French Revolution 
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2/21/2021
January 6, 2021: A Day of Populist Transgression
by Robert A. Schneider
The Capitol riot included a small core of actors bent on destruction, with many more along for the ride reveling in a moment of transgression. In this way, it was a microcosm of the Trumpian movement that, now unleashed, will be difficult to contain.
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SOURCE: Age of Revolutions
1/22/2021
4 Cautionary Tales from the French Revolution
by Christine Adams
A historian of revolutionary France argues that the period presents cautions about the prevalence of disinformation, the potential of rhetoric to incite, the folly of blaming singular figures for broad trends and movements, and the cynicism that flows from efforts to undermine the legitimacy of democratic institutions.
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SOURCE: Made By History at The Washington Post
8/18/2020
Conspiracy Theories Make Sense of a Topsy-Turvy World — But Undermine Democracy
by Zachary R. Goldsmith
While the “paranoid style” in the various conspiracy theories of QAnon are nothing new, they certainly bode ill for democracy.
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SOURCE: Age of Revolutions
8/17/2020
Liberté, Equality, #ICantBreathe! Teaching the Age of Revolutions Using the NBA’s 2020 Summer Restart
by Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall
The slogans NBA players are wearing on their jerseys can help lead students to understand the objectives of 18th century revolution and the incompleteness of attempts to secure the rights and dignity of all humanity.
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SOURCE: Washington Post
7/14/19
What the French Revolution teaches us about the dangers of gerrymandering
by Rebecca L. Spang
Our institutions must remain representative and responsive.
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2-16-16
How Historians Can Help Us Better Understand the Revolutions Taking Place Around the World
by Jack Censer
The key is to understand revolution as a global phenomenon.
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SOURCE: OZY
10-29-15
How the French Revolution Gave Birth to the Third World
by Pooja Bhatia
The term is still bandied about, but what does it mean?
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SOURCE: Times Literary Supplement
9-17-15
University of Kansas historian Jonathan Clark says Thomas Paine didn't write the account of the French Revolution included in the Rights of Man
by Jonathan C. Clark
Who did? The Marquis de Lafayette, with whom Paine boarded for a time.
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2-22-15
3 Lessons from the French Revolution European Policymakers Should Keep in Mind
by Rebecca L. Spang
The moment has come to diversify our analogy portfolio to include the French Revolution if we are to understand the Euro crisis.
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SOURCE: Atlantic
11-17-14
This is how kids are learning the history of the French Revolution now (video)
by Kabir Chibber
Let Them Play Assassin's Creed? With sympathetic noblemen and bloodthirsty common folk, the French Revolution-set Unity is re-igniting an historic debate over the period's heroes and villains.
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11-30-14
This Ghost Story Puts the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror in a New Light
by Ronen Steinberg
The Reign of Terror (1793-4) was an event of mass violence in the middle of the French Revolution. Tens of thousands of people were executed and hundreds of thousands were imprisoned.
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SOURCE: Fast Company & Inc
10-22-14 (accessed)
This company claims its video games about the French Revolution are accurate
Trois-Rivieres history professor Laurent Turcot sees the potential for video games to introduce students and others to how people lived in the past.
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Understanding Modern Violence Through the Lens of the Reign of Terror
by Jack Censer
One of the most stimulating books I have read in some time is Sophie Wahnich’s In Defense of the Terror: Liberty or Death in the French Revolution (published in 2003, but in English 2012). But it’s not the writing (which is murky) or its purpose (with which I generally disagree) but its viewpoint on Terrorism that can be instructive.In fact, this little book is an apologetic for the Terrorists in the French Revolution. And its value is that in associating herself so clearly with her subject, she does see them much as they saw themselves. In short, Wahnich argues that the Terrorists were motivated by the “dread” that they felt after the assassination of Marat. They then had acted to protect the purity and integrity of the “sacred” revolution that they had made to affirm the political equality of all. More originally, Wahnich also claims that the mechanism of the Terror led to more incarcerations than executions and that its organizational existence at least put limits on popular “enthusiasm.” In sum, the Terrorists were justified and their leadership contained excesses.
