Phil Feller

You got straight to the heart of the matter.

I had a summer job doing this and other low-skill IT jobs for Monroe County. The episode I still remember was when the carriage control tape broke on the line printer and it started spewing out paper.

The name Scipione is another sign of the extent to which XVI century Italy was harkening back to Roman models.

That was great.

I’m the descendant of Irish Catholics who immigrated following the potato famine. My study of the 1850s, though, has forced me to consider the context in which the Know Nothings rose and consider that many were motivated by things other than nativism and religious bigotry.

I haven’t read Fate of the Republic, but I assume that Guiteau didn’t have as many direct interactions with the other main figures , and that those scenes were intended to illustrate character and what would otherwise be abstract concepts. That doesn’t bother me.

My one complaint was with the way that the show often mined Guiteau’s story for comic fodder, leading them to misrepresent the Oneida Community as orgiastic. It would have been more interesting (and historical) had they explored its utopian appeal.

He’d be better suited to give the response to Chuck D’s address.

In the area of political theory, a lot of it did filter through Italian Renaissance thinkers. Pocock’s classic Machiavellian Moment analyzed how the English Commonwealth writers received Aristotle’s and Polybius’ political thought.

That was outstanding. Among many other things, I liked your description of the US operation as “classical.” Vegetius would have had a thing or two to say about the failure to fortify overnight camps.

Like Gunnar, I think that its use in the coding assignments is legit. I’ve been using GitHub Copilot and other AI to help me build and analyze multinomial-Diriclet modules, and it’s made me much more productive.

A court order froze the account.

I haven’t painted it yet, but I have a new model army.

Yeah, I’m a JQA fan, although not enough of one to read his lectures on rhetoric and oratory.

I think that presidents should be ranked by their ability at epideictic, not just persuasion.

A mathematician would probably dispute that she used it correctly.

Plus they’re named after people who created notable Catholic religious art.

FWIW, here’s how historians rank the presidents on public persuasion in a C-SPAN poll: www.c-span.org/presidentsur...

That’s the closest they get to ranking their rhetorical abilities, although the categories of moral authority and vision/agenda setting are related.

I’m curious how you’d rank the presidents as rhetoricians. I imagine that Lincoln would top that list, too.

Also true of political history!

That was a great episode! I’m always interested in 19th century political economy, and it sounds as though O’Connor’s book is a particularly good example.

As an added bonus, I used to work at an office in Durham’s American Tobacco Campus, and I now have a better idea of its role in US history.

I missed yesterday’s discussion with Matt Pinsker and will definitely watch the recording.

après moi, de luge

This view of 18th century warfare came up, in passing, in the most recent Ones and Tooze podcast, when Tooze spoke about American football's “extraordinary top-down management,” which he described as “like an 18th century battle with intense remote control.”

Gives a whole new meaning to party politics. 🎈

Gotta admit that that curlers have stones.

You just sold me on the Kickstarter. I’d guess that Citino might also argue that the popular perception of the Wehrmacht (and the Waffen SS) as highly effective forces also contributed.

Interesting. How big a part did the myth of the clean Wehrmacht play?

Have you read Tom Holland’s Dominion, and, if so, what’s your take? I haven’t read it, but I’ve heard quite a lot about it.

That reminds me of the best opening line on a 1979 album: “Oh, I just don’t know where to begin” (“Accidents Will Happen,” side 1, track 1 on Elvis Costello’s Armed Forces).

Post a banger that’s not in English.

youtu.be/8soQkubMk1g?...

I’ve loved Philip Ethington’s The Public City: The Political Construction of Urban Life in San Francisco, 1850-1900, so much so that I emailed him two Thanksgivings ago to let him know. I’ve found his concepts of romantic republicanism and republican liberalism quite eye-opening.