The period from 1775 to 1825 was a time of revolutions in Europe and the Americas, but not all revolutions are created equal. Some revolutionaries were elite colonists, while others were enslaved laborers. Whether motivated by high taxes or anger at being excluded from politics, revolutionaries fought for both political rights and a better quality of life. They succeeded in creating new nations and governments, but often with very different outcomes across and within societies.

In this article, you’ll see how ideas about sovereignty and economic conditions played out in several different states across the Atlantic Ocean. It’ll give you the background knowledge you need to assess continuity and change in terms of political revolutions. You can combine this with similar assessments for other kinds of revolutions to respond to the Unit Problem.

Think about the following question as you read the article: To what extent does this article explain the causes and effects of the various revolutions in the period from 1750 to 1900? Write this question at the top of the Three Close Reads worksheet. You will be asked to respond to this question again after the third read in the Evaluating and Corroborating section of the worksheet.

Read 1 – 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!

Read 2 – 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 first sparked the American Revolution?
2. What was the Third Estate?
3. What did the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man have in common? How did they differ?
4. How did the French Revolution impact Saint Domingue? What were some other sources of the Haitian Revolution?
5. What classes took power in South America, and how was this different from the class that took power in Saint Domingue?

Read 3 – Evaluating and Corroborating

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

1. To what extent does this article explain the causes and effects of the various revolutions in the period from 1750 to 1900?
2. How “revolutionary” were each of the revolutions described in this article? What changed? what didn’t?

In the late eighteenth century, the French colony of Saint Domingue teetered on an unstable social pyramid. At the top of the hierarchy were wealthy white plantation owners who enslaved the vast majority of the island’s population: hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans and their descendants. New ideas about natural rights swirled around the Atlantic world and reached the people of Saint Domingue—including enslaved people—and helped launch the most radical of the Atlantic revolutions. But the fight didn’t end with independence, as the new nation of Haiti continued to struggle for its survival and the end of slavery.

This video will provide you with evidence to evaluate the revolutions of the long nineteenth century through the lens of history’s most successful slave revolt. It will also help you formulate a response to the Unit 5 Problem: “How did different parts of the world experience the revolutionary transformations of the period c. 1750 to 1900 CE?” The Haitian Revolution challenged ideas about who had rights. It was made possible by networks of free and enslaved people who exchanged information around the Atlantic world. And it defied the plantation system that was the foundation of the global economic system during the long nineteenth century.

Think about the following question as you watch the video: This video makes the argument that the Haitian Revolution was the most radical of the Atlantic revolutions. Do you agree? What evidence from the video supports your view? You will be asked to respond to this question again at the end of the video.

Preview – Skimming for Gist

As a reminder, open and skim the transcript, and read the questions before you watch the video.

Key Ideas – Understanding Content

Think about the following questions as you watch this video.

1. Who made up the social classes in Saint Domingue, and why was this social pyramid unstable?
2. According to Dr. Daut, what was life like for an enslaved person in Saint Domingue?
3. According to the Dr. Daut, what was the goal of the revolutionaries in the revolution’s early days?
4. Who was Toussaint Louverture, and why did he fight first with the Spanish and then with the French?
5. How did enslaved people learn about revolutionary ideas?
6. This video makes the argument that Haiti’s struggle continued long after the revolution and independence. What evidence is provided to support this point?

Evaluating and Corroborating

1. This video makes the argument that the Haitian Revolution was the most radical of the Atlantic revolutions. Do you agree? What evidence from the video supports your view?

In this activity, you’ll create a recipe that explains the causes for a particular political revolution. Since revolutions are often messy (and bloody!), analyzing the causes and categorizing them will allow you to expand your understanding of how causation helps to explain historical processes and how historians focus on particular causes to shape people’s understanding of these events.

Comparison, claim testing
You will further develop your causation skills by comparing different revolutions. By evaluating the similarities between revolutions, you will be able to understand causal relationships more fully, specifically as they relate to the causes of revolutions across different temporal and spatial settings. As always, you should claim test the assertions you make in order to provide sound logic and solid reasoning when determining the causes and effects of a historical event.

For this activity, you’ll be creating a recipe to “cook up” a political revolution. First, you’ll be assigned one of the revolutions you’ve already read about in this unit. Then, you’ll create a recipe that consists of causes (your list of “ingredients”) for your revolution. You’ll also include detailed directions about how to combine all the ingredients in your recipe. These directions will actually be an account of how the causes led to a revolution.

