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comment by cgod
cgod  ·  2758 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: September 7, 2016

I've listened to both.

I'm finding Revolutions a little uneven.

I wish it had some kind of thesis or some kind of overall lesson to grasp but I fear it will not. Maybe the overall lesson is that revolution is a diverse and unpredictable phenomenon.





mk  ·  2758 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I'm just in the first segment, so I haven't experienced that yet. Do you think that THoR had such a thesis? It didn't seem to me that it did, aside from the arch of the rise and fall of the Roman Empire itself.

IMO, Duncan started to find his voice about 60% into THoR, when he made the realization that he was starting to just talk about the rise and fall of Emperors, and then broadened the scope and allowed for tangents a bit more. Thus far, I've found Revolutions pretty balanced in that way.

cgod  ·  2758 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I think Duncan kept improving throughout the podcast, which is pretty normal if you've listened to many history podcasts. But sometime around the middle he definitely found a voice and settled on a way to present the material.

Revolutions sounds like the history of a topic more than several disparate and tangentially related histories. It seems like there should be some kind of general lesson to draw out of the study of a dozen revolutions beyond a recounting of the facts. Maybe there will be some kind of conclusion at the end, I hope so.

Duncan has spoken before that he has some novel overarching theories of history, I'd be interested to hear them in podcast form.

Check out The History of England By David Crowther next time you need a good history podcast. It starts pretty rough, you can basically throw out the first section on the Anglo Saxons as an inferior product but after he finds his feet it's one of my favorite history podcast of all time. I know he was thinking about redoing the Saxon episodes but I think he may have just done a history of the Saxons podcast seperatly later on to make up for his early product.