Crane Brinton was a historian in France. He started teaching at Harvard 1923 and became a full professor at Harvard in 1942. During his time at Harvard he wrote his world famous book, “The Anatomy of Revolution” in 1938.

In summary, he pretty much discovered a pattern between each of the revolutions and he compared a revolution to a disease. He organized the pattern into four different steps:

Stage 1: incubation

-sense of government injustice

-weak rulers and halfhearted reform

-intellectual opposition

-class division and antagonism

-military victory

 

Stage 2: moderate

-rule of the moderates

-financial breakdown

-protest against government

 

Stage 3: crisis

-radical revolution

-war

-terror and vertue

 

Stage 4: recovery

-war or peace

-slow, uneven return to quieter times

Brinton’s definition of a revolution was “A drastic, sudden substitution of one group in charge of the running of a territorial political entity by another.”

I found that Brinton became friends with a man named Lawrence Henderson in 1918, a friendship that lasted until Henderson died. After his friend has passed away Brinton began to realize the impact that Henderson had on his writing.There is also evidence of Brinton having multiple people by his side and maybe even influencing him while he wrote.

In the beginning of the modern copy of “Anatomy of a Revolution” it reads “adapted by Crane Brinton” which means that people have taken his writing and rewritten it over and over. Does that maybe mean that the steps that he wrote are different than the steps we know now? The reason I think that is because whenever something is rewritten multiple times, the book is bound to change.
It’s similar to religious scriptures. Information and stories are passed through many generations and over those many generations people are taking those peices of information and stories and writing them down, and by being re written the stories change and modify automatically.

 

It’s quite tricky to find information for this question but in the end I learned that he didn’t have people telling him the information or anything, from what I know is that he came up with the revolution idea on his own.
He had friends and colleagues that were present during his writing process, but that is just like any writer.