Teaching the Age of Revolutions

We have it in our power to begin the world over again. Thomas Paine, Common Sense, 1776

Though I was trained primarily as a historian of the US, departmental needs mean that I have pushed myself to focus more on Atlantic and transnational history.

This past spring, I decided to teach a course on the Age of Revolutions. While such a course is far outside my temporal and geographic scope, it seemed like a fitting course for the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. And of course, it was another great opportunity for me to dig into the Haitian Revolution and listen to Boukman Esperyans!

In preparing to teach the course, I leaned especially on Rafe Blaufarb’s The Revolutionary Atlantic (Oxford, 2017), Ben Marsh and Mike Rapport’s Understanding and Teaching the Age of Revolutions (University of Wisconsin Press, 2017), Nathan Perl-Rosenthal’s The Age of Revolutions (Basic Books, 2024), and Laurent Dubois’s Avengers of the New World (Harvard, 2005).

A few highlights from the course:

• Virtual lecture about Hamilton and “founders chic” by Dr. Shira Lurie, author of The American Liberty Pole: Popular Politics and the Struggle for Democracy in the Early Republic (UVA Press, 2023)
• Two-day interactive role-playing game using John Patrick Coby’s Raising the Eleventh Pillar: The Ratification Debate of 1788 (W.W. Norton & Company, 2021). This was my first time using a “Reacting to the Past” game in class, and students responded really well to it.
• Thayer Lecture with Dr. Jane Kamensky, CEO of Monticello and author of A Revolution in Color: The World of John Singleton Copley (Norton, 2016).
• Class trip to the Virginia Museum of History & Culture, including vault tour and panel with museum employees.
• Graphic history novel by Charles F. Walker, Witness to the Age of Revolution: The Odyssey of Juan Bautista Tupac Amaru (Oxford, 2020). Another first–I’ve personally really enjoyed reading Oxford’s Graphic History series but hadn’t assigned one until this year. It worked well!
• Weekly “think aloud” assignments where students recorded themselves talking about the week’s reading and what it has to do with them. In addition to avoiding AI use, I found the assignment helpful for honing students’ verbal and synthesizing skills
• Research paper assignment. I worked to scaffold this assignment – including two guided library work session. One student paper about loyalists in the American Revolution even won Randolph College’s 2025/26 Best Writing in the Arts & Letters Division!

Image below: Attack and take of the Crête-à-Pierrot (1802). Original illustration by Auguste Raffet, engraving by Ernst Hébert. Courtesy of Library of Wikimedia Commons.