In this project we created an entire court trial to show the effectiveness of the Haitian revolution. We worked very very hard on this and I am proud to show you it.
Here is our final product of the Haitian Revolution court trail:
This project has been one of my favourite projects so far because it was fun and quite interesting. I learned so much about revolutions and Haiti. I also put a lot of effort into this project and I’m happy with how everything came out.
Our driving question is:
How did revolutions bring down empires and change societies around the world?
Through researching more on the topic, we were slowly able to answer this question more clearly the farther along we were on this project. In the end I was able to answer the driving question easily; I believe it was because so many people were tired of the way they were being treated for so long and they finally snapped. For instance the Haitian Revolution occurred because of slavery, in the French Revolution it was because of government corruption, and in the American Revolution it was because of over taxing. All these revolutions started because of mistreatment of the citizens. Since there were so many people that were upset from the mistreatment they could easily overpower the government, and accomplish what they wanted to accomplish. Doing so would end up bringing down entire empires and change massive societies through out nations all around the world. If there wasn’t so many people willing to risk their lives for what they were fighting for (peaceful or not peaceful) there wouldn’t be as many successful revolutions.
But what research did I do to be able to answer this?
The first thing we did was create a Crane Brinton diagram. This diagram is showing the anatomy of a revolution. It highlights four main stages, incubation stage, moderation stage, then crisis stage at the peek, and the recovery stage at the end. It then explains in more detail each stage and what would be happening in them. 
After we made our own diagram in any form we decided. I chose to display it in a volcano, the underground magma was the start of the revolution stages then the end was when it turned to stone on the ground.
I found the revolution stages very interesting. In every revolution no matter how different they are it will always fall into the stages. There will always be a build up and tension starting to rise, and there will always be a recovery (no matter how long it takes).
After we learned about how revolutions work we were assigned into groups and got to choose a revolution. My group was:
And Dylan
We chose the Haitian revolution, I chose it because it looked more interesting then the other revolutions. Most of them had something to do with how the government was treating their citizens, and yes Haiti’s government supported slavery but that wasn’t just the governments fault. Over half of the Haitian population was made up of slaves, and then there was the small group of slave owners that made up the rest of the population. This was because of the Haitian pyramid of high class to low class citizens. At the top was the rich white people who were the slave owners then at the bottom was slaves. I found these different classes of people very interesting.
After doing as much research as I could on everything about the Haitian revolution we made a graphic organizer to put all the information into.
I put so much effort into this organizer and I think that’s why I like it so much, it’s detailed and visually pleasing (at least in my opinion) but it is hard to see some of the smaller words. It took a lot of different drafts before I made it to this final one. I took in a lot of student critique and teacher advise to make it better. In the end I like how it turned out.
Finally the last step of this project was to create a court trail!
1st We watched some videos of court trials to see how they work
2nd We started gathering information to prove the Haitian revolution was successful
3rd We started writing the script
4th We filmed the video with our scripts
5th We edited the video!
The hardest part I found about this was gathering information. We had four different people searching the web for any media that will prove the revolution was successful, but it still took a long time. We had one document where we gathered everything we found then at the end we filtered through them to find the strongest ones. The strongest ones were the ones that had solid information fighting for the success of the revolution. My favourite part of this was the editing part at the end. I love editing videos and luckily I was chosen as the editor! I love how it turned out because I think it looks very professional and dramatic (other then the acting 😭).
I think our group distributed the work quite well, we each all had certain roles that we worked hard in.
Sydney H wrote the whole script and directed us through the video
Callum r was our main witness actor and he helped with lots of the research
Dylan W did the voiceover for the entire video and he was our videographer
and I was an actor and editor
A court trial wouldn’t work if it was only one side so we did have another group create a video fighting for the ineffectiveness of the Haitian revolution. Here is their video, by Danial, Kira, Keira, Sofia, Hannah, and Gwenyth.
Which one do you think wins? Comment your opinion! Let’s see which side wins!
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