The Revolutions of 1848 were not only a highly significant episode in European history; they were also closely connected to developments in the Americas. During the revolutionary upheaval, European actors of different political leanings invoked the American example either to justify democratic reform or to warn of profound changes. To many liberals, the American Revolution served as an inspiring example that a democracy could work in a large territorial state and their debates about the merits and shortcomings of American democracy helped shape their political identities. Perceiving the U.S. more critically, many conservatives, by contrast, inter- preted the American Revolution and its aftermath as a cautionary tale, and doubted anyway that any potential American ‘lessons’ could be applied outside the Western Hemisphere. The events in Europe made Americans, in turn, ponder what the Revolutions of 1848 meant for their conception of the American nation as an exceptional ‘land of liberty’ and how they should react to what happened in the ‘Old World.’ Furthermore, the so-called Forty-Eighters who fled from Central Europe to North America after 1849 subsequently influenced political developments in the antebellum U.S., above all through their contribution to the abolitionist movement. Meanwhile, the European revolutionary contention also spread to parts of Latin America. This course will therefore analyze the European Revolutions of 1848 within a transatlantic framework. Course requirement: oral presentation. Credit requirements: presentation handout and power point presentation; term paper (10-15 pages). Readings: Hobsbawm, Eric. The Age of Revolution, 1789-1848. New York: Vintage, 1996. Print; Rapport, Mike. 1848: Year of Revolution. New York: Basic, 2008. Print; Roberts, Timothy Mason. Distant Revolutions: 1848 and the Challenge to American Exceptionalism. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2009. Print; Honeck, Mischa. We Are the Revolutionists: German-Speaking Immigrants and American Abolitionists after 1848. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2011. Print.