Before you begin to dig into the causes, consequences, and longer-term impacts of revolutions, it’s helpful to first under what a revolution actually is, and how this relates to the political and social transformations that often occur as a result of these upheavals. To do this, you’ll think about the differences between revolution and evolution to see how they are related, and how they are different. As you do this, you’ll learn about a lot of different historical revolutions.

In this activity, you’re going to really dig into what revolution means, and how revolutions and evolutions are similar, yet different.

First, brainstorm as many words as you can that relate to the word revolution. Your teacher will record these on the board as you brainstorm.

Next, brainstorm as many words as you can that relate to the word evolution. Your teacher will record these on the board as well.

Now, compare the two lists. Are there any synonyms shared by the two lists? Your teacher may have you come up to the board and circle the words on each list that are similar. Then, have a discussion about the similarities you see. Why do you think some of the words have similar meanings even though the words they started with are different? What about the differences? What makes an evolution different from a revolution?

Between 1775 and 1825, people around the Atlantic world revolted against the powers that ruled them. They were inspired by concepts like equality, reason, and freedom. When the authorities imposed too much in the way of taxes, and when poverty or labor conditions were too terrible, people started to resist their governments and call for freedom. Every revolution had its own style, causes, and outcomes, but what they had in common was a strong desire for people to have a say in who governed them and to make better lives for themselves.

In this article, you’ll see how powerful ideas about sovereignty and freedom combined with economic factors to spark revolutionary movements across the Atlantic. You’ll be able to see how these new Enlightenment ideals were applied in different regions. You’ll learn more about the Enlightenment, revolution, and nationalism in this lesson, as we take a closer look at how intellectual trends shaped communities across the globe. As you learn about this, you’ll be able to compare across regions. You can then tackle the Unit 4 Problem with a clearer understanding of how revolutionary ideas were engines of change shared origins but that had pretty wide-ranging and diverse effects.

Preview – Skimming for Gist

Fill out the Skimming for Gist section of the Three Close Reads Worksheet as you complete your first close read. As a reminder, this should be a quick process!

Key Ideas – Understanding Content

For this reading, you should be looking for unfamiliar vocabulary words, the major claim and key supporting details, and analysis and evidence. By the end of the second close read, you should be able to answer the following questions:

1. What was the Stamp Act and how did British North American colonists react to it?
2. How did the lives of French people in the lower and middle classes change during the eighteenth century? How did these changes affect their attitudes about the government?
3. What was unique about Haiti’s independence?
4. What were the causes of the Latin American revolutions, according to the author?

Evaluating and Corroborating

At the end of the third close read, respond to the following questions:

1. How does evidence from this article help you support, extend, or challenge the communities frame narrative?
2. Revolutionary movements had many different causes, as you learned in this article. In your view, based on this article and other material in this lesson, make and defend a claim in response to the following questions: Do you think Enlightenment ideals or economic factors played a bigger role in sparking revolutions? Do you think the answer is the same everywhere, or does this vary by region?

While historians often talk about the Enlightenment, they don’t really agree about what it was. Enlightenment thinkers generated a lot of new ideas about how the natural and political worlds worked. They proposed new ways for humans to study nature and organize our societies, and they believed that this work could help society to progress. But in some ways, the Enlightenment was less revolutionary than it could have been, and its benefits were not extended to everyone.

This article presents one half of a debate about the origins of liberal and national revolutions, a key question within the Unit 4 Problem. In another article, you will read more about the economic causes of revolution. In this article, you will try to determine how new ideas led to revolution. This part of the debate will also help you evaluate whether the networks frame narrative accurately represents the evidence from this period.

Preview – Skimming for Gist

Fill out the Skimming for Gist section of the Three Close Reads Worksheet as you complete your first close read. As a reminder, this should be a quick process!

Key Ideas – Understanding Content

For this reading, you should be looking for unfamiliar vocabulary words, the major claim and key supporting details, and analysis and evidence. By the end of the second close read, you should be able to answer the following questions:

1. The author argues that the Enlightenment introduced the idea that the universe had rules, and that these rules could be understood by studying and examining the world around us. Why was this a revolutionary idea?
2. The author also describes the Enlightenment as a political movement. What idea does she say was most revolutionary in this regard?
3. The author also describes the Enlightenment as an economic, ethical, and religious phenomenon. What changing idea does she look at in this regard?
4. According to the author, most Enlightenment thinkers wanted gradual and limited change. What evidence does she give for this argument?
5. Some people pushed for a more revolutionary result from the Enlightenment. Who were they?

