If you’d like to bone up on your European history, the second edition of “The French Revolution: A Document Collection” by Laura Mason and Tracey Rizzo was published at the beginning of this year. Rizzo, professor of history and interim dean of humanities at UNC Asheville, says the first edition of the text, in 1999, came about because there were no other books that served the needs of her classes and students. As Toni Morrison famously said, “If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.”
The documents used to illustrate the French Revolution originally came from “facsimiles held in U.S. libraries, especially the New York Public Library [and] some were copies we made in France,” Rizzo explains. “Now so much is digitized, including the French National Archives, that we could do everything from here.” For the second edition, Rizzo and Mason added more sources by under-represented groups, such as Haitians, women, and rural and conservative people.
So, why tell the story of the French Revolution through documents rather than narrative? “All readers, but especially college history students, need to encounter the past on its own terms with as little interference/direction as possible,” Rizzo explains.