Well, tonight's guests are uninspiring. Jon's is Michael Barone, senior writer for US News & World Report, commentator on Fox News, principal co-author of The Almanac of American Politics, etc. He's been published in many other places, including a book from Regnery press (in 2001 -- I didn't realize they'd been around that long). I did read a few bits of some of his essays, but bleh. His US News blog isn't awful.
He's here about a new book, Our First Revolution: The Remarkable British Upheaval That Inspired America's Founding Fathers, which sounds interesting. PubWeekly summarizes:
Political journalist and historian Barone (Hard America, Soft America) elucidates the template for America's independence movement in this well-written history of its forerunner: England's Glorious Revolution of 1688. The author describes the origins of the revolution, a mostly bloodless change of government, as a mixture of religious, political and diplomatic factors. King James II's Roman Catholicism, hostility to Parliament, and French sympathies alienated an increasing number of his powerful subjects including John Churchill, later Duke of Marlborough, who invited Dutch Stadtholder William of Orange and his wife, Mary, James's sister, to intervene. Among the revolution's consequences was a Bill of Rights that limited the monarch's powers and strengthened representative government. A Toleration Act encouraged variant forms of Protestant worship. The creation of a funded national debt and the foundation of the Bank of England laid the groundwork for financial development. Involvement in the long series of wars with France moved England from a country standing apart from Europe to one that took responsibility for maintaining a continental balance of power. It was a Glorious Revolution indeed that laid the political groundwork for the world in which we now live, and Barone's lucid work honors its heritage.
and, also via Amazon, Booklist elaborates:
To this well-studied topic--the author draws extensively on biographers of its leading figures--Barone productively contributes his scholarly trademark: analysis of elections. Several parliamentary canvasses were conducted during the Stuart Restoration, whose elements of procedure, franchise, and electoral arithmetic Barone breaks down over the major issue in play, which was rife with the possibilities of civil war: the rights to be accorded to Catholics and, specifically, converted Catholic James II.
It's just too bad that what I've seen of the rest of his writings have such a strong right-wing bias -- I don't know how he could interpret the events of 1688 wing-nuttishly, but, y'know.
(In the light of mcjoan's current front-page story Restoring Habeas, my eye keeps being drawn to this sentence from Wikipedia:
It can be argued that James's overthrow began modern English parliamentary democracy: never again would the monarch hold absolute power, and the Bill of Rights became one of the most important documents in the political history of Britain.
Sigh.)
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