Part 1: Categorizing Causes

First, your teacher will break the class into groups of two to three students and assign each group one of the following political revolutions: American, French, or Latin American. Then, your teacher will either hand out or have you download the Causation – Recipe for a Revolution worksheet, which includes the Causation Tool. Review the article “The Atlantic Revolutions” and take notes on the causes and consequences of your assigned revolution. You might need to conduct additional research to find enough causes (you must have eight to ten) to create your recipe. If you do outside research, make sure someone in your group keeps a list of where you found your information. As you research, be sure to include the appropriate evidence (that is, the “good” evidence) for the causes and effects for your revolution. These might include dates, key terms, and names that relate to the revolution.

After your group has identified all the causes and effects, your teacher will review a few more aspects of causation with you, along with the language we use to describe them:

• Time: Short term, intermediate term, long term, triggering event
• Historical significance:
  • 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?

In this activity, you are adding one more category: type. Categorizing causes by historical type will help you group similar causes together, which is the kind of analysis that historians do when they categorize the economic or political causes of an event or process. Review the different categories for type. There’s also a mnemonic device to help you remember these categories: PIECES.

• Type: Historical type:
  • (P) Political – What type of government, organization, or power structure was there? Who was in charge? Did people vote or have a say?
  • (I) Innovation – What did they invent? Were there any new developments or technologies?
  • ($) Economic – What jobs were there? Did they use money? Did they trade?
  • (C) Cultural – What/whom did they worship? What/whom did they believe in? Did they have written language? Did they leave any artifacts behind, such as art, customs, sports, dress, language, music, dance, foods, celebrations?
  • (E) Environmental – How did they attempt to control or use the environment? What impact did the land, water, and nature around them have on the way they lived?
  • (S) Social – Were there different roles for men and women? Did they live in family units? Did they interact with other groups? Did they have a social structure (enslaved, priests, kings)?

After you’ve reviewed this category of causal analysis, complete the Causation Tool. You should categorize your causes for time and type (we’ll get to the other categories of causation in later activities) and list the effects.

Part 2: Creating the Recipe

Use your causes from the Causation Tool to create your recipe for revolution. Here are the steps you’ll have to follow to create your recipe:

1. Write the list of “ingredients” (the causes of the revolution). Note: You should have eight to ten causes in your list of ingredients.
2. Next, rank your causes from most essential to least essential, with 1 being the most essential. This will be your ingredient list for the recipe. Then, explain how your top three ingredients compare with the bottom three. Ranking the causes will help you understand the relative significance of each cause.
3. Create “directions” (that is, preparation steps). This can be accomplished by answering the question, How does each cause come together (or get “mixed”) to create revolution? Think about the verbs you might see in a recipe such as mix, blend, stir, chop, and sprinkle. There are lots of other examples—use your imagination! Your directions must include:
   • The event that triggered the revolution
   • Timeframe/periodization
   • Historical context

Your teacher may have you share your recipes with the class, and will collect your worksheet and use it to assess how your causation skills are progressing.

We often learn about the US War of Independence, the French Revolution, and revolutions in Haiti and Latin America as a set of “Atlantic revolutions” that share some characteristics and were connected to each other by shared ideas and trade networks. But West Africa was also part of this increasingly linked Atlantic world. Were West African revolutions part of this Atlantic “Age of Revolutions”? Did these conflicts share causes and impacts with those across the ocean? This article argues that to some degree, they did. You will have to decide whether you agree or not.

As you study the revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, you may see some patterns. For example, historians see revolutions in different parts of the Atlantic as being linked by shared ideas but also as reactions to economic inequality. West Africa is often left out of these discussions. By looking at new research on revolutions in West Africa, you can get a sense of how political events in this region had both similarities and, in some cases, differences to other parts of the Atlantic world. This will help you understand the broader pattern of the revolutions you are studying.

Think about the following question as you read the article: To what extent does this article explain the intellectual and ideological context in which revolutions swept the Atlantic world from 1750 to 1900? Write this question at the top of the Three Close Reads worksheet. You will be asked to respond to this question again after the third read in the Evaluating and Corroborating section of the worksheet.

Read 1 – 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!

Read 2 – 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. When did ‘Uthman dan Fodio’s revolution take place in northern Nigeria? What other revolutions in the Atlantic world were taking place right around this time?
2. What economic factors led to revolutions like ‘Uthman Dan Fodio’s in West Africa, according to the article? Were these factors similar or different from other parts of the Atlantic?
3. What was the ideology or unifying force for revolution in West Africa, according to the article, and why?
4. What revolutionary state did ‘Uthman dan Fodio create? How revolutionary was this state, and other new Islamic states, according to the article?

