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?

In 1750, most people played very little part in governing the state in which they lived. Their most important communities were religious, family, or local. Partly because of the increasing interconnections between societies, however, new ideas were emerging about sovereignty – who has the right to govern. These ideas gave birth to many of the concepts of community we have today, such as democracy, human rights, citizenship, and the nation state. In some places, the mix of ideas and conditions was right for revolution. But there were limits to who could participate in the political orders being created.

Although this video focuses only on one region, it provides a piece of evidence for understanding how ideas about science, the universe, and the way things worked could lead to new arguments about how the political world should be ordered as well. It will provide you with evidence from one region to apply at a global scale to understand how the spread of ideas influenced the emergence of political revolutions in the Long Nineteenth Century.

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. What, according to the video, was powerful about Nicolaus Copernicus’ On the Revolution of Heavenly Spheres?
2. What, according to the video, was important about Sir Isaac Newton’s Principia?
3. According to the video, how did these questions lead to changes in how people thought about political rights and organizations (in the Enlightenment)?
4. What is the argument John Locke makes in the excerpt from Second Treatise Concerning Civil Government presented in this video?
5. This video asks to what degree the Enlightenment helped people. But it also speaks to the limits of the Enlightenment. What were some of these limits?

Evaluating and Corroborating

1. This video makes the argument that the ideas of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment in Europe led to political revolution later in this era. Do you think these ideas were enough to launch revolutions and revolutionary wars? What else might have been necessary?

In this activity, you’ll continue to develop your sourcing skills by analyzing primary source documents, written from different perspectives, about the practice of inoculation. As you analyze the documents, you’ll focus on the Historical Context, Purpose, and Importance rows of the Sourcing Tool. In doing so, you’ll also learn how using multiple sources from different perspectives can give you a better understanding of a historical event.

Claim testing
Claim testing is an integral part of sourcing. In order to evaluate a source, we must use intuition, logic, authority, and evidence to analyze the document in order to understand the source’s point of view and reason for writing.

Since this activity is your full introduction to using the Sourcing Tool, your teacher will guide you through the process. In this activity, you’ll read primary source excerpts, complete the Sourcing Tool focusing on historical context and purpose, and craft a response to a prompt. You’ll also answer questions for importance to turn in as an exit ticket. Note that the Sourcing Tool and the source excerpts are included with the Sourcing – The Inoculation Debate worksheet.

Before you get started, think about why you should even bother with sourcing. Sourcing helps us understand the past by analyzing the evidence that people or societies left behind. Sometimes, this evidence is limited, and as a result, we have to draw conclusions by carefully evaluating sources and artifacts. Other times, there is a lot of evidence or sources to help us explain a historical event or process. But even if we have lots of source material, we still have to analyze the sources to understand their different points of view and perspectives. Sometimes people refer to different points of view as author bias. But we should remember that all primary source material has some bias—we all have lenses through which we view the world, and recognizing those viewpoints can help us better understand the point someone is trying to convey through their writing. In history, this can help us construct a clearer account of the past. Also, remember that it is almost impossible to discern with certainty what a particular author intended (that is, what their purpose was). It is speculation guided by the evidence we have and only needs to be reasonable given what we know.

In this case, you’re going to read a primary source document as a class so you can answer the question, What factors may have influenced how each author wrote about inoculation?

The idea here is to figure out the context and purpose of those writing about the same historical event and to see how that shapes the sources. Your teacher will either hand out or have you download the Sourcing—Inoculation Debate worksheet. You’ll review the documents as a class, and then see if you can come up with an answer to the question based on what you’ve read. This may be hard to do—and that’s OK! You’re going to answer the same question again later, but only after you’ve sourced the document like a historian would. Now, take out the Sourcing Tool and really focus on the Historical Context and Purpose rows. Go through the worksheet with your class, and then revisit the question:

What factors may have influenced how each author wrote about inoculation?

Think about how you might have read this text differently (or had a different perspective) after your first reading. Then, discuss the following questions with your class: Would you have a different perspective if you hadn’t gone through this sourcing process? Would you have fully understood these texts without knowing the historical context in which it was written? How does knowing about the purpose for these texts give you a fuller picture of their significance?

Finally, your teacher will break the class up into small groups of three to four students. Work with your group to answer the questions in the Why? (Importance) row of the tool to turn in as an exit ticket. Your teacher will collect your worksheets to evaluate your sourcing skills.

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 2 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?

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.

By focusing on the world in 1750, Unit One provides a baseline to help you evaluate continuity and change in the rest of the course. 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?

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 1.2.

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.

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 2 Problem: How were ideas about political identity and political experience transformed by the liberal and democratic revolutions that created nationalism and nation-states? What were the limits of these transformations?

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 2 problem: How were ideas about political experience transformed by the liberal and democratic revolutions, and what were the limits of those transformations? 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 this activity, you’ll become more familiar with the nuances (slight differences) of authority. This is a challenging but worthy claim tester because authority can either be earned or granted—and is deeply connected to our personal biases. The reasons we choose to believe people are varied, and it’s not always because someone has authority on the topic at hand. Understanding how and why we decide what to believe is a critical skill not just in history, but in our everyday assessment of claims. You will dig into the specifics of authority and understand how to identify, assess, and use authority when evaluating and making claims.

Reading, sourcing
At this point, you’ve had multiple opportunities to practice your reading skills for a variety of media (articles, videos, and graphic biographies). However, in this activity, you will be pushed to think about what and how you read. As historians and critical thinkers, you should be curious about where you are getting your information, and you should be equipped with the skills to evaluate a source’s claims. This lends itself to the historical thinking practice of sourcing—which is necessary in all subjects and in life. You need to develop your claim testing skills so that you can make, evaluate, defend, and refute claims as well as the claims of others.

