New Ways to Teach about Revolutions

Here is a fantastic resource for your revolutions unit called "Age of Revolutions."

It is an open-access academic journal with essays, roundtables, and book reviews.

In an on-going series called "Teaching Revolutions,"  you can read essays that offer new ways to frame the way you teach revolutions.  

In "Finding Genres of Revolution in the Classroom," Aaron R. Hanlon, a professor at Colby College, attempts to get students to "mute the tendency to conceive of all revolution within a liberal framework."   He suggests one way to do that with a comparative exercise in which students compare the US and Haitian declarations of independence.  He notes that "students were able to trace common rhetorical strategies—an appeal to “citizens”; an exposition of grievances—but also to identify tonal differences that reflect the different stakes for US mandarins versus enslaved Haitians."

In another essay called "You Can't Teach theAge of Revolutions without the Black Intellectual Tradition, Robert D. Taber, assistant professor of government and history at Fayetteville State University in North Carolina,  suggests new ways to think about "resistance and the politics of the enslaved" and reminds us that "a core piece of these revolutions was the way enslaved people pushed for their manumission and emancipation, individually and collectively." 

The website includes a section of new books about revolutions. These reviews are a good way for us teachers to learn about new research and even about some revolutions we do not teach in AP World.

For example,  Elena A. Schneider, author of "The Occupation of Havana War, Trade, and Slavery in the Atlantic World" and a professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley introduces her book about the struggles of black soldiers in Havana during the imperial wars. 

Another example includes book recommendations about the history of slavery. 

Here three historians offer book suggestions for educating ourselves about the history of slavery. These books include: 

• "Slavery at Sea: Terror, Sex, and Sickness in the Middle Passage," 
• "The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution" 
• There is A River: The Black Struggle For Freedom in America 

The Age of Revolutions Website also includes sections with links to resources for specific revolutions such as the American, French, and Haitian revolutions.