Read 3 – Evaluating and Corroborating

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

1. To what extent does this article explain the intellectual and ideological context in which revolutions swept the Atlantic world from 1750 to 1900?
2. Why do you think the history of West Africa has generally been left out of the study of revolutions in the Atlantic in this period?
3. Would you include ‘Uthman dan Fodio and the Islamic revolutions of West Africa as one of the “Atlantic revolutions”? In what ways was it linked or similar to other revolutions in this period, and in what ways was it unique or unconnected?

Manuela Sáenz (1797–1856) was born into rebellion. The daughter of a wealthy Ecuadorian merchant, she became a rebel and spy for ‎Simón Bolívar during the wars for Latin American independence. She also rebelled against the rules governing how women should act in her society. But she could not have done it without her enslaved companions, Jonotas and Natan, about whom we know little.

Political revolutions, industrialization, and the movements that accompanied them were supposed to have changed peoples’ lives and provided them with many more opportunities. But did they? Manuela Sáenz’ story, and that of her two compatriots shows how some people could push the boundaries, but also how some limits remained in place.

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. What was Manuela Sáenz’ status when she was growing up?
2. How did Manuela’s father try to teach her to be obedient, and what was the result?
3. Who were Manuela Sáenz’ companions, and why don’t we know a lot about them?
4. How did Manuela, Jonatas, and Natan serve Simón Bolívar and the revolutionaries?
5. How does the artist show Manuela’s attempt to break out of confinement using art?
6. How does the artist portray Jonotas and Natan? Why does she make this choice?

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. Use evidence from this article to explain the causes and effects of the various revolutions in the period from 1750 to 1900.
2. How does this biography of Manuela Sáenz support, extend, or challenge what you have learned about social transformations and their limits during the long nineteenth century?

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!

Nationalism hasn’t been around forever. Even though people say nations are older than time, they really began to appear at a very specific point in time, about two centuries ago. Nations aren’t biological or natural. Nations are communities that people imagine and build, around shared languages, cultures, histories, governments, and goals. They came about for many different reasons, from military victories to reading lots of new print materials to the decrease in trust in religion, but they didn’t come about everywhere or in the same way—or at all for some time.

In this article you’ll take a closer look at evidence for how ideas of sovereignty and the Enlightenment helped to create the modern experience of nationalism. Nationalism was a game-changer during this unit, so understanding it and being able to compare across regions will help you answer the Unit Problem: “How did different parts of the world experience the revolutionary transformations of the period c. 1750 to 1900 CE?” You’ll also get an idea about how to put nations—past and present—into context and analyze their claims about themselves.

Think about the following question as you read the article: To what extent does this article explain the intellectual and ideological context in which revolutions swept the Atlantic world from 1750 to 1900? Write this question at the top of the Three Close Reads worksheet. You will be asked to respond to this question again after the third read in the Evaluating and Corroborating section of the worksheet.

Read 1 – 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!

Read 2 – 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 nation? Are nations natural or biological?
2. Why does the author describe nations as an “imagined communities”?
3. How did French military victories contribute to the rise of nationalism in France and elsewhere?
4. In what context did nationalism take hold in Europe? In the Americas?
5. What factors helped nationalism take hold in Germany and Italy?

Read 3 – Evaluating and Corroborating

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

1. To what extent does this article explain the intellectual and ideological context in which revolutions swept the Atlantic world from 1750 to 1900?
2. What is the author’s main argument about nationalism? Do you find it convincing? Why or why not?
3. What are some of the ways in which nationalism helped liberate people or bring about positive political change in this era? Can you predict any potential problems or challenges that nationalism might also bring? If so, what are they?

Nationalism is the most impactful ideology in modern history. It is a cultural and political concept that argues that nations exist and have a right to govern themselves. That might not seem controversial, but it has been an incredibly disruptive force over the last 200 years. From the Atlantic Revolutions, the concept of nationalism spread around the world, sometimes liberating people from empires, and sometimes warping into new, destructive ideologies like fascism. Nationalists make historical claims that help them achieve their political goals. It’s time for you to test those claims. Is nationalism good or bad?