Evaluating and Corroborating

At the end of the third close read, respond to the following questions:

1. After reading this argument, do you think the Enlightenment should be called “revolutionary”? Why or why not?
2. How could the ideas expressed in the Enlightenment pave the way to political revolution?

3x5 note cards or cut up paper

This sourcing collection, along with the Quick-Sourcing Tool, gives you an opportunity to practice a quicker kind of sourcing than you do in the sourcing practice progression. The tool and the process for using it—specifically designed for unpacking document collections—will help you be successful when responding to DBQs.

Note: If you are unfamiliar with the Quick-Sourcing Tool or the process for using it, we recommend reviewing the Quick-Sourcing Introduction activity in Lesson 2.1.

The Quick-Sourcing Tool can be used any time you encounter a set of sources and are trying to respond to a prompt or question, as opposed to the deeper analysis you do when using the HAPPY tool that is part of the sourcing progression.

First, take out or download the sourcing collection and review the guiding question that appears on the first page. Then, take out or download the Quick-Sourcing Tool and review the directions. For Part 1, you’ll write a quick summary of each source in terms of how it relates to the guiding question (we recommend using one note card or scrap of paper for each source).

For Part 2, which uses the first four letters of the acronym from the HAPPY tool, you only have to respond to one of these four questions. You should always include the historical significance or “why” (the “Y” in “HAPPY”) for any of the four questions you choose to respond to.

In Part 3, you’ll gather the evidence you found in each document and add it to your note cards so you can include it in a response later. Once each document is analyzed, look at your note cards and try to categorize the cards. There might be a group of documents that support the claim you want to make in your response, and another group that will help you consider counterclaims, for example.

To wrap up, try to respond to the guiding question.

This collection explores the ideas and philosophy of the Enlightenment. You may already be familiar with the term “the Enlightenment”, but does it describe just one thing? There’s actually a pretty complex debate among scholars about the Enlightenment. One part of that debate asks whether the Enlightenment was a unified intellectual and cultural movement, or if it is just a label we give to a bunch of different ideas from an assortment of thinkers in this period. Another part of the debate is just how unified these ideas and values were across vast distances. Enlightenment ideas proved incredibly portable—and incredibly versatile. They spread rapidly, yet reality seldom lived up to these ideas and values.

The primary source excerpts in this collection will help you assess the extent to which Enlightenment philosophy inspired revolutionary thinking. This will also help you understand the causes of the political revolutions of the long nineteenth century. In addition, you’ll work on your sourcing skills using the Quick-Sourcing Tool.

We recommend using the accompanying Quick Sourcing activity (above) to help you analyze these sources.

The Enlightenment can be a difficult movement to fully understand. By analyzing a set of quotes from authors who were either inspirations for, or products of, the Enlightenment, you’ll learn more about their perspectives, which will help you understand the viewpoints of people who lived during that time. Quote analysis is an important analytical skill, and will help you see how different types of evidence can help us better understand the past. In this case, the analysis will help you understand how this movement inspired the revolutionary period that followed. In addition, you’ll connect these quotes to current events to evaluate how these ideas still influence society today.

In this activity, you’ll work together to analyze a set of quotes from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century authors to determine how each quote is both symbolic of the Enlightenment, and an indication of the Enlightenment’s impact today. These quotes were written hundreds of years ago using language and style different from how most people write and speak today. Because of this, these quotes can sometimes be difficult to interpret. This activity offers an everyday-language interpretation to help you fully understand the meaning of each quote.

First, your teacher will either hand out or have you download the Enlightenment Quotes worksheet. As a class, you’ll review the differences between one original quote and one everyday-language translation. These everyday-language interpretations should not be taken as the only way to understand them. In fact, many of the “original” quotes are themselves translated from other languages. When doing this type of analysis, it’s important to keep in mind which lenses of interpretation have been applied when deciding what something means. Could there be other ways to “translate” the quotes that might lead to a slightly different understanding?

Then, your teacher will break the class into groups of three or four. Each group will be responsible for two or three of the quotes on the worksheet. With your group, read your assigned quotes and answer the questions posed at the end of the worksheet for each quote. Make sure to read your quotes carefully and look up any words you don’t know.

How do you know when—and where—big changes are happening? Paris in the late eighteenth century was experiencing massive advances in science and technology, a great political transformation, and experiments in industrialization. But in 1750, most of its people were poor. The highest class were the same land-owning nobility and monarchy that had ruled for centuries, and its streets were covered in mud and excrement. Yet its thinkers were also producing one of the most important archives of knowledge and thought the world would ever see—the Encyclopedia. Its existence may have been a signal of change to come.

