Some of the flavor of The Rise of American Democracy by Sean Wilentz

Here is the author summarizing a northern Republican looking back over the 1850s from just before the Civil War.(Page 705):As Seward remarked, the events of the mid-1850s threw into sharp relief how two different democracies, shaped by slavery, had arisen within the same nation. Although some southern franchises and systems representation were, in fact, more equal than others,...

The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln, by Sean Wilentz

I have been working on this book for quite a while now; even with a fair amount of skimming over detail, I am still 150 pages from the end. It's fascinating. What is most remarkable about this account of the evolution of democratic ideas and institutions between the Revolution...

Translated into the heavens

-- or at least into Italian.This is the Italian translation of my 10-year-old monograph on late medieval formal combats, Deeds of Arms.  Gesta d'Armi is the work of Benedetta Ermacora and Marco Signorini; it is published in Kindle format through the Italian branch of Amazon...

Fintan O'Toole and the imaginative foundations of political structures

From the Guardian: Has Europe lost its hold on our collective imagination? Fintan O'Toole When I was a teenager in Dublin in the early 1970s, the phrase “We’re into Europe!” gained a peculiar currency. It was half-jokey but not really sardonic. You used it for good things that promised even better things – when a girl you fancied smiled at you or your team scored the first goal....