This video is intended to introduce you to a concept you’re going to hear a lot about for the rest of the course: nationalism. The video defines the ideology of nationalism, provides an overview of where it got started and how it spread, and concludes by providing some evidence to help you evaluate nationalism as an ideology. It will help you better understand the revolutions of the long nineteenth century and the remarkable violence of the twentieth century.

Think about the following question as you watch the video: To what extent does this video explain the causes and effects of the various revolutions in the period from 1750 to 1900? You will be asked to respond to this question again at the end of the video.

Preview – Skimming for Gist

As a reminder, open and skim the transcript, and read the questions before you watch the video.

Key Ideas – Understanding Content

Think about the following questions as you watch this video.

1. How does this video define nationalism?
2. What did Benedict Anderson mean when he called the nation an “imagined political community”?
3. According to the video, where did nationalism begin and how did it spread?
4. How did nationalism contribute to the extreme violence of the twentieth century?
5. How do nationalists construct ideas about their nation?
6. What is some evidence referenced in this video as to whether nationalism is good or bad?

Evaluating and Corroborating

1. To what extent does this video explain the causes and effects of the various revolutions in the period from 1750 to 1900?
2. The opening quote of this video is by the American novelist Kurt Vonnegut. In the quote, Vonnegut warns that “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” Why do you think this quote was included in this video?

In this activity, you will be assigned a mystery vocab word, and your job is to go around the room and ask enough questions of your classmates to try to figure out what the word is. You’ll have to use your questioning and deduction skills to figure out the word. In many ways, you are being asked to take context clues to help you figure out your word. This is a great way to determine if you really understand the words from the unit, or if you need more practice.

You are going to play the vocab game, “What’s My Word?” And, it’s exactly as it sounds—you’re going to be assigned a vocab word, but you won’t know what it is. Your job is to ask your classmates questions about your word until you correctly guess what it is.

Your teacher will explain how the game works. Once everyone is ready, your teacher will place a vocab word, written on an index card, face down on your desk. DO NOT LOOK AT THE WORD. Instead, when your teacher says “go,” hold up the card to your forehead, with the word facing out, and then go around the room asking questions until you’ve figured out your word.

Once your whole class has figured out their words, think about and discuss the following questions with your class:

1. What kinds of questions did you ask?
2. What types of questions most easily led you to figure out your word?
3. How might these types of questions help you figure out unfamiliar words that you encounter in the course?

The Atlantic revolutions helped birth nationalism in the eighteenth century. But in the nineteenth century, people in Europe started embracing a different form of nationalism. In large land-based empires like the Ottoman and Austrian Empires, ethnic groups within the empire started demanding their own independent nation-states and a broke away from the empire. In Italy and Germany, by contrast, people used nationalism to unite many different states into larger nation-states.

This article provides evidence to respond to the Unit Problem, with its focus on continuity and change, by providing examples of how nationalism played out in different types of states in the nineteenth century. As you read, use the governance theme to compare ethnic nationalism to the types of nationalism you’ve already read about in France and the Americas.

Think about the following question as you read the article: Use evidence from this article to explain the extent to which ethnic nationalism might have been a cause and effect of the various revolutions in the period from 1750 to 1900. Write this question at the top of the Three Close Reads worksheet. You will be asked to respond to this question again after the third read in the Evaluating and Corroborating section of the worksheet.

Read 1 – 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!

Read 2 – 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. How does the author define ethnicity?
2. Why was ethnic nationalism such a threat to the Ottoman and Hapsburg Empires?
3. How did nationalist ideas spread to Greek communities?
4. What was the dark side of ethnic nationalism?

Read 3 – Evaluating and Corroborating

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

1. Use evidence from this article to explain the extent to which ethnic nationalism might have been a cause and effect of the various revolutions in the period from 1750 to 1900.
2. Use the evidence from this article, and others you have read, to answer this question: Does nationalism liberate people, or does it oppress them? Or neither? Or both?
3. Throughout this unit, we have seen people adopt new identities—from being British to being American, from being Ottoman subjects to being Greek citizens, etc. What does this flexibility suggest about the nature of our political and social identities?

In the long nineteenth century, people in many parts of the world were trying out new ideas and seeing how they fit into their own societies. Rifa’a al-Tahtawi was an Egyptian intellectual who studied French society and the ideas of the Enlightenment in the age of revolutions. He theorized ways to combine European scientific ideas with Islamic belief, reflecting the great Muslim contributions to science of earlier centuries. He was also an Egyptian nationalist and a liberal theorist.

