Revolution

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

The term “revolution” has been applied widely, from sudden and self-consciously organized political events to gradually unfolding cascades of social changes. Which political events or epochs are best understood as “revolutions”? What factors might predict the occurrence or political character of revolutions? What do revolutions tell us or fail to tell us about times of political stability and “business-as-usual”? Most centrally: what have the revolutions of the past few centuries contributed to the state of our present? We will start the course with a brief unit explicitly investigating some of these philosophical themes. The course will then turn to case studies of revolutions in recent centuries, focusing on revolutions within the French empire (including 1791 Haiti and 1789 France), the Russian empire (1917) and the Portuguese empire (including 1963 Guinea-Bissau, 1961 Angola, 1964 Mozambique, and 1974 Portugal).