Ask Nathan Anything: Quarantine Edition

[KaiserDave]

Worst and Best Pope (if that can be answered)?

[KaiserDave]

Worst and Best Pope (if that can be answered)?

It can't, so I'll do most overrated and most underrated.

Overrated: Pius IX, an evil son of a bitch who covertly supported the Confederacy and poisoned the well for the nascent Kingdom of Italy with his narcissistic and delusional refusal to accept its existence as a secular state. Somehow he ended up a beatus, but his canonization is probably DOA unless one of Francis's successors is a Young Pope-tier reactionary.
Underrated: Callixtus II, a High Medieval pontiff who negotiated an end to the Investiture Controversy, called a good-not-great ecumenical council (Lateran I), and, crucially, forbade pogroms, forced conversions of Jewish people, and disruption of Jewish religious and cultural rites on penalty of excommunication.

Wow. Very good indeed. And a cool name to boot.

[KaiserDave]

https://talkelections.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=431203.msg7970206#msg7970206

Thoughts on the WWI discussion in this thread, and perhaps on my response to GMac

We don't have enough WWI discussion on Atlas

Also thoughts on King Louis-Philipe?

[KaiserDave]

Was the Glorious Revolution the first modern revolution?

ayy lmao

No, the French Revolution was, for better or for worse (normal, arguably-sane, boring answer). The Glorious Revolution, like the Restoration before it, was an elite-driven project more similar to a modern coup than to a revolution as we now understand the word.

Boy do I have a book for you then:



I used to think like you did, but this book changed my mind. It completely overturns the (normal, insane, boring) Whig history interpretation of the Revolution, just by examining evidence and sources (like newspapers, pamphlets, letters, etc.) that other historians have long ignored. As Pincus shows, the Glorious Revolution was a bloody, popular uprising marked by extensive mob violence and an extremely politically active public. In other words, the first modern revolution.

Mob violence and a politically active public does not a modern revolution make, or else Julius Caesar is the first modern revolutionary!

[KaiserDave]

Opinion of Napoleon Bonaparte?

[KaiserDave]

Opinion of

1. Rerum Novarum
2. Quadragesimo anno
3. Fratelli Tutti
?