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From the Bloody Nursery of Revolution, Democracy
by Guillaume Mazeau
More than two years after the hope that accompanied the so-called “Arab Spring,” the Occidental experts, politicians and public opinions are now chocked by the return of political violence in Egypt, perpetuated by the military. What is striking about these reactions is the difficulty to understand why so many Egyptian former dissidents, liberals and even leftists, who fought against Mubarak and his military dictatorship, now clearly support General Al-Sisi’s coup and even justify the recent massacres of Muslim Brothers. Is it possible to explain such a dramatic shift without blaming these sincere men and women, who claim to struggle for democracy but, at the same time, approve the use of political violence?
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Revolutionary Disillusionment, from 1789 to 2013
by Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall
Disillusionment is a time-honored revolutionary tradition. True believers risk their lives launching a revolution, only to see their ideals abandoned by others -- or, worse, to watch the former government return.
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Revolutions: Three Different Kinds
by Rex Wade
Alyssa's posting, like Peter Stearns' earlier, implicitly touch on the questions of leadership and revolutionary stages. Perhaps in any discussion of revolutions it may be worth keeping in mind that those who begin revolutions rarely are the ones who finish them. (The American Revolution, perhaps better called by its other common term, the War for Independence, is an anomaly that perhaps misleads Americans about revolutions.) In comparing revolutions and leadership, perhaps several variants are worth keeping in mind:1) Places where the revolution “succeeds,” in the sense of the old regime being swept away, but successive leadership changes and even mini-revolutions and regime changes occur before things are stabilized in a new order, as in France after 1789 and Russia in 1917.2) Those (rare?) instances where the original revolutionaries successfully sweep away the old regime and replace it by something genuinely new that is reasonably stable and permanent, such as Turkey with Ataturk.3) Instances where revolutionaries have temporary success but the old regime soon reconstitutes itself in slightly altered form (“Revolution of 1905” in Russia, 1848 in Central Europe).
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Revolutionary Situations are Inherently Messy
by Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall
Social scientists who study revolutions and other historical processes generally look for patterns and similarities. Historians, by contrast, have traditionally focused on factors that are specific to each situation, in each time and in each place. They seek to understand the particularities of each situation, rather than generalize about commonalities.Like most historians, I tend to analyze events based on particular historical contexts. And yet, after twenty-five years of studying eighteenth- and nineteenth-century revolutions (and watching new ones erupt in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries), I cannot help but notice certain patterns that recur in almost all revolutionary situations.
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The Military Played a Smaller Role in France and the U.S. than in Egypt
by Jack Censer
The political independence that the military often displays in the midst of revolutionary situations was strikingly absent in both the American and French revolutions. Both depended on militias composed of citizen soldiers. Even as an army was constituted, this remained the case at least for a good while.Let me consider the French case as I know it much better. In fact, the revolutionary uprising (July 12-14, 1789) that led to the capture of the Bastille already revealed that some of the royal army had, in fact, absorbed the rising tide of revolutionary spirit. The troops called up largely refused to intervene. The effective fighting force that actively favored the revolution proved to be poorly armed citizenry, but taking the Bastille was accomplished less by armed assault than persuasion. When the revolutionaries got around in succeeding months to organizing the army, they installed elections by the troops as a way of peopling the officer rank.
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SOURCE: Foreign Affairs
1-2-13
Charles Walton: The Missing Half of Les Mis
Charles Walton is Associate Professor of History at Yale University.Before there were blockbuster films, there were blockbuster books. Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, published in 1862, was one of them. Thanks to a market-savvy publisher, this monument of French romanticism, which was serialized in ten installments, became an immediate bestseller across Europe and North America. Demand was so great that other authors, notably Gustave Flaubert, postponed the publications of their own books to avoid being outshined. On days when new installments went on sale in Paris, police were called in to stop impatient crowds from storming the bookstores. Some high-minded critics, not unlike those who spurn sensational Hollywood films today, found the hype distasteful. Edwin Percy Whipple, in a review for The Atlantic, referred to “the system of puffing” surrounding the book’s release in terms worthy of Ebenezer Scrooge: it was “the grossest bookselling humbug,” a spectacle “at which Barnum himself would stare amazed.”
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