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pschw

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The author seems to have little understanding of how much this was true of World War 1...

Fussell wrote _The Great War and Modern Memory_, so I'd say he was pretty well-versed on how WW1 was portrayed.

From what I remember (I did a masters in history about a decade ago), Eran Shalev's _Rome Reborn on Western Shores_ was the main book on the subject (edit: the subject being Rome / the classics and early American political culture generally, not specifically the US Constitution).

That said, there was some debate over the influence of Rome on early American political debates, with others citing either "classical republicanism" or the pre-English Civil War debates on the English constitution as more important influences (for example, JGA Pocock or Gordon Wood).

Anecdote: When I was in a history graduate program, part of our training was a "written exam" based on a list of 200+ required books (and several hundred more recommended ones). There literally was not time to read every book, so we all got a crash course in how academics read -- get the author's argument from the intro/conclusion, then get the structure/evidence/case studies by skimming the chapter list. By the end, I was able to "read" a book in about 30 minutes, but there was no way I could actually _read_ the book. The goal was to spend as much time as possible reading primary sources, not books, because that was the "value-add" for an academic historian.

If you like Zoom you should be ok with Webex.

Webex lacks a native Linux client, and the browser-based version has limited features and in my experience has had some recurring issues with audio and screensharing. So, purely from a user experience point of view, the shift from Zoom to Webex hasn't been painless.

Nit: the first issue of Marat's "L'Ami du peuple" wasn't published until several months after the fall of the Bastille and thus played no role in radicalizing