The first great revolution in the twentieth century, the Mexican Revolution was as dramatic and compelling as later episodes in Russia, China and Cuba. Using a wide variety of sources--from films, murals, and comic books to classic works of political and social history--this seminar will examine the forces that exploded in over a decade of violence and produced the peculiar "institutional revolutionary" government that ruled Mexico from the 1920s to the crises of the late 1990s. Was the Revolution a true social revolution or just a "palace coup"? Did workers, women, peasants, or indigenous peoples make real gains in social or political power during the after the Revolution? How democratic or authoritarian is the Mexico that emerged from the brutal decade of the 1910s? Finally, in light of globalization, the political scandals of the 1990s, and ongoing peasant rebellion in Chiapas, is the Revolution dead or is its promise only now to be fulfilled?