This video asks you to switch scales from a global perspective to focus on one place and one theme, and to consider the broader question of what the world looked like in 1750 from this perspective.

Preview – Skimming for Gist

Before you watch the video, open and skim the transcript. Additionally, you should always read the questions below before you watch the video (a good habit to use in reading, too!). These pre-viewing strategies will help you know what to look and listen for as you watch the video. If there is time, your teacher may have you watch the video one time without stopping, and then give you time to watch again to pause and find the answers.

Key Ideas – Understanding Content

Think about the following questions as you watch this video

1. How was Paris in 1750 a “contradiction”?
2. How was the encyclopedia representative of this contradiction?
3. What political and national revolutions does the video connect to the philosophes and their encyclopedia?
4. Why, according to the video, did some “enlightened monarchs” and aristocrats support this work?
5. Why was the encyclopedia so controversial?

Evaluating and Corroborating

1. In the video, the encyclopedia gives us a glimpse into what life was like in 1750, over 250 years ago. What kind of things do you think people might study 250 years in the future, in order to understand what the life was like today?

Sovereignty is a term that describes the idea of self-government for a community or an individual. It is based on the idea that people are the source of political power. It suggests that people are citizens, who have the right to participate in government. Sovereignty was a core idea in the political revolutions of the long nineteenth century, but it had lots of limits. Even those who thought sovereignty was important often didn’t include some groups of people in the idea. They often excluded enslaved people, serfs, women, and children.

This article explores a core concept in the political transformations described in this unit, but also shows how these transformations were limited even in the way they were originally imagined. It should help you respond to the Unit 4 Problem: How did people transform the political systems under which they lived, and were these changes felt equally around the world and within communities?

Preview – Skimming for Gist

Fill out the Skimming for Gist section of the Three Close Reads Worksheet as you complete your first close read. As a reminder, this should be a quick process!

Key Ideas – Understanding Content

For this reading, you should be looking for unfamiliar vocabulary words, the major claim and key supporting details, and analysis and evidence. By the end of the second close read, you should be able to answer the following questions:

1. What is a citizen, and how is the idea of popular sovereignty important to creating citizens?
2. Thomas Hobbes was an important thinker from this period who wrote a book called Leviathan about popular sovereignty. How does the image from Leviathan express that idea?
3. The author argues that sovereignty left people out. What are examples she gives?
4. Beyond just being left out, the author argues that sovereignty for some actually meant that others could lose rights. How does she make this argument?

Evaluating and Corroborating

At the end of the third close read, respond to the following question:

1. What do you think is actually the author’s main argument about sovereignty, and do you agree?

The “father of modern conservatism” was a British political figure and philosopher who was an important leader of the liberal transformation of the eighteenth century. How could he be both a liberal and a conservative? It turns out that the development of the two sets of ideals were firmly linked.

This biography provides you with important evidence for responding to the Unit 4 problem: How did people transform the political systems under which they lived, and were these changes felt equally around the world and within communities? It will help you to evaluate claims made about liberalism and nationalism as part of the communities frame.

Read 1: Observe

As you read this graphic biography for the first time, review the Read 1: Observe section of your Three Close Reads for Graphic Bios Tool. Be sure to record one question in the thought bubble on the top-right. You don’t need to write anything else down. However, if you’d like to record your observations, feel free to do so on scrap paper.

Read 2: Understand

On the tool, summarize the main idea of the comic and provide two pieces of evidence that helped you understand the creator’s main idea. You can do this only in writing or you can get creative with some art. Some of the evidence you find may come in the form of text (words). But other evidence will come in the form of art (images). You should read the text looking for unfamiliar vocabulary words, the main idea, and key supporting details. You should also spend some time looking at the images and the way in which the page is designed. By the end of the second close read, you should be able to answer the following questions:

1. When and where was Edmund Burke born? Who ruled the place where he was born?
2. What, according to the author, was the major political contest in Britain during this period? What did each side believe?
3. In what ways was Burke a liberal? In what ways was he a conservative?
4. What were the events that made Burke fear too rapid change and too much democracy?
5. How does the artist use art and design to demonstrate Burke’s position as both a liberal and a conservative?

Read 3: Connect

In this read, you should use the graphic biography as evidence to support, extend, or challenge claims made in this unit of the course. On the bottom of the tool, record what you learned about this person’s life and how it relates to what you’re learning.

