Our story is now rapidly approaching an incredibly important series of events: the Revolutions of 1848. In a single year, a series of revolutions swept across Europe, occurring in France, Prussia, Austria, Italy, the German states, and others. While timing like that might make it seem as though the revolutions were a carefully laid plan by a European-wide conspiracy, they were mostly spontaneous uprisings. They fed off each other’s energy and momentum, definitely, but there was no force behind the scenes coordinating things. What is perhaps even more remarkable, however, is that two years later, most of Europe would look largely the same as it had before the revolutions, at least superficially.