How to Understand a Revolution: Guts, Lungs, and Bronchiectasis

Suppose a scholar seeks to understand the American Revolutionary War: its causes, consequences, and what lessons we may learn from it. They begin by reading biographies of key participants, but soon realize the scope of these books is too narrow. Broadening the scope to study demography (e.g., census reports, immigration records) helps them understand not merely the leaders of the revolution but also the people they led. Yet even this isn’t enough to understand the colonists’ activities, so the scope is broadened further to interactions: in governance (political science), in the marketplace (economics), and in culture (sociology). Finally, our historian realizes they cannot understand the events of Boston, Philadelphia, and Yorktown without also studying England: the leaders, people, and interactions that influenced a revolution from across an ocean.