In the last activity on claim testing, you had the opportunity to discuss and explore the practice. In this series of activities, you will do a deep dive into claim testers so that you feel comfortable applying each when you read, write, do research, and speak.

Think about the following scenario:

Leading up to the November 6, 2018 midterm elections, Taylor Swift, a famous musician, took to social media to promote voter registration. After her post, Vote.org saw 155,940 unique visitors within 24 hours (up from the average daily number of 14,078). Further, over 2,100 new voters registered in Tennessee the day after her post, which nearly matches the typical monthly number of registrations (about 2,800). Her short post on social media had a real impact on the number of registered voters—and likely, actual voter turnout—in both Tennessee and the nation.

Now, take out the Claim Testing – Authority worksheet, and respond to the questions in Part 1. Be ready to discuss your answers with the class.

Authority comes in all shapes and sizes, and it often helps us decide not only what to believe—but whom to believe. Some authority is earned based on merit, such as licensure or education (doctors, teachers, estheticians, electricians, lawyers, and so on); some is given due to popularity. Our biases are deeply embedded in whom we believe. We may be biased based on our religious beliefs, where we grew up, or what our family believes. We can also be biased based on the popularity (or lack of popularity) of a claim or the person making the claim.

So, what do we do when two authorities disagree? There are long-standing debates among historians, scientists, and other scholars about what really happened in the past, and we’ll encounter those frequently in this course, as we do in life all the time. So, let’s dig into a debate that was relevant to many early modern revolutions: When and where did the Enlightenment begin?

The eighteenth century saw a world in crisis, particularly in the region surrounding the Atlantic. The growth of trade and production meant that more things were being made than ever before, and there was lots of wealth to be made. But populations were growing. Lots of people weren’t getting an equal share of the new wealth. Some people just wanted more, but others didn’t even have enough to live on. Both groups were angry enough to start or join revolutions.

This article presents one half of a debate about the origins of liberal and national revolutions, a key question within the Unit 2 Problem. In other articles and videos, you have seen the importance of new ideas. In this article, you will explore the importance of people’s economic conditions. This part of the debate will also help you to evaluate whether the production and distribution frame narrative accurately represents the evidence from this period.

Preview – Skimming for Gist

Fill out the Skimming 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 were three important economic changes that accompanied the growth of capitalism in this period, according to the author?
2. How did the Seven years’ War (in which France and Britain were on opposite sides) start a process that led to both the American and French Revolutions, according to the article?
3. What economic problems helped lead the middle class bourgeoisie and the poor to combine in the French Revolution?
4. What four groups in Haiti all had complaints against the French government, and what were those complaints?

Evaluating and Corroborating

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

1. After reading this article, do you think economic conditions were more important, as important, or less important than ideas in leading to revolution in these three places?
2. Were economic conditions also important in the revolutions in Latin America? How would you find out?

In this activity, you will continue to grapple with cause and consequence and how causal reasoning can be used to help you understand change over time. Causal reasoning can help you develop evidence-based explanations or arguments in response to a causal question that considers human actions, events, and larger structures or processes. You will think about both the causes and consequences of revolutions, which will push you from thinking about causation as linear, toward an understanding of the complex relationship between cause and consequence. In addition, by working through the causes and consequences of a historical revolution, you will begin to understand how many of these same causes and consequences still influence revolutions today.

Claim testing
Causation requires a great deal of sound reasoning, which is another way of saying claim testing. In order to identify and categorize causes and consequences, you’ll have to use logic, evidence, and (usually) authority to decide if these were long term or short term and if the causes or effects were historically significant.

In this activity, you’ll first identify the factors that may have caused the political revolutions that took place in this era. If you need to refresh your memory on these revolutions, review the articles “The Enlightenment” and “Economic and Material Causes of Revolt.” Then, you’ll think about the consequences that resulted from these revolutions and construct a causal map that helps you put all of this into perspective. Historians use causal maps to help them organize historical events or processes. Creating a causal map allows you to see the connections between events over time. In addition, these maps will help you understand that causation is rarely linear.

First, your teacher will either hand out or have you download the Causation – Revolutions worksheet, which includes the Causation Tool. Working together with your class, follow these directions:

1. In the Event box, write the name of the event you’re studying, along with the dates, location, and a brief description.
2. Using what you’ve learned thus far in the course about political revolutions, think of all the possible causes that led to these revolutions.
3. As you think about the causes listed, decide which should be categorized as long term, intermediate term, or short term. Make sure you’re able to justify your categorizations.
4. Write each cause in the appropriate box of the worksheet (long term, intermediate term, and short term).

   We’ll get to the other parts of the tool later in the course. For now, categorizing by time will be a sufficient way to understand these causes.

   Now, your teacher will divide the class into small groups. With your group members, look at the causal map for revolutions. Think about the following questions as you review the map:

• Are all the causes that were written on the board included in this causal map?
• Would you have organized this causal map differently? If so, how?

Now, work with your group to try to think of all the possible consequences (effects) of revolutions and add them to your tool. Then, add those effects to your causal map. Fill in the circles on the map and add at least three more circles. Next, label your causal maps. For each circle that’s a cause, write the letter “C” next to it. For consequences/effects, write the letter “E” next to those circles.

Once you’re done, be ready to discuss what you labeled as causes or consequences and which of those are the most historically significant. You can determine historical significance in several ways. Use the acronym ADE to help you determine if historical events or processes, in this case the causes and consequences of revolutions, were significant.

• Amount – How many people’s lives were affected by the cause/effect?
• Depth – Were people living in the time period being studied deeply affected by the cause/effect?
• Endurance – Were the changes people experienced as a result of this cause/effect long-lasting and/or recurring?

Your teacher will collect your worksheet and use it to assess how your causation skills are progressing.