Revolutionary Currents: Nation Building in the Transatlantic World

In the Age of Democratic Revolution, countries on both sides of the Atlantic were linked together through trade networks, diplomatic ties, and social interactions. More importantly, however, they also shared a common revolutionary dynamic that oscillated back and forth across the ocean. Revolutionary Currents explores the global crosscurrents and revolutionary ideologies that inspired four great modern revolutions--England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688-89, the American Revolution of 1776, the French Revolution in 1789, and the Mexican Revolution in the early 1800s. Michael A. Morrison and Melinda S. Zook bring together noted historians to look at how each nation reshaped these revolutionary traditions, making them their own, and exported them once again. In examining each event, the contributors respond to the historiographical trends of revolutionary ideology, transatlantic cross-fertilzation of ideas, and nation-building. In assessing and analyzing the ideas, traditions, and nationalisms that inspired revolution and nation-building in the modern world, this book breaks new ground in the area of transatlantic history.

Michael A. Morrison is associate professor of history at Purdue University. He is the author of Slavery and the American West: The Eclipse of Manifest Destiny and the Coming of the Civil War. He is editor of The Human Tradition in Antebellum America and with James Brewer Stewart coeditor of Race and the Early Republic. He is also coeditor of the Journal of the Early Republic. Melinda S. Zook is associate professor of history at Purdue University and author of Radical Whigs and Conspiratorial Politics in Late Stuart England.