Revolutions Come & Go
This week I have been exploring some of the BIG new books on the Age of Revolutions that have come out recently. One of the things I’m most struck by is how scholars are turning anew to the lost opportunities of the revolutionary era. It was remarkable, I think, that during the various conferences to mark the 150th anniversary of the Civil War and Reconstruction, the celebrations of the second founding were not all that common. Instead some scholars sought to unwrite the freedom narrative, to cite Carole Emberton’s tour-de-force article, and in other spots it was clear that there were historiographic cracks in the foundation of the the second founding literature.
Perhaps as we turn to the 250th of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, the same historiographic trends will be on full display. Woody Holton certainly charted the way in his most recent work, Liberty is Sweet (2022) which charts the wartime years to show the fraught relationship between the Independence movement and the revolution. Ashli White has brought a fresh eye to the material culture of the Revolutionary era with her book Revolutionary Things: Material Culture and Politics in the Late Eighteenth Century Atlantic World, connecting Europe, the Caribbean, and U.S. North as few others have. Notably, her book ends with a discussion of violence, which few scholars of objects do. But in looking at wax figures and wax museums, she shows how the objects of revolution forced people to confront the violence of the era. Nathan Perl-Rosenthal tackles this question of violence (and illiberalism more generally) head on in his brilliant book The Age of Revolutions (2024). I was struck, for instance, by the observation that “Mass moblization could lead to democratic outcomes, in which everyone was endowed with a piece of the sovereignty. Or it could become the foundation for tyranny and one-man rule.” Continuing the author observes that “the mass movements that took off after 1800, in sum, fulfilled some of the greatest dreams of the early revolutionary era but only by dint of abandoning or betraying others.” (10) In tracing the story of interconnection, and showing the vast web of integration in the Atlantic World, Patrick Griffin offers his own take on these questions in his new work, The Age of Atlantic Revolution (2023).
We are no doubt in for a wave of scholarship on U.S. Independence in the coming years. One wonders if these titles are signs of things to come.
