Bitchy History - Episode 14： American History 101 - The Enlightenment and the End of Absolutism

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00:00:46.900 welcome to episode 14 of bitchy history and you are not seeing things the logo did change

00:00:57.640 we're in our hot girl era and that required a new wardrobe thanks to canva this is not a sponsored

00:01:03.060 episode i just really love canva however if they want to sponsor the show i would not say no anyway

00:01:09.440 on to the history for today's episode we are heading outside of america and looking at some

00:01:14.600 of the underpinnings of the intellectual thought and rebellion that created the foundations for

00:01:18.840 the American Revolution. And there's no better place to start than the Age of Enlightenment,

00:01:23.120 or the Age of Reason, the rationalistic sibling of the religious rabble-rousers of the Great

00:01:27.840 Awakening that we talked about last week. Around the same time the English settlers 0.99

00:01:31.720 were establishing the first forms of government in the New World, in Europe new political ideas

00:01:36.600 were also gaining ground. The philosophical movement of the Enlightenment began to come

00:01:40.820 to popularity in the 17th century and had global impact through the 18th century. It focused on a

00:01:46.760 range of ideas that centered on the value of human happiness, the pursuit of knowledge through reason

00:01:51.260 and evidence, and ideals like liberty, progress, toleration, fraternity, constitutional government,

00:01:57.140 and the separation of church and state. Prior to the Enlightenment, the Catholic Church reigned

00:02:01.380 supreme as Europe's preeminent religious and intellectual leader, but during the 1500s and

00:02:05.980 1600s, several events began to challenge its hold on power. Martin Luther's Reformation and split

00:02:11.300 from the Catholic Church, which we talked about back in episode 7 when I gave you the rundown on

00:02:15.380 the history of the Puritans, was one of these challenges. People began to question the

00:02:19.480 traditional authority of the Catholic Church and broke away to begin forming their own religious

00:02:23.340 denominations. At the same time, the political upheaval in Europe during the Thirty Years' War

00:02:28.340 from 1618 to 1648 would cause many people to start questioning the intelligence and authority

00:02:34.140 of religious and political leaders that had waged a decades-long war with millions of casualties

00:02:39.480 because they couldn't agree on what religion to force people to follow. 1.00

00:02:44.200 That is the stupidest fucking thing I've ever heard. 1.00

00:02:46.760 Totally agree. But most wars are started for very dumb reasons, like 70-year-old men who 1.00

00:02:51.700 are unwilling to accept that the Soviet Union fell apart in 1991 and Ukraine doesn't have 0.63

00:02:56.600 any interest in helping him rebuild it. Stop trying to make fetch happen. It's not going to happen. 0.73

00:03:02.040 But the other major change in society was the scientific revolution that took place during the 16th and 17th century.

00:03:08.540 Science became its own discipline, and major developments and discoveries in mathematics, physics, astronomy, biology, and chemistry were happening.

00:03:15.880 We realized that the natural world was something that could be observed, researched, and experimented on, not just taken on faith.

00:03:22.140 From this revolution, the names Galileo, Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton, Sir Francis Bacon, among others, become famous and build the foundation for the modern STEM field.

00:03:31.000 Empiricism ruled the day, and while many of the thinkers of this era were religious and still had faith,

00:03:36.060 they rejected the idea that belief in God was the only thing needed to understand the natural world.

00:03:41.060 So we see a slow eroding of the power structures that had traditionally run European society.

00:03:46.060 In essence, the 1500s through the 1700s are the rebellious teen years for the European population.

00:03:51.820 And just as it is with real teenagers, the results vary wildly in how that rebellion turns out.

00:03:57.280 For some, it's rebellious experimenting with Copernican heliocentrism, the nerds of the world.

00:04:03.120 And for others, it's violent revolutions where people get their heads chopped off en masse.

00:04:08.000 The, uh, mean girls of the world, I guess?

00:04:11.400 How many of you have ever felt personally victimized by Regina George?

00:04:16.180 Look, it's not a perfect metaphor, but you understand what I mean.

00:04:18.920 People weren't taking things for granted anymore.

00:04:21.080 The ideas of the Enlightenment undermined the authority of the monarchy and the church,

00:04:24.740 both Catholic and Protestant in some ways.

00:04:27.280 And this period of philosophical, you can't tell me what to do, you aren't my real dad,

00:04:32.180 sets the stage for the political revolutions that spread throughout Europe and the Americas in the 18th and 19th century.

