The period when the modern political order was forced into being.
11 topics · 11 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Common Sense
Thomas Paine · 1776
Argues, months before the Declaration of Independence, that reconciliation with Britain was no longer in the colonies' interest and that an…
+2 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
The Jamaica Letter
Simón Bolívar · 1815
Argues Spanish America's independence is inevitable given centuries of colonial misrule, but warns its fragmented regions may struggle to unite into…
+1 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England
Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon · 1702
A royalist minister's account of the English Civil War from inside the king's counsels, arguing the catastrophe came from the failures of particular…
+5 more at this level
11 works
Thomas Paine
Argues, months before the Declaration of Independence, that reconciliation with Britain was no longer in the colonies' interest and that an independent republic — not a reformed monarchy — was the only government suited to America.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Jean-Jacques Dessalines
Declares Haiti's break from France total and irrevocable, arguing former slaves must renounce France forever if the freedom just won is to be secure against reconquest.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
A memoir by Napoleon's private secretary and boyhood friend, offering an insider's account that both flatters and, after his own fall from favour, undercuts the image Napoleon cultivated of himself.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Simón Bolívar
Argues Spanish America's independence is inevitable given centuries of colonial misrule, but warns its fragmented regions may struggle to unite into stable republics once the common enemy is gone.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Joanne B. Freeman (YaleCourses)
Argues that the Revolution's outcome was contingent and contested at the time, and reconstructs it from what participants believed while it was still uncertain rather than from its result.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon
A royalist minister's account of the English Civil War from inside the king's counsels, arguing the catastrophe came from the failures of particular men rather than from any inevitable conflict.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Thomas Carlyle
A history written as literature, arguing the Terror was an eruption of the sansculottes' pent-up suffering that no single leader truly controlled and no earlier historian's methods could adequately narrate.
link failing as of 17 Sept 2026Thomas Babington Macaulay
Argues the Glorious Revolution of 1688 completed rather than began England's constitutional settlement, presenting it as the triumph of ordered liberty over both royal absolutism and revolutionary excess — the classic Whig account, since much revised.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Karl Marx
Argues the 1848 revolution's defeat in France resulted from the bourgeoisie turning against its own worker allies once the underlying class conflict became too dangerous to tolerate.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Alexis de Tocqueville
Argues the Revolution did not break with the old monarchy's centralising administrative state but completed it, so much of what seemed new in 1789 was already well underway before it.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Klemens von Metternich
Metternich's own memoirs argue the post-Napoleonic order he engineered at Vienna preserved decades of great-power peace in Europe by deliberately balancing restoration against revolution.
link checked 17 Sept 2026