The Great Pamphlets

Many courses are devoted to the great books of civilization, but historians increasingly wonder how many contemporaries really read them. Pamphlets, on the other hand, have consistently been among the most popular, persuasive, and political texts around. Emerging as a form of mass media in the European Reformation, the form has served the subversives of pre-revolutionary France and England, and been adopted by figures from Martin Luther to Simon Bolivar, Karl Marx, Rosa Luxembourg, and Upton Sinclair. We will examine the pamphlet as a form across genres (memoir, manifesto, essay, exposé, etc.) and historical contexts, reading specific examples as a way into broader questions of literacy, rebellion, and authority: crucial vehicles for both revolutionary and reactionary ideas.