00:04:38.420 The Enlightenment gives us many famous recognizable names.

00:04:41.360 Diderot, Hume, Kant, Spinoza, Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Locke, Smith, and Hobbes.

00:04:47.400 If this were a podcast about philosophy, I could spend entire episodes on each of these figures.

00:04:52.080 But it's not. And thank God for that.

00:04:54.060 because this is an episode meant to help you understand the foundations of the American

00:04:57.720 Revolution, so we're just going to spend some time on the ideas and philosophers who had the

00:05:02.440 most influence on this event specifically. There are several ideas from the Enlightenment that

00:05:07.280 greatly influenced the future of America. The questioning of religious dogma gave rise to the

00:05:11.560 concept of deism, an intellectual movement that accepted the existence of a creator on the basis

00:05:16.320 of reason, but rejected belief in a supernatural deity who interacts with humankind. Deists tended

00:05:22.160 to share a disdain for religious dogmatism and blind obedience to tradition and faith.

00:05:26.780 This is a mindset Taylor made for a revolutionary because it rejects traditional power structures.

00:05:31.980 Many of the most well-known figures of the American Revolution were deists, not the Bible-thumping

00:05:36.240 evangelicals that Republican politicians like Marjorie Taylor Greene might like us to believe

00:05:40.720 they were. Yet the founding fathers quoted the Bible constantly and were driven by their faith.

00:05:46.600 To be remembered that way would definitely be a shock to someone like Thomas Jefferson who took

00:05:50.600 his deism so far as to entirely deny the divinity of Christ. The Jefferson Bible was a project by

00:05:56.120 Jefferson in rewriting the Bible with no mention of miracles, angels, or the resurrection of Jesus.

00:06:01.480 I could go on, but would get bogged down in discussion of the relative faith of each founding

00:06:05.480 father compared to the modern-day religious evangelicals in Congress, and that's a topic

00:06:10.180 for a future episode of the podcast. A generally negative view of dogmatic religion also led to the

00:06:15.400 embracing of the idea of toleration, which would play a part in building what we think of today

00:06:19.800 as the ideas of religious freedom, free speech, and freedom of expression.

00:06:23.820 Toleration was a belief that the hatred or fear of other races and creeds

00:06:27.340 interfered with economic trade, extinguished freedom of thought and expression,

00:06:31.480 eroded the friendship between nations, and led to persecution and war.

00:06:35.300 Toleration imagined an age in which enlightened reason, not religious dogmatism,

00:06:39.440 would govern relations between diverse peoples with loyalties to different faiths.

00:06:43.760 Another idea that would go on to influence the American Revolution

00:06:46.380 was the concept of liberalism,

00:06:48.020 The notion that humans have natural rights and that government authority is not absolute,

00:06:52.660 but based on the will and consent of the governed.

00:06:55.300 A concept we'll get back to in a minute when we discuss the philosophers whose touch we can see in the American Revolution.

00:07:01.500 Republicanism, which has nothing whatsoever to do with the Republican Party, just to clarify that,

00:07:06.200 was another idea we borrowed from the Enlightenment.

00:07:08.600 This was the idea that a nation ought to be ruled as a republic.

00:07:11.560 Selection of the state's highest public official is determined by general election

00:07:15.640 rather than through the way that monarchies were ruled by hereditary right.

00:07:19.720 You might recall from episode 6, I mentioned that the concept of Republican motherhood,

00:07:23.940 where it is the job of mothers to instill Republican values of patriotism

00:07:27.680 and virtuous citizenship in their children as well as educate them.

00:07:31.540 There are certainly other aspects of the Enlightenment that would go on to influence the early years of America,

00:07:36.440 but we'll leave things like conservatism and scientific progress until a later episode,

00:07:40.960 since I would argue that neither of them are directly related to the foundation of the

00:07:45.000 American Revolution specifically. The final concept I'd like to discuss in relation to

00:07:49.220 the Enlightenment's influence is one that was discussed by a huge number of Enlightenment

00:07:53.200 philosophers. We generally refer to it today as the social contract. This is the basis of the

00:07:58.540 idea of liberalism in many ways, as it concerns the legitimacy of the authority of the state

00:08:03.280 over the individual. The social contract model argues that individuals have consented,

00:08:07.840 either explicitly or tacitly to surrender some of their freedoms and submit to the authority

