Thank you for listening! What’s striking about Britain is how fast it all happened - literally one generation separated a province of populous cities and a complex economy from one that literally couldn’t build in stone or make pottery. It’s shocking and hard for us to imagine.

Thank you!

Try the later episodes. I made a bunch of fixes that have improved the sound quality. If you’re such an audiophile that everything has to sound like it was produced by NPR, I’m sorry, I can’t help you - I don’t have thousands of dollars to spend on equipment, I don’t have a studio, and I can’t turn a room of my house…

Every once in a while an episode of this show makes it into Ethnonationalist Twitter and I get a bunch of tweets asking why I’m not talking more about immigrants causing the downfall of the Roman Empire. My response is always the same - because they didn’t. Rome was a pluralistic society whose great genius was…

Thank you!

The point is that these places are representative of a type of community spread across a whole swathe of the country, and that they exist not just in states that went red but elsewhere as well.

California is a net loser of people due to internal (within the US) migration, but it’s still growing overall because it’s attracting large numbers of foreign immigrants.

Well, there’s a whole debate about the Roman economy that uses the primitivist/modernist dichotomy in ways that aren’t closely connected to Marx’s or Smith’s notion of accumulation - primitivist in this sense doesn’t mean “primitive”, it means “focusing on differences rather than similarities between ancient and…

I don’t disagree that the Romans weren’t capitalists as we understand the term, but you’re coming down pretty hard on the side of a primitivist understanding of the Roman economy.

That’s a really fantastic question.

Serious scholarly thought? Not really. Academic history doesn’t deal much in counterfactuals.

I got out when I realized I was never going to get tenure and neither was anybody else in my program (aside from maybe one or two folks). It’s not like my PhD is from the Southwest Michigan School for Kids Who Can’t Read Good, either - in my field, basically every tenure-track slot goes to people who went to Ivies.

This was exactly my experience - it was as if the thought was the two were somehow mutually exclusive, that we couldn’t be trusted to understand different rhetorical strategies or modes of writing.

So there’s some truth to that, but it’s a bit of an oversimplification. When the Romans conquered a new region, they weren’t particularly interested in what the average person thought about it; instead, they tried to co-opt the ruling class of that area. There’s a great passage in Tacitus’ Agricola, for example, where…

Thank you, glad you’re enjoying it.

Thank you!

That we were writing for an audience of other professional historians, trying to make arguments that advance our fields of study rather than writing to entertain or educate the uninitiated. 

In my program, we were actively discouraged from writing in any way popular audiences could possibly construe as entertaining or interesting. It’s mind-boggling.

Thank you for listening!

Yeah, that’s a fair point. One good riot in a major American metro area and a disproportionate police response, hardly an unthinkable occurrence in this particular climate, would shift the tolerance for political violence pretty markedly.