11.0- Welcome to the Martian Revolution

Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 11.0:

Welcome to the Martian Revolution.

250 years after the event, the Martian Revolution remains one of the most formative events in human history.

This is not a novel observation.

Contemporaries quickly realize the momentousness of it all as it was happening.

Historians have only amplified the conclusion that the Martian Revolution was a big deal.

A really big deal.

Every political, social, and economic trend in interplanetary history runs through that chaotic decade.

Its results and outcomes and legacies form the basis of modern human civilization.

Everywhere you look throughout the solar system, the legacy of the Martian Revolution lives on.

Now, I acknowledge that there has not exactly been a surfeit of writing about the Martian Revolution.

Over the past two and a half centuries, I don't think a single year has gone by where something hasn't come out about it.

Macro histories, micro histories, biographies, screen vids, EPUBs, music, immersives, whatever.

The Martian Revolution is endlessly fascinating and has endlessly fascinated us.

It certainly has endlessly fascinated me, which is why I'm here to walk you through it point by point, day by day, year by year.

From the death of Vernon Bird all the way through to, well, you know how it ends, obviously.

What I want to present here is a detailed overview of what happened and why.

Who were the most important people and why, so that when you go forth to go engage with that mountain of material available on the Martian Revolution, you'll have a very firm grounding on the who, what, when, where, why, and how of it all.

Now a project like this draws from a wide variety of sources, both primary and secondary.

Now primary sources are of course the bread and butter of the historian's craft.

In our case this will include official records from Omnicor's corporate archives and records from the various Martian governments that rose and fell over the years.

We also have logs and diaries and messages, both of principal players as well as common people living through difficult times.

The logbook of Presley Wu, for example, is always going to be a great resource for information on what it was like to live through all of this just on the quotidian daily level.

Almost all these records are available to me through the T-Portal, which thank God my student access login still works.

I think they forgot to ever turn it off.

But that said, we've also lost a lot over the years.

The great server crash of 2354 wiped out economic and commercial records, which leaves our understanding of the economics of all this far shakier than any of us would really prefer.

Then there was the time archivists installed an AI cleaning tool to the colonial records, which instead instantly and irretrievably deleted every fifth word, which it's now been mostly patched back together, but there's still lots of disagreements, sometimes substantial disagreements, between historians about the correct words and meanings that should be in certain passages.

Was that supposed to be a never or a forever?

And it does actually matter.

I will be relying on Strickler and Hunt's compendium as the standard edition, but there is a considerable body of literature in orbit around Strickler and Hunt that point out some of their conclusions and choices are unreliable.

But it's the best we have, and it's what I will be using.

For secondary sources, I mean, secondary sources on the Martian Revolution are volumnious.

The first true histories were written in the decade after the fact, and since then, the revolution has never been out of print.

These early histories are both beneficial in that they have access to materials that we've now lost, but we also now have material that wasn't available to those first generations of historians, particularly the Werner deposit, which ended an early historiographic debate about the culpability of Timothy Werner in the Bloody Sunrise Massacre.

For years it was an open debate whether he was the one who gave the order or not.

The Werner deposits, discovered 100 years later, make it crystal clear that it was him.

We have him saying so in his own words.

Now obviously I can't read everything that's ever been written about the Martian Revolution, but I have read broadly over the secondary literature, starting with classic surveys like Anya Brownstone's Red, White, and Blue, which masterfully interweaves events on Mars, Luna, and Earth.

Then there's Robin Ibarra's Mars and Revolution, which is still great if a bit dated at this point.

And I also must mention Jabari Conrad's History of Mars, which is technically about more than just the revolution, but it gives great context for both before and after the event, as well as covering the revolution itself in fine detail.

I've also read just a metric ton of biographies and monographs about specific people and topics.

Timothy Werner, Mabel Dorr, Alexandra Clare, Marcus Leopold, Booth Gonzalez, the Mons faction, the Martian Navy, the Elysian Commune.

I've tried to read at least something about everything.

Now some historians emphasize the economic fundamentals, others elite decision-making, others social forces, others just accidents and individual agency.

Some say events on Mars were simply peripheral to what was going on on Earth.

Others say that events on Earth were peripheral to a principally Martian-driven event.

And then sometimes the lunars are like, hey, what about us?

Now some people say the Martian Revolution can be considered a year zero, a birth of a new epoch.

Others stress continuities.

I have tried to balance all of this in an attempt to tell you a single, coherent narrative of the Martian Revolution.

So whether you are here because you already know a a lot and just love talking and thinking about the Martian Revolution and hey, who among us, or whether you are engaging with the Revolution for the first time, I hope this show continues and contributes to a historical conversation, debate, and exchange of ideas that will never end.

So with all that said, on with the show.