Patrick Link > Recent Status Updates

Enjoying Grandin's approach so far but him pegging Jackson as a nullifier makes me wonder what else is being glossed over.

England differed from other European nations in this, that the flood-tide of counter-revolutionary feeling and discipline coincided with the flood-tide of Industrial Revolution; as new techniques and forms of Industrial organization advanced, so political and social rights receded.

On the disaster of the Arakan campaign in early 1943. In a nutshell, the British highly overestimated their own abilities and grossly underestimated the Japanese which was pretty dumb considering what happened in 1942.

Was Austria ever not in serious foreign trouble? I'm not sure that the real threat to the international system was the loose, traditional character of the ancien regime and not the revolutionary impulse but good arguments were made especially about the deterioration of the system by the big powers. Need to find out more about the Imperial German concept of Landeshoheit.

Chapter 2
Was Austria ever not in serious foreign trouble? I'm not sure that the real threat to the international system was the loose, traditional character of the ancien regime and not the revolutionary impulse but good arguments were made especially about the deteriation of the system by the big powers. The example given is basically centralized France verses weak German states which certainly pre-dates the revolu

Making the case that the French Revolution
wasn't the only major cause of the wars of the Napoleonic era by sketching out the inherent instability of the balance of power system of the 1763-1789 period by pointing out the crumbling of the Austro-French alliance and the failure of a Russo-British one forming despite common interests.

Cogent attack on the balance of power system by showing the 1792 partition of Poland made sense of it.

The history of the London Corresponding Society in the 1790s will be immediately familiar to modern political activists.

Oh, for another year like Tom Paine had in 1792! Also, the worst interest group of the eighteenth century must be Reeves' Association for the Protection of Property against Republicans and Levellers.

Rainsborough earned his early Irony Bro bona fides when he asked Cromwell's son-in-law at the Putney debates what the property-less soldiers had been fighting for when informed that political rights should only go to those with property.

The free labor mindset which was a great help to abolition in the 1850s was an even greater help to capitalism in the 1870s. It is a concept that is more weird and foreign to me than anything I've read about. I really like the leftist perspective in this book that few of these big American history narratives have. The moment of radicalism and its retrenchment deserves much closer attention.

George Roper, an incautious black veteran, was shot and beaten after rushing into the street and shouting, "Hurrah for Grant and Colfax" as Klansmen rode through the streets of Huntsville.


I'm in the part of the book that covers the direct opposition to Reconstruction and the terror of the klan is as disturbing to me as it is local.

The doughfaceness of Pierce on the world stage.

The radical moment seems short-lived and smothered by capitalist worry and racist violence. I will have to reappraise what I know on Ben Wade which is mainly his career in the 1840s.

Interested in Ben Wade's speech on class conflict in 1867.

The more I read the Rougon Macquart cycle the more Louis Napoleon looks like the prototype of the modern political leader.