Understanding and Teaching the Age of Revolutions ed. by Ben Marsh and Mike Rapport (review)

Ben Marsh and Mike Rapport's collection of essays is part of the University of Wisconsin Press' Harvey Goldberg series for understanding and teaching history, which also includes volumes on American Slavery and the Cold War. These books intend to provide teachers at the high school and college level with new ways to approach major historical themes in the classroom. Most of the chapters in this book start with a quick overview of the historical narrative, followed by major historiographical trends and, most importantly, practical ways to introduce historical events to students.

The Age of Revolutions volume, its editors further emphasize, is meant to be "eclectic, fast-moving, and polyphonic in tone and style" (4). The style of the essay ranges from the scholarly to the informal, with some occasional asides directly addressed to the reader, as if one were having a conversation over coffee with a colleague over shared pedagogical challenges. "Eclectic" is an apropos descriptive. The opening chapter, by Peter McPhee, is a first-person account of the author's career teaching the French Revolution in Australia. The closing chapter, by Stuart Salmon and Ben Marsh, covers internet sources that can be employed in the classroom. Most unusually, the print version of that chapter consists of a one-paragraph abstract followed by an invitation to read the actual chapter online (347). (The web address provided in the footnote is inaccurate; the article can be found instead at https://goldbergseries.files.wordpress.com/2017/08/marshrapportwebrev.pdf.)

Many of the chapters cover fairly traditional topics like the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Mark C. Carnes) and Thomas Paine (Edward Larkin), Napoleon's use of nationalism to bolster his political rise (Alan Forrest), the Terror (David Andress), and the Boston Stamp Act Riots (Colin Nicolson), along with slightly more obscure topics like the United States of Belgium (Jane Judge). Despite the editors' professed goal to be inclusive, the North Atlantic receives the lion's share of attention: nine essays are primarily about Europe (especially France) and four about the United States of America. Only two are about Latin America and another two about the Caribbean, which is to say Haiti.

In keeping with the overall format of the series, in addition to case studies of specific revolutions (Part 3), the book includes cross-sectional essays about sources and methods (Part 2). Mark Ledbury's entry, for example, invites educators to use visual arts like Jacques-Louis David's Death of Marat as part of their teaching strategy. The focus of these topical chapters often reflects new historiographical trends, which can be useful for educators who have not kept up with the profession's latest developments. Lindsay A.H. Parker's chapter embraces a gendered approach, for example, while the chapter by Sharla Chittick is an environmental history of the US and Latin American revolutions. Lester Langley's chapter introduces the Atlantic approach pioneered by Robert R. Palmer and Eric Hobsbawm in the 1960s, then encourages educators to extend this approach to the wars of independence in Latin America.

The two essays most likely to be useful to this journal's readers both focus on Haiti. The first is by Julia Gaffield, a young scholar best known for a 2016 edited collection entitled The Haitian Declaration of Independence (full disclosure: I was a contributor). She suggests comparing the text of Jean-Jacques Dessalines' 1804 Declaration of Independence to that of other documents like the US Declaration of Independence in 1776 to draw more general conclusions about Haiti's place in the revolutionary era. Iconography and slogans like "la liberté ou la mort" were identical, she notes (82). But the Haitian declaration was issued by a strongman, not on behalf of the people, and it was addressed to the French people, not a British tyrant, allowing students to draw more general conclusions about the two revolutions' varying policy objectives.

The style of Christopher Hodson's essay is exemplary...