Welcome friends, this is Matt with a special Chapo interview episode where I'm going to be

talking one-on-one with a fellow podcaster of note Mike Duncan known for the history of

Rome podcast, his book The Storm Before The Storm, and more recently his podcast Revolutions,

which has covered significant revolutions in world history starting with English Civil

War, he just finished the amazingly just finished the revolutions of 1848 and has now begun

the Paris Commune. Mike, I just wanted to start off by telling you that when you said

that you were going to do the revolutions of 1848, I thought he is insane. What is he doing?

That is not necessary. You can just skip that one because it's just everything happening

in every country in Europe at the exact same time. How do you turn that into a coherent

narrative for people to understand? But I was astounded how well you pulled it off. How

did I do? It was great. I was amazed at how coherent it was. Yeah, 1848 was on my original

list of revolutions to cover because it's like, oh yeah, it's the great failed revolutions

to a very nice pivot. On the middle of the 19th century as you move from liberal revolutions

to socialist revolutions and then as I got into the show, I was like, I am not going to

do 1848 because that's going to be insane. That was probably my position for a good two

years is that I wasn't going to do 1848. Then as I got closer to it, I was like, oh no,

if I don't do it, I'll look back and really, I'll hate myself for flinching. Even though

it was easily the most complicated, I mean, even talking about the French Revolution,

like it's the most complicated topic I've ever tried to cover. Yeah. I mean, it is, as

you say, necessary because it's such a hinge point in terms of the way that people's

understanding of what constituted a revolution changed around that time. Exactly. And if you

skip it, it's sort of leaving that transformation off of the narrative and people are going

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