1. We generally speak of political revolutions in this period as bringing more liberties and being a good thing. Does Burke’s biography challenge that assumption? How?
2. How could the rise of liberalism in this period also lead to the rise of political conservatism? Does this biography provide any clues to help you to answer this question?

To Be Continued…

On the second page of the tool, your teacher might ask you to extend the graphic biography to a second page. This is where you can draw and write what you think might come next. Here, you can become a co-creator of this graphic biography!

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, all kinds of women became active in the fight for change. While these fights for rights may not seem particularly revolutionary today, and while not all of these women are famous or well known, these women were agents of change in history, helping to push the boundaries of what was “normal” at the time. In this activity, you will engage in an in-depth study of one revolutionary woman to illuminate just how “revolutionary” this person was, and how her impact is still felt and seen in women’s lives around the world today. You will create an influence campaign to show others how this woman’s history is still usable and important in today’s world.

CCOT
You will have to determine how the changes spurred by revolutionary women still impact lives today. In doing this, you will have to look at how those changes have persisted.

In this activity, you will research one revolutionary woman from history, with the goal of creating a mini-influencer campaign in order to show that your woman was the most revolutionary. Your teacher will start by reading the following passage to you – feel free to read along!

The eighteenth century marked a significant turning point for much of the world. It was an era of tremendous change, as people developed new ways to examine human nature using science, and at times called for radical political revolutions. It was the period of time in which intellectuals discussed creating a social contract between the people and the government. These new republican governments required the consent of the people because in the words of Thomas Jefferson, “all men are created equal.” You might ask, “What about women?” Abigail Adams brought up the question in a letter to her husband, an author of the US Constitution, requesting, “in the new Code of Laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors.” The mere fact that women were active in fighting for change is one of the most revolutionary elements of that century and after. Some of these fighters were intellectual women of the European Enlightenment. But the revolutionary spirit had a much wider reach, including women from varying socio-economic and geographical backgrounds.

What do you think it means to “Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than [their] ancestors”? After you’ve discussed your ideas with the class, it’s time to start learning more about revolutionary women. You are going to both remember and celebrate revolutionary women by creating an influencer campaign for one woman. So, what does it take to be “most revolutionary”? Well, that will be determined by the class, but generally, it will be the woman whom you show to have fostered the most change, with the effects of those changes still being felt around the globe today.

Once you’ve been assigned a revolutionary woman to study, take out the Revolutionary Women Worksheet. First, read the excerpt that aligns to the geographic area your woman is from. You might also want to check out the other excerpts so you have a sense of the competition. Then, you should conduct Internet research to find out more about the woman you are studying. Consider the following questions as you dive into your research.

• Do they go by other names?
• What was their childhood and background like?
• What made them ordinary?
• What made them extraordinary?

Be sure to use the research cards on the Revolutionary Women Worksheet to help you evaluate and record your sources.

Once you have a good sense of why the woman you are studying is revolutionary, it’s time to move on to the influencer campaign. Your teacher will tell you who the specific audience is for this campaign so that you can target your materials accordingly. The audience will ultimately vote on the campaigns to identify the top three most revolutionary women in history.

For this campaign, the woman is the “influencer” and you’re the marketers collaborating with her. Your campaign must include at least five slides that incorporate the following information in one way or another. Feel free to get creative, but also make sure you address each of the criteria, in no particular order:

1. Product being endorsed
   • This is the agent of change/change itself (in this case, the woman).
2. Review(s) of the product
   • How did the change go? Was it positive, negative, or somewhere in between?
   • Find and cite 2-3 credible sources who may have offered an opinion on this change, whether positive, negative, or somewhere in between.
3. Contextualization
   • Why did this happen at this time? What were the contexts and conditions that helped spur this change?
4. Reach
   • How many people did this impact? (That is, study the reach of the impact and display it somehow).
5. Relevance to today
   • Why is this person still important today? Where do we see their revolution at work?

The campaigns could be created using PowerPoint, Google Slides, or your teacher may suggest other options. They should include, where possible, images, data, and perhaps even videos that help strengthen the campaign. Each final product should be something that the audience can click through without requiring any outside information to understand what the campaign is about. In this way, the judges/audience could do a gallery walk through the campaigns without needing anyone there to explain them.

Once the campaigns have been shared and voted on, and the top three women selected, wrap up with a discussion of why the women chosen were the most revolutionary. Was it more about what they did or more about how the campaigner was able to argue their position? And were these the more well-known women or were the women chosen more representative of everyday women who happened to do something revolutionary? Finally, talk about how you were able to trace this historical impact over time, and think about other ways you can continue to connect the past to today, making sure that the history you learn is usable and applicable to you.