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

Abstract

versity 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://gold bergseries.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 attenBen Marsh and Mike Rapport, eds. Understanding and Teaching the Age of Revolutions. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2017, 352 pp.