00:08:12.800 of the ruler or to the decision of the majority in exchange for protection of their remaining

00:08:17.680 rights or the maintenance of a social order. The contract is an agreement between the ruled and

00:08:22.080 the ruler which outlines the rights and duties of each to the other. Government is not meant to be

00:08:26.780 one-sided with the ruler holding all the power because the consent of the governed is needed to

00:08:31.080 maintain the agreement so both sides need to hold up their end of the bargain. Thomas Hobbes was the

00:08:36.680 English philosopher that is most commonly associated with the 17th century concept of

00:08:40.920 the social contract, though technically the general concept dates way back to the Greek

00:08:45.440 philosophers. Hobbes was a mixed bag, really. If you cast your mind back to episode six again,

00:08:51.200 you'll remember that I noted that Hobbes saw the family unit as a little monarchy in which the

00:08:56.380 husband and father was the sovereign, which, while he was a man of his time, is generally a pretty

00:09:01.500 crappy way to view a relationship. He was also a major killjoy with a fucked up view of human 0.99

00:09:06.200 nature. He argued that people are inherently wicked and selfish, and therefore government 0.99

00:09:10.340 was needed to control them. In his treatise, Leviathan, which was published in 1651, Hobbes

00:09:16.000 set out his doctrine of the foundation of states and legitimate governments and creating an

00:09:20.160 objective science of morality. Much of the book is occupied with demonstrating the necessity of

00:09:25.040 a strong central authority in order to avoid the evil of discord and civil war. To quote chapter

00:09:30.900 13. Whatsoever, therefore, is a consequent to a time of war, where every man is enemy to every

00:09:37.400 man, the same consequent to the time wherein men live without other security, than what their own

00:09:42.480 strength and their own invention shall furnish them with. In such condition there is no place

00:09:47.160 for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently no culture of the

00:09:51.640 earth, no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea, no commodious building,

00:09:57.380 no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force,

00:10:01.800 no knowledge of the face of the earth, no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society,

00:10:06.760 and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death,

00:10:10.860 and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

00:10:15.900 Fun!

00:10:16.660 I'm writing an article over on my blog right now that's about the Hobbesian view of human nature

00:10:21.200 and how it's represented in modern dystopian fiction, by the way.

00:10:24.220 according to Hobbes all individuals in society must cede some right to the sovereign authority

00:10:29.480 for the sake of protection power exercised by this authority cannot be resisted because the

00:10:34.260 protector's sovereign power derives from the individual surrendering their own power for

00:10:38.940 protection the individuals are therefore the author of all decisions made by the sovereign

00:10:43.660 to quote Hobbes again he that complaineth of injury from his sovereign complaineth that whereof he

00:10:49.540 himself is the author and therefore ought not to accuse any man but himself no nor himself of

00:10:55.500 injury because to do injury to oneself is impossible for Hobbes there was no right of

00:11:00.380 rebellion and there was no doctrine of separation of powers in his form of theoretical government

00:11:04.820 according to Hobbes the sovereign must control civil military judicial and ecclesiastical powers

00:11:10.220 so while Hobbes is proposing a form of the social contract it's not one that really jives with the

00:11:16.060 form of social contract that supported the idea of a revolution against your parent country.

00:11:20.880 That idea would come from another philosopher who wrote about the state of nature and the social

00:11:24.740 contract. John Locke. Not the guy from Lost. This is a different John Locke, just to clarify. Not

00:11:30.680 that I thought you'd confuse a 17th century philosopher for a fictional character played

00:11:34.760 by Terry O'Quinn, but let's just say this confusion has happened before in one of my classes, so

00:11:40.940 yeah. Different guys, same name, big difference. For one thing, the 17th century philosopher had

00:11:46.800 hair. Locke was an English philosopher and physician who is widely regarded as one of the

00:11:51.300 most influential thinkers of the Enlightenment. He's sometimes referred to as the father of

00:11:55.520 liberalism, and his most famous work is undoubtedly his two treatises on government,

00:12:00.060 followed by a letter concerning toleration. His political theory was also based on the idea of

00:12:05.280 the social contract, but he had a very different view of human nature and society than Hobbes.

00:12:09.960 Locke believed that human nature is characterized by reason and tolerance.

00:12:13.760 I used to agree with him, but in the last few years, it's gotten harder and harder to do so.

