Course Number:

Credit Hours:

4

Course Title:

Atlantic Revolutions

Course Description:

Studies the earliest revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in order to understand better how revolution became an integral part of modern consciousness and ideology. Beginning in England, the early revolutions flared on both sides of the Atlantic, moving from England to the thirteen colonies, to France, and to Haiti. Examines the way in which these early revolutions influenced and cross-fertilized one another, extending their implications to the political, social, and cultural spheres. Like ships, goods, diseases, and human beings, ideologies flowed across the ocean, changing human consciousness in the process. With the development of revolutionary philosophies, radical participatory politics had become an integral part of modernity. Students read selections from a number of works that discuss these early revolutions and their implications and write a research paper.