In this unit we see a number of new ideas about politics and governance. These led to liberal and national political revolutions in many parts of the world. Much of the focus is on France, the United States, Haiti, and Latin America. But Enlightenment ideas, including ideas about politics, were debated widely. This biography introduces an important Egyptian political philosopher. You can explore the ways he tried to fit Enlightenment ideas into his own society, and also those ideas he rejected, and see how these ideas helped to create a sense of nationalism in Egypt.

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. Where was Rifa’a al-Tahtawi from, and what was he doing in France in 1827?
2. Who was in charge of Egypt in this period, and what were some of his ideas?
3. What ideas did al-Tahtawi come up with and share when he returned to France?
4. What idea did al-Tahtawi reject for Egypt?
5. How does the artist use art and design to demonstrate al-Tahtawi’s belief that science and religion could co-exist, as opposed to French ideas that they were in opposition to each other?

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. Use evidence from this article to explain the extent to which ethnic nationalism might have been a cause and effect of the various revolutions in the period from 1750 to 1900.
2. How does this biography of al-Tahtawi support, extend, or challenge what you have learned about the Enlightenment and political revolutions of the long nineteenth century?

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!

The year 1848 was a huge year for Europe. Several bad harvests in the 1840s created the conditions that led to dozens of revolutions all over Europe. Diverse coalitions of liberals, republicans, and working-class radicals demanded independent nations, political sovereignty, and constitutions. They succeeded at first, but soon they started fighting amongst themselves. The kings of Europe made alliances with liberals and returned to power, stronger than ever, and the workers lost out. But in India and China huge wars against the status quo erupted, failing in the short term but setting long-term events into motion.

This article provides evidence at a global scale to respond to the Unit Problem, which asks you to evaluate continuity and change in an era of revolutions. This article discusses important revolutions that arguably did not cause lasting change, or had significant limits. As you read, ask how ideas about political sovereignty and nationalism traveled so far and so fast after 1848.

Think about the following question as you read the article: To what extent does this article provide evidence to explain the intellectual and ideological context in which revolutions swept the Atlantic world from 1750 to 1900? Write this question at the top of the Three Close Reads worksheet. You will be asked to respond to this question again after the third read in the Evaluating and Corroborating section of the worksheet.

Read 1—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!

Read 2—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 caused the revolutions of 1848 in Europe?
2. Why did the revolutions of 1848 fail?
3. What effects did the Taiping Revolution and the Great Revolt of 1857 have on British power in Asia?
4. Why does the author suggest that all these revolutions happened around the same time?
5. From Europe to China, what was the common effect of the failed world revolutions from 1848 to 1865?

Read 3—Evaluating and Corroborating

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

1. To what extent does this article provide evidence to explain the intellectual and ideological context in which revolutions swept the Atlantic world from 1750 to 1900?
2. All the revolutions mentioned in this article failed. However, thinking back to your discussions from the last lesson, how revolutionary would the revolutions of 1848, the Taiping Revolution, and the Indian Rebellion of 1857 have been, if they had succeeded?
3. The 1848 revolutions were driven by two questions: a governance question that mostly the middle-class liberals pushed (who gets to participate in ruling?) and an economic question that mostly working-class radicals pushed (who gets the profit from industrialization?) Were either of these questions resolved by these revolutions?

You practice testing claims a lot in this course. You make claims as well, often within the context of writing assignments. This activity gives you the opportunity to practice making claims and counterclaims, which will help you make strong historical arguments both verbally and in writing. This activity will also give you an idea of how well you understand the causes of the political revolutions of this era.

Claim testing
In many ways, claim testing is really shorthand for “making and testing claims.” In this activity, you will practice your claim-making skills.

This is a quick activity where you’re asked to make two claims and one counterclaim about the causes of political revolutions.

Think about the political revolutions you learned about earlier in this unit. Pick two revolutions, and for each, come up with a claim for what caused the revolution. If you completed the Recipe for a Revolution activity, pick different revolutions from the ones used in that activity. For each claim, find two pieces of evidence that support it. Once you’ve written your two claims and provided supporting evidence, write one counterclaim that relates to one of the claims. You should also find two pieces of evidence to back up your counterclaim. You should be able to support your claims using course materials, but your teacher might ask you to use the Internet, as well.

Be prepared to share your claims at the end of class. Note that most if not all of these claims are causal claims. Historical claims often relate to historical thinking practices such as causation, CCOT, and comparison. You should consider the types of historical claims you want to make when you respond to a particular type of historical question.

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.