The iconic Revolution-era writers studied in a BU class this semester are Ben Franklin (from left), Toussaint L’Ouverture, Phillis Wheatley, and Mary Wollstonecraft. Photos via Wikicommons

Arts & Culture

BU Class Ponders “Revolutionary Icons” as the Declaration of Independence Anniversary Nears

Course focuses on American Revolution and others in its wake

Would you have coffee with Ben Franklin? Boston University students in Joseph Rezek’s Revolutionary Icons class aren’t jumping at the chance. 

Sure, they know the founding father’s gold-plated CV: prodigious inventor/scientist, helpmate in drafting the Declaration of Independence, respected diplomat who helped negotiate the end of the American Revolutionary War. But after reading Franklin’s autobiography, the preoccupations of which include thrift and acquiring wealth, HB Bielawa (CAS’26) speaks for others in finding the book’s self-made-man’s pretensions disingenuous. 

Bielawa—who portrayed Joshua Wyeth, a Boston Tea Party participant, in a 2023 anniversary reenactment at Boston Harbor—recalls Wyeth’s background: “He comes from basically nothing. His family were farmers,” whereas Franklin, though of humble birth and largely bereft of formal education, had opportunities at key junctures that Wyeth didn’t. “Obviously, he’s an extremely hard worker,” Bielawa concedes, but “he seems to have things completely handed to him.” 

Sylvie Cressman (CAS’26) says she’d have coffee with Franklin once—“because it’s Benjamin Franklin”—but couldn’t be his friend. “He seems like the kind of person who does not let you get a word in edgewise,”

The coffee question from Rezek, a College of Arts & Sciences associate professor of English and director of the American Studies program, is part of a semester-long dive into the virtues and warts of four towering writers from the Age of Revolution, when uprisings spanned the Americas to Europe. The others: Phillis Wheatley, who in 1773 became the first published African American poet; English philosopher and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, who penned support for the French Revolution; and Toussaint L’Ouverture, the Black general who ended slavery in the French colony of St. Domingue (now Haiti) and paved the way for Haitian independence in 1804.

The relevance of Rezek’s decade-old course swells this year, the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Expanding the scholarly prism beyond these shores is deliberate, he tells BU Today: “The American Revolution heavily influenced the French Revolution, which heavily influenced the Haitian Revolution. There’s a kind of circuit of excitement about overturning old, unjust institutions and monarchies.” 

The almost three-hour-long class, in a seminar room overlooking Bay State Road, demonstrates that these revolutions are not dusty mausoleums entombing dead white males (plus a Black male and two females). The visions of those who launched these drives for independence centuries ago reverberate today, a fact Rezek, who has written about that topic in publications like the New York Times, demonstrates in the class discussion about Franklin. 

In addition to Franklin’s autobiography, course reading includes the court opinion granting habeas corpus this year in the case of asylum seeker Adrian Conejo Arias and his five-year-old son. The judge, ordering their release from custody pending their asylum hearing, concluded his opinion with Franklin’s response to a woman who asked the upshot of the 1787 Constitutional Convention: “A republic, if you can keep it.”

In an earlier session, students presented online memes based on the Revolutionary period, some of which have been displayed in recent No Kings protests. (Alternatively, the Revolution resonates for supporters of the current administration to whom Donald Trump “seems a lot like a revolutionary,” Rezek says.)

Rezek is a Franklin fan, while acknowledging the shortcomings his students discussed, and those of the other icons. 

Wheatley favored the American Revolution and racial equality, but Black poets later criticized her for parroting white poets’ style instead of cultivating distinctive Black poetry. Wollstonecraft supported the French Revolution’s ideals and women’s rights. But some today fault her for blaming women of her time for having to use physical beauty to influence men and for holding traditional views of women as child-rearers and homemakers. “There are limits to her feminism,” Rezek says.

L’Ouverture led the revolution that abolished Haitian slavery—yet he held slaves himself before that revolt, says Rezek, had patriarchal views of women’s rights, and established Catholicism as the state religion.

Studying shortcomings is not a case of applying 21st-century standards to people from centuries ago, Rezek says. “My goal in this class is to be fair to my subjects. I think, though, it is fair to think about the limitations of their revolutionary visions. We can talk about the founders of the United States and say they were of their time” in permitting slavery. “But what’s happening is that people are ending slavery in Haiti at the exact same time.

“If you can recognize the flaws of historical figures, you can appreciate what they accomplished,” Rezek says. “I want students to understand that even today, if you have a political figure who’s doing good in the world, you can’t cancel them because they did one bad thing. Don’t be too arrogant when you’re looking at the past or the present. Allowing yourself to have complicated judgments is a better entrée than ignoring them.”

Leora Zatlin (CAS’26) appreciates that Rezek brings what could be moldy history alive by the memes assignment and pairing the icons’ writings with contemporary studies of their time, such as the 1619 Project, the controversial New York Times series that foregrounds slavery and its consequences in the nation’s history.

“He’s done a lot of work to connect what we’ve been reading to modern political movements,” Zatlin says.