Viva la Revolution!

• A revolution (from the Latin revolutio, “a turn around”) is a fundamental change in political power or organizational structures that takes place in a relatively short period of time when the population rises up in revolt against the current authorities.

In the last two weeks we did a project on the anatomy of a revolution. At first we learned about Crane Brinton’s The Anatomy of a Revolution which was a book about one theory that could describe all revolutions. The theory is different from that which I put on the top of my post which is Wikipedia’s definition of a revolution. Both of the theories get the main ideas of what a revolution is through.

After we learned about Crane Brinton’s theory on what defines revolutions we learned about and made our first Ruth Goldberg Machine. The first one that my group made wasn’t too good and as we were at a big crunch for time we didn’t change it too much over the variations of what it was used as a metaphor for. Mainly because all of the revolutions followed the same path.

The revolution we studied next was that of America. Before this project I only knew the more widely known facts about the American Revolution like who they were revolting against, that they were aided by the French and that they declared their independence on the 4th of July. Within the actual project I learned a lot. Not only that but I also learned a lot more about the historical significance of the American Revolution. For example we learned about the “shot heard ‘round the world” which was the start of the revolution and the ideas that spread because of it. Our machine didn’t change much for it as it followed Crane Brinton’s theory almost precisely. We also did a writing assignment on the historical significance of the American Revolution.

After the American Revolution we studied the French Revolution. It went along the same lines although in France the peasants were a lot poorer and way more heavily taxed. There was also a lot more wealth inequality throughout France than there was in the USA. This revolution was the most represented by Crane Brinton’s theory. The part of his theory where he goes into terror being a virtue is more or less based on the part of the French Revolution known as the Reign of Terror in which France was ruled by radicals. We also did a writing assignment on the causes and consequences of the French Revolution.

As for the driving question and my answer to it, I saved that for last. The question is “How do revolutions transform society?”. Well I have a short answer and a long answer and for the benefit of this blog post I’ll go with the short answer. Revolutions transform society in a drastic way for the better or worse. I gave this answer because it’s a blanket statement and can apply to more or less every revolution ever.

Although it really was a crunch for time I learned a lot from this project. I learned about revolutions, group work, and more about filming a video, especially the process of adding audio to video in a group project and how hard it is. I think that next time I do something like this I will be much better at it and will be a lot more organized. One thing that I don’t understand is how our wonderful teacher Ms Willemse can mark all of our work and make everything we need for new projects in such a short time.

Thank you for reading my blog post about this project that I did with my friends and classmates Ryder, Keenan, and Sophia as well as the two other groups that I did some minor activities with that consisted of Jordan, Nathan, Randy, Raymond, Simon, and Indira.