00:12:18.440 In a natural state, Locke believed that all people were equal and independent,

00:12:22.380 and everyone had a natural right to defend his life, health, liberty, or possessions.

00:12:26.640 But rather than constantly having to defend ourselves, we form societies,

00:12:30.640 so that instead we can have a government which resolves conflicts in a civil way.

00:12:34.700 So we give up some freedom for the safety and security, just like Hobbes.

00:12:39.080 But this is again where Hobbes and Locke diverge and where Locke's influence can be most clearly

00:12:43.340 seen in the building blocks of the revolution. Locke advocated governmental separation of powers

00:12:48.320 rather than a dictatorship of a single sovereign and believed that revolution is not only a right

00:12:53.200 but an obligation in some circumstances. Locke writes this in his second treatise on government.

00:12:58.860 Whenever the legislators endeavor to take away and destroy the property of the people or to

00:13:03.100 reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people

00:13:08.100 who are thereupon absolved from any further obedience

00:13:11.060 and are left to the common refuge

00:13:12.760 which God hath provided for all men

00:13:14.960 against force and violence

00:13:16.600 who in so ever therefore the legislative

00:13:18.980 shall transgress this fundamental rule of society

00:13:21.700 and either by ambition, fear, folly or corruption

00:13:24.900 endeavor to grasp themselves

00:13:26.600 or put them into the hands of any other

00:13:29.080 on absolute power over the lives, liberties

00:13:31.360 and estates of the people

00:13:32.540 by this breach of trust they forfeit the power

00:13:35.220 the people had put into their hands

00:13:36.920 for quite contrary ends, and it devolves to the people who have a right to resume their original

00:13:41.860 liberty. And yes, this is from the second treatise on government, and there are two of them. You

00:13:47.220 might ask what the first treatise on government is, but it's not really relevant to this episode.

00:13:51.780 I'll just say that it's an absolute roast of a man by the name of Sir Robert Filmer,

00:13:56.540 who I can only assume John Locke hated with the heat of a thousand suns based on how thoroughly 0.98

00:14:01.480 he philosophically bitch slapped the man. The full title of the first treatise has the subtitle

00:14:06.420 the false principles and foundation of Sir Robert Filmer and his followers are detected and

00:14:11.220 overthrown, and he thoroughly destroys the arguments found in Filmer's Patriarcha, which

00:14:15.780 had been published nine years previously. If you can get past the 17th century language,

00:14:20.640 do give it a read. But back on to the second treatise, which has the subtitle of

00:14:25.040 An Essay Concerning the True Original Extent and End of Civil Government.

00:14:29.600 This treatise touches on a number of themes. The state of nature, the condition of human beings

00:14:34.320 before or without political association. Conquest and slavery. In two chapters of the treatise,

00:14:40.400 he performs a neat takedown of the concept of slavery by first writing a justification for

00:14:45.240 slavery and then pointing out that the requirements for such a justification could

00:14:49.300 never exist in reality. In providing a justification for slavery, he renders all

00:14:54.480 forms of slavery as it actually exists invalid. He does the same thing with the right of conquest.

00:14:59.680 He proposes one power a conqueror could gain, and then demonstrates how actually that power can't be claimed in reality.

00:15:06.720 A neat little job of reverse psychology.

00:15:10.240 Property. Locke claims that civil society was created for the protection of property. Simple enough.

00:15:16.040 Representative government. Locke feels that a legitimate contract could easily exist between citizens and a monarchy, an oligarchy, or some other mixed form of government.

00:15:25.220 His notions of people's rights and the role of civil government

00:15:27.800 provided strong support for the intellectual movements

00:15:30.320 of both the American and French revolutions.

00:15:33.160 And the right of revolution.

00:15:35.040 Locke declared that under natural law,

00:15:36.920 all people have the right to life, liberty, and estate.

00:15:39.900 Under the social contract, the people could instigate a revolution

00:15:42.620 against the government when it acted against the interests of citizens,

00:15:46.060 to replace the government with one that served the interests of citizens.

00:15:49.900 There are several more philosophers who deal with the social contract,

00:15:53.100 but frankly, I think I'll save Montesquieu and Rousseau for the episodes of the podcast when we

00:15:58.140 get into the creation of the American Constitution, for reasons. One of those reasons is that John

00:16:04.480 Locke is an excellent place to switch to the second topic we're covering today, the end of

00:16:09.080 absolutism. Now, not all Enlightenment thinkers were against absolute monarchy. In fact, many

00:16:15.080 supported it for a variety of reasons. Many saw a strong absolute monarch, as long as they were

00:16:20.580 an enlightened philosopher king type of monarch as the key to creating reform. Given that the

00:16:26.460 enlightenment was taking place in a time not that far removed from the genetic creation of the 1.00

00:16:30.900 Habsburg Chin, look it up, I can't explain it via audio, I honestly have no idea where they thought 0.99

00:16:37.480 these philosopher kings were going to come from, but wishful thinking, I guess. Okay, maybe that

00:16:43.260 crack about the Habsburgs was a little bit mean. I'm sorry I called you a gap-toothed bitch. It's 0.99

00:16:48.640 not your fault you're so gap-toothed. It is, however, their fault that they thought family 0.60

00:16:52.780 reunions were the 16th century version of Tinder, though. Anyway, let's talk about absolute monarchy.

00:16:59.100 Absolutism is the political doctrine and practice of unlimited centralized authority and absolute

00:17:04.080 sovereignty, as vested especially in a monarch or dictator. In this system, a ruler is subject to no

00:17:10.220 challenge to his authority. There is no Congress, Parliament, or court that can supersede him.

00:17:15.280 So, you know, the version of government that Trump and his supporters wished they had.

00:17:18.960 Never in my life did I think I would like to see a dictator,

00:17:22.540 but if there's going to be one, I want it to be Trump.

00:17:25.680 The most common defense of absolute monarchy was a belief in the divine right of kings.

00:17:29.860 It asserted that kings derived their authority from God,

00:17:32.520 and that even tyrannical rule was justified,

00:17:34.500 because obviously God intended for a genocidal maniac to be put in power

00:17:38.520 to punish the sinfulness of humanity.

00:17:40.940 Going back to John Locke for a second,

00:17:42.580 we see a leading thinker of the Enlightenment who takes this issue head on in the first of his two

00:17:47.040 treatises. As I mentioned, Sir Robert Filmer's Patriarcha was a treatise that defended the

00:17:51.800 divine right of kings based on the idea that all of the modern states derived authority from the

00:17:56.540 biblical patriarchs. Locke smashes through that argument and says, nah, bad kings are bad kings,

00:18:02.640 and we shouldn't have to put up with them just because they claim divine authority.

00:18:06.400 In fact, I think I have some actual audio of Locke speaking about this. 1.00

00:18:10.240 Listen, strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. 1.00

00:18:16.360 Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony. 1.00

00:18:22.880 Be quiet.

00:18:23.960 You can't expect to wield supreme executive power just because some watery tart threw a sword at you. 1.00

00:18:29.960 Shut up. 0.99

00:18:30.940 If I went round saying I was an emperor just because some moistened bint had lobbed a scimitar at me, they'd put me away. 1.00

00:18:37.320 Okay, you caught me. That wasn't John Locke. Recording equipment didn't exist in 1689,

00:18:42.360 but I firmly believe it's what he would have sounded like. This guy's even got a British

00:18:46.620 accent. But honestly, Locke wasn't speaking hypothetically. He was 16 years old and half a

00:18:52.060 mile away when the truest expression of, you can't get away with ruling without the consent

00:18:56.480 of the governed, occurred with the execution of Charles I, former King of England. Now this isn't

00:19:02.220 a British history podcast, and frankly, if you want a full rundown on the details of the English

00:19:06.220 Revolution, you should really head over to the first season of Mike Duncan's Revolutions podcast

00:19:10.440 where he covers it with exquisite detail. But the short of it is that Charles and Parliament

00:19:15.420 disagreed a lot, and Parliament kept trying to use the power of the purse to get him to negotiate

00:19:20.100 and stop doing the stuff that Parliament didn't like. Charles got sick of working with Parliament

00:19:24.740 and dismissed them. There's some back and forth here, but essentially he begins what his critics

00:19:29.120 would call the 11 years tyranny because he refused to reconvene Parliament. Only Parliament is the

00:19:34.820 one that handles taxes. So for 11 years, Charles just has to play a lot of tricky games to raise

00:19:40.420 funds. One of the things that happened was the reinstitution of fines for not attending Anglican

00:19:45.260 services. I mentioned that in the episode about the Puritans, remember? See, it's all coming

00:19:49.940 together. Charles' anti-Catholic views would eventually lead to a rebellion in Scotland,

00:19:54.500 and he'd have no money to put the rebellion down, so he'd recall Parliament. Only Parliament doesn't

00:20:00.080 want him to invade Scotland, so they won't give him the funds. Charles is pissed. He dismisses

00:20:05.360 them again, tries to invade Scotland without the funds to do so, and ends up in an even worse

00:20:09.800 situation. He recalls Parliament again, but now they're the ones that are pissed. They get into

00:20:15.240 a political power pissing match with Charles, and Charles tries to arrest some of the members of

00:20:19.520 the House of Commons on charges of treason, but they escape. Now everyone is pissed. Charles and

00:20:24.980 his family flee London. It's 1642, and John Locke is a 10-year-old boy. He would have been old enough

00:20:30.640 to understand the stories filtering in, how Charles was unable to enforce any of his orders, how he was

00:20:36.120 at war with his own parliament, and it wasn't going well. If God had appointed him, God appeared

00:20:41.320 to be on the side of parliament on the issue of separated powers and government. There's a lot of

00:20:45.720 back and forth and several years of war. Again, if this is of interest to you, go listen to Mike

00:20:50.520 Duncan's podcast on it. The important thing to understand today is that Parliament won the war,

00:20:55.760 and Charles was put on trail for treason, found guilty, and on January 20th, 1649, he was publicly

00:21:01.500 executed by beheading in front of the banqueting house of the Palace of Whitehall. The banqueting

00:21:06.400 house, by the way, is the only part of the palace that's still standing, and it's truly a gorgeous

00:21:10.900 building. So John Locke had seen the folly of absolute monarchy for himself, up close and

00:21:16.620 personal. But more importantly, the fall of the monarchy and the subsequent absolute clusterfuck 0.95

00:21:21.820 of the Commonwealth would have been a history that the Founding Fathers would have known well.

00:21:25.960 In the course of around 11 years, England went from being a monarchy to a commonwealth to a

00:21:30.720 dictatorship and back to a monarchy again. Oh, right, I forgot to mention, in 1653, Oliver Cromwell

00:21:37.220 dismissed Parliament because they were too difficult to work with, you know, just like

00:21:41.320 Charles had done, and then ruled over England as the Lord Protector, i.e. dictator, until his death

00:21:47.520 in 1658, at which point his son took over, because apparently being Lord Protector is a hereditary

00:21:53.460 job. His son proved to be incompetent, and Parliament reconvened and decided to give that

00:21:58.600 whole monarchy thing a second chance. So even though England ultimately ends up being a monarchy

00:22:04.040 again, this period had thrown the entire system of absolute monarchy into a very skeptical light.

00:22:10.100 major institutional changes on the power of the English monarchy would come in the next few years

00:22:15.200 such as the English Bill of Rights. This landmark piece of constitutional law in England would make

00:22:20.020 Parliament stronger than the monarch and set out basic civil rights for the citizens of England

00:22:24.200 like trial by jury and outlawing cruel and unusual punishment. And whose ideas helped inspire that law?

00:22:31.300 Why it was an English philosopher who accompanied Mary, William of Orange's wife, from the Netherlands

00:22:35.940 to England in February of 1689 after the Glorious Revolution. That philosopher? John Locke, of

00:22:42.700 course. Thanks for tuning in to listen to me bitch about history. Also, if you'd like to read more of 0.97

00:22:47.440 me bitching about history and popular culture and blackening the name of classic children's authors,

00:22:52.400 I write for a blog, PerspectivesOnPopCulture.com. I've actually been involved with this blog for a

00:22:58.440 while now, I just haven't written for it in a while and kind of forgot? Anyway, a link is now

00:23:04.080 on bitchyhistory.com. My most recent articles have been ripping into Roald Dahl's problems

00:23:08.660 with feminism, and I'm currently working on an article about William Golding and Lord

00:23:12.560 of the Flies, which neatly ties into today's episode, actually, since I'm discussing the

00:23:17.080 Hobbesian worldview of the book. And again, I am still laying out the timeline for covering

00:23:21.720 the American Revolution content for the podcast, so next week's episode topic will be a surprise.

00:23:27.280 Thank you for listening, and I'll see you back here next week.

00:23:34.080 Thank you.

Bitchy History - July 10, 2023

Episode 14： American History 101 - The Enlightenment and the End of Absolutism

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