By Bryan Banks and Cindy Ermus

Today is Age of Revolutions’s first birthday. Since beginning this project a year ago, we’ve published 69 posts. This marks our 70th. We’ve posted original research, directed attention to new publications in the field, tackled historiographical problems, summarized conference panels, and thought about slavery, race, gender, periodization, material culture, and many other themes in the context of the Age of Revolutions. We’ve interviewed scholars about their approaches and pedagogy, and we’ve been interviewed, as well (Process blog). It has been a busy year!

A considerable amount of work has gone into connecting with scholars from around the world – researching, writing, and editing posts, and organizing them on the site. However, AoR would not exist without the work of our contributors. We are grateful to all of those who have joined us in our endeavor. It has been exciting for us to see how the AoR community has grown, and it is an honor to bring this content to our audience. 

We’ve featured many great posts (we love them all!). Some of the most viewed posts on the site have been Steven Pincus’s “Placing the American Revolution in Global Perspective,” Christopher Taylor’s “The Black Jacobins: From Great Book to Classic?,” David Andress’s “Navigating Feelings in the French Revolution,” Kevin Gannon’s “The Civil War as a Settler-Colonial Revolution,” and Naghmeh Sohrabi’s “Books as Revolutionary Objects in Iran.”

With the holiday seasons fast approaching, revisit our book lists from this past summer. We asked experts in their fields to suggest recent and not-so-recent field-shaping books. We compiled lists on the Atlantic Revolutions, American Revolution, French Revolution, Haitian Revolution, and the Cuban Revolution.

We also fostered discussions on technology, the digital humanities, and pedagogy. Check out posts like Erin Zavitz’s “Revolutions in the Classroom: Digital Humanities and the U.S. History Survey,” Abby Broughton, Kelsey Corlett-Rivera, and Nathan Dize’s “Lessons from A Colony In Crisis: Collaborative Pedagogy and the Digital Humanities,” Alex Sayf Cummings’s “Information: The Revolution that Didn’t Happen,” and our interviews with podcasters Liz Covart and Mike Duncan.

And we thought about issues that seem remarkably topical and important for our contemporary world. Cindy Ermus reflected on her experience with revolution and immigration in “The Cuban Revolution and Me.” Bryan Banks thought about modern conspiracies in “Conspiracy and Paranoia in the Age of Trump.” In “Women and Revolution: A Horror Story,” Caroline Wigginton reflected on the violence inflicted on female bodies during the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions. Kacy Tillman explored similar themes in the cases of female loyalists during the American Revolution in “Loyalist Women and the Fight for the Right to Entry.” The rhetoric of such violence also resonated with Marlene L. Daut’s “‘Genocidal Imaginings’ in the Era of the Haitian Revolution.” We also hosted a fantastic panel on the right to bear arms during the Age of Revolutions.

We hope that you have enjoyed reading along as much as we have enjoyed bringing it to you!

Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll be toasting our anniversary with a series of posts on alcohol in the Age of Revolutions. We are calling this roundtable “Intoxicating Revolutions.”

Here is the lineup:

Bertie Mandelblatt (University of Toronto), “Trans-Imperial Geographies of Rum: Production and Circulation” (November 28)

Jordan Smith (Georgetown), “The False Hope of Corn Stalk Rum during the American Revolution” (November 30)

Noelle Plack (Newman University), “Intoxication and the French Revolution” (December 5)

Frederick H. Smith (William & Mary), “Rum, Oaths, and Slave Uprisings in the Age of Revolution” (December 7)