A Tenth Revolution Around the Sun

By Bryan A. Banks and Cindy Ermus

Ten years ago, we published our first essays on Age of Revolutions (AoR). Not yet knowing how the site would evolve, our publications that first year were diverse. Was Christmas a revolutionary holiday? Could the Civil War be considered a colonial-settler revolution? Was there a “Darwinian Revolution”? We published essays on important books in the field with novel takes, as in Christopher Taylor’s “classic” essay on CLR James Black Jacobins. We also published bibliographies, reading lists, and even a photo journal of the Haitian Revolution, written by a historian and travel writer. We couldn’t have imagined what directions the site would take, or how much it would grow, but what resulted over the years far surpassed what we expected. Age of Revolutions has developed into a useful resource for scholars, students (at all levels), and interested laypersons across the globe. We’ve cultivated a wide readership that has somehow largely survived the implosion of Twitter, on which we so relied. And the project continues to evolve.

A couple of years ago, the two of us sat down to consider possible new directions for this labor of love. Ultimately, we decided that we’d put enough into it that it should be a book. But AoR is so capacious—how to frame a book project based on it? We identified some questions we saw as most central and as currently shaping the field, and decided to go from there: What was the Age of Revolutions? What defined such an era with such wide-ranging ideologies and social experiences and (im)balances? Where did revolutions occur and what connected them with sister revolutions elsewhere? And lastly, are we still living in an Age of Revolutions, connected by ideological and cultural webs? The result is our forthcoming volume with the University of Virginia Press in early 2026.

In The Global Age of Revolutions: A History from 1650 to the Present, we asked authors both new to Age of Revolutions as well as former contributors to the website to write something new or expand on their original essays to speak to one of these larger questions—and we could not be more pleased with the result. This collection of relatively short-form essays (in the style of AoR) is not only a worthy celebration of the project we launched ten years ago, but also a real contribution to the field of revolutionary history/studies, an invaluable resource for the classroom, and an engaging read for anyone interested in the subject.

Authors include: William A. Booth, Katlyn Marie Carter, Denise Z. Davidson, Beatrice de Graaf, Laurent Dubois, Dan Edelstein, Bronwen Everill, Kate Fullagar, Gideon Fujiwara, Miguel La Serna, Christy Pichichero, Noah Shusterman, Andrew W. M. Smith, Naghmeh Sohrabi, Junko Thérèse Takeda, Erin Zavitz, as well as ourselves, and Lynn Hunt, who provides a reflective, synthesizing afterword.

This volume, then, represents the evolution and growth of the website over the course of its first ten years, or ten revolutions, around the sun.

So, what will become of Age of Revolutions in the next ten years? We’re excited to find out! This past year has seen an important transition. Co-founder, Cindy Ermus has stepped away from her role as Co-Executive Editor for the publication to focus on her series editorships at the University of Nebraska Press (France Overseas) and Cambridge University Press (Global Health Histories).Our long-time editor, Erica Johnson, has become our Managing Editor, and is already doing a fantastic job. Bryan Banks remains on board as Executive Editor, alongside an amazing team of editors with diverse areas of expertise; and we remain the home for the selected papers of the annual Consortium on the Revolutionary Era.

We may not know what the next ten years hold for Age of Revolutions, but the future is undeniably bright!

Interested in contributing and shaping those next ten years?