Chapter 17: A Time of Revolutions

During this time frame in world history, the people of North America, Europe, Haiti, and Latin America were all looking for changes in their lifestyles and governments. People were tired of the ways of their governments, religious authority and monarchies. Although in different parts of the world, these countries all wanted the same thing..CHANGE. They shared  common goals and ideas which lead to the end of their European influence/ways of the past. Traditional thinking was done and over with at the time. People had new ideas about how to run things and sought to express those ideas. The core idea/principle of this point in history was popular sovereignty, which is the idea that "the authority to govern/ run something came from the people not god or tradition." This idea of popular sovereignty spread like wild fire all over Europe and pretty soon all over the world. 1775 the North American Revolution began. This was the fighting of Americans to gain their land from the British. It was a hard and long battle but soon after the colonies of this land had succeeded in taking the land from the British and therefore wrote the US Constitution. Soon after, the French also wanted change. After fighting alongside the American Colonies, the French returned home to fight yet another battle. When King Louis XVI decided to raise taxes all hell broke loose. The people were tired of their dictatorial monarchy and thus began building an army against the King and Queen of France. It was a huge deal, the French ended hereditary rule, executed the King and Queen and even abolished slavery. Because of these drastic actions, what awaited France was HUGE.  The government decided to kill off anyone who was a tential threat of disturbing the peace so they did a major sweep through of everyone involved in the revolution which were thousands. Because of this France split in to 83 colonies which were later united. Haiti then broke out against their French based government as well, the interesting part of  this battle  was that the people fighting were all slaves.After their success came the Latin Revolution against Spain which also succeeded.