A course taught by Professor of History Roger Chartier and Kislak Center curator John Pollack took students on a journey through revolutions as told through writing, tackling issues of both political and societal change.
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A course on printing and publishing during ages of revolutions taught this spring explored the American, French, and Haitian revolutions as well as transformations of other sorts, including the scientific revolution and the rise of women as writers.
There’s an adage that writing can spark the flames that lead to revolution.
This spring, Penn students gathered every week surrounded by rare books and documents to examine just how words have changed the world in a variety of ways.
The fundamental meaning of a revolution, says Chartier, is a sharp break from what has gone before. “The present is no longer the past,” he explains.
One class session found the students discussing how women throughout history used needlework samples and printed materials to communicate, says Izzy Welsh, a 2026 English and cinema studies graduate from Los Angeles. “It was a step on their growth to becoming more active politically and practically,” she says. “We were able to see the ways in which other groups weren’t able to be a part of the existing revolutions and had to find more ways to communicate … and in their own way also be political participants.”
Gathering in the Henry Charles Lea Library, the class’ discussions also spanned the book trade, the development of the writer, the invention of literature and the novel, encyclopedias, graffiti, and epigraphs. Several readings focused on American Revolutionary-era writers, such as formerly enslaved Black poet Phillis Wheatley and essayist Judith Sargent Murray, who became a women’s rights advocate.
“We wanted to expand the definition of ‘revolution’ beyond the simply political,” Pollack says. For example, the class examined what scholars have called the “reading revolution,” about a significant way in how people experienced books.
(Left) Kislak Center curator John Pollack discusses a rare book with a student while history professor Roger Chartier, seated, makes a point during a discussion. (Right) Students had the opportunity to see, read, and handle some of the books and other printed materials from the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts.
While history hasn’t been the main focus at Penn for Arman Yarlagadda, a third-year biology and English major from Leawood, Kansas, he says, a friend recommended it, noting Chartier’s renown as a historian and Pollack’s expertise with older texts.
Yarlagadda says that the most interesting part for him was discovering the backstories of “scandalous texts” which were passed around to highlight political scandals and thus attack public figures. He points to pamphlets printed in France that had a “profound impact” on the 1789-99 revolutionary period in that country. “There were a lot of those circulating, and they would kind of be the general public’s insight into the private lives of public figures,” he says. “Before social media, before you could turn on the news and get a story, [there] was still curiosity about the lives of important people.”
Welsh says she loved how the class mixed hands-on learning with additional discussion. Pollack’s knowledge of the holdings of the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts and his introducing students to those resources was another wonderful experience, she says. At the end of each class, students had the opportunity to see, read, and handle some of the books and other printed materials from the Kislak Center.
“A lot of the reading I’ve done at Penn has been scanned copies,” Yarlagadda says. “When you look at the original paper that was used, it’s a whole different experience.”
During one class, on the scientific revolution, Pollack gently folded out an enlargement of an illustration of a flea, an engraving depicting what scientists saw under a microscope from a 1665 book by Robert Hooke. “How to visualize these discoveries was a huge problem,” he explained. “These texts couldn’t exist without the pictures.”
Chartier says that element, which was interwoven throughout the course, highlighted the idea of books not only as textual sources but as material items. Students were able to see the words in their full context, not merely as individual pages on a screen, Chartier says. “This focus on books as books, I think, is startlingly new for them—books as objects, books as a field of study in itself, books as historical factors,” he says.
Welsh agrees. “There’s something really special about attending a university that has access to these really rare books,” she says. “Students are able to actually flip the pages of these books, and the average person would have to look at them from behind museum glass.”
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