmer, The Age of Democratic Revolution, vol. 1, The Challenge

Sept. 16 R. R. Palmer, The Age of Democratic Revolution, vol. 2, The Struggle

Sept. 23 Carla Gardina Pestana, The English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution Sept. 30 Seth Cotlar, Tom Paine’s America: The Rise and Fall of Transatlantic Radicalism in the Early Republic

Oct. 7 Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, An Empire Divided: The and the British Caribbean.

Oct. 14 Jonathan Sperber, Europe, 1780-1850

Oct. 21 Jonathan Israel, Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the from the Rights of Man to Robespierre

Oct. 28 Laurent DuBois, A Colony of Citizens

David Geggus, ed., The Impact of the in the Atlantic World, pp. 4-20.

Nov. 4` John Lynch, The Spanish-American Revolutions

Nov. 11 Jeremy Adelman, Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic

Nov. 18 Mike Rapport, 1848: Year of Revolution

Nov. 25 Timothy Mason Roberts, Distant Revolutions: 1848 and the Challenge to American Exceptionalism

Dec. 2 Jonathan Sperber, Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life

Dec. 9 Andre Fletch, The Revolution of 1861: The American Revolution in the Age of Nationalist Conflict