How to Stage a Revolution

Assignments

Website Forum Post

During Extra Session 1 you will be required to post a response of 200–300 words to a topic that will be posted on the class forum. Your responses should be thoughtful and thought provoking. You are not expected to do any extra preparation for this post: we have carefully calculated your weekly workload to allow for about 30 minutes for the forum post during the week in question.

Papers

• Paper 1 (1250 words): Due Extra Session 2, between Sessions 5 and 6.
• Revision of Paper 1: Due Recitation 4
• Paper 2 (1250 words): Due Recitation 6
• Paper 3 (1250 words): Due Recitation 10
• Paper 4 (1250 words): Due Session 27

A Word of Warning

Your paper should rely entirely on the required and optional primary and secondary sources. We do not consider Wikipedia or any online Internet sources adequate information for this paper. You may consult the Internet if you are looking for a particular piece of information (e.g., a date) that is considered common knowledge. We will also strongly prosecute any instances of plagiarism, so we recommend you know what it is: MIT: Avoiding Plagiarism.

Paper 1

Many Americans view the American Revolution as the genesis of their nation, the United States. They, therefore, tend to see the conflict as a noble colonial rebellion against the escalating British persecution of North America beginning in 1763 and view its success as the culmination of a struggle against political tyranny. How does this understanding of the origins and outcomes of the Revolutionary War change when viewed from the perspective of Native Americans?

Successful papers will demonstrate the following:

• A clear thesis statement near the opening of the paper;
• Close familiarity with the North American and British primary sources for the period;
• Understanding of the nature of these sources and of their limitations;
• Understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the twentieth century historians’ arguments about the revolutionary nature of events in North America in this period;
• Your ability to bring together all the above in a clearly written and logically structured argument.

Paper 2

After the fall of the Old Regime in 1789, the French experimented with at least three different forms of government during the next decade, until Napoleon’s coup d’état at the end of 1799. Select one of the following three political “experiments,” and offer a multicausal explanation for its failure to stabilize French politics in the revolutionary decade:

• Constitutional Monarchy, 1789–1792
• Rule of the Committees of General Security and Public Safety, 1793–1794
• Parliamentary Democracy (Directory), 1795–1799

You may wish to consider ideological, institutional, social, economic, or cultural factors. Be sure to ground your analysis in a detailed examination of the primary and secondary source documents listed as “required” and “recommended” reading on the syllabus.

Successful papers will demonstrate the following:

• A clear thesis statement near the opening of the paper;
• Close familiarity with the primary sources for the period;
• Careful study of the relevant secondary literature assigned;
• An understanding of these sources and of their limitations;
• Your ability to bring together all the above in a clearly written and logically structured argument.

Paper 3

The historian Richard Pipes has observed:

Post-1789 revolutions have raised the most fundamental ethical questions: whether it is proper to destroy institutions built over centuries by trial and error, for the sake of ideal systems; whether one has the right to sacrifice the well-being and even the lives of one’s own generation for the sake of generations yet unborn; whether man can be refashioned into a perfectly virtuous being. To ignore these questions . . . is to turn a blind eye to the passions that had inspired those who made and those who resisted revolutions. For post-1789 revolutionary struggles, in the final analysis, are not over politics but over theology.

Using the Haitian Revolution as your point of reference, please comment on one (and only one) of Pipes’s three “fundamental ethical questions”:

1. Whether it is proper to destroy institutions built over centuries by trial and error, for the sake of ideal systems;
2. Whether one has the right to sacrifice the well-being and even the lives of one’s own generation for the sake of generations yet unborn;
3. Whether man can be refashioned into a perfectly virtuous being.

Your answer should focus on, and make specific use of, the primary and secondary sources we are studying in the current segment of the course on Haiti. A paper that waxes abstractly about the ethics of revolution in general is not acceptable. Instead, you should aim for a paper that makes an historical argument about what the Haitian Revolution was and how it unfolded, in the course of which you explicitly address one of the three normative dilemmas listed above.

Successful papers will demonstrate the following:

• A clear thesis statement near the opening of the paper;
• Close familiarity with the primary sources for the period;
• Careful study of the relevant secondary literature assigned;
• An understanding of these sources and of their limitations;
• Your ability to bring together all the above in a clearly written and logically structured argument.

Paper 4

Write a 1250-word essay in response to one of the following three topics:

1. Which of the three Atlantic Revolutions we have studied (American, French, Haitian) provides the closest parallel to events in Egypt since the fall of Hosni Mubarak in early 2011? Be sure to discuss specific events from the revolution you have selected and the Egyptian case. You may also choose to argue that the Egyptian case is totally different than the three Atlantic revolutions we have studied, in which case you will need to discuss relevant details from all three revolutions.
2. The director of MIT’s Office of Digital Learning sends you an e-mail in which he asks you to prepare a mini-lecture for a new MOOC entitled “How to End a Revolution.” The theme of the mini-lecture is precisely that: how to bring a revolution to a successful conclusion. Drawing on the three examples we have studied in depth this semester, write a lecture in which you detail “best practices” for ending revolutions.
3. The American, French, and Haitian Revolutions are linked in time and space. Are these Atlantic revolutions, however, tied by something more than an ocean? Using details from the class readings for each module, describe the deeper historical connections between these revolutions.

Successful papers will demonstrate the following:

• A clear thesis statement near the opening of the paper;
• Close familiarity with the relevant primary sources we have read this term;
• Careful study of the relevant secondary literature assigned;
• An understanding of these sources and of their limitations;
• Your ability to bring together all the above in a clearly written and logically structured argument.