England's crisis of the 17th century is difficult to navigate.  It was a series of civil wars; it was a religious war; it was a war involving foreign powers; it was a revolution that beheaded a king and established a republic. At the end came the "glorious revolution of 1688" which forever limited the power of the monarch and firmly established "English constitutionalism."  

It can be very confusing to keep all the actors, actions and outcomes straight, made even more confusing by the fact that for the next 250 years, the English tended to overlook the events between 1640 and 1688, focusing on "the Glorious Revolution of 1688."

In this SDG, our goal is to make sense of all of this. We will treat the half century from 1638 to 1688 as a revolution, no less important than the American and French revolutions that followed in the next century. This is the period when the modern British state emerged. To understand modern Britain, one must explore the 50-year English civil wars and revolutions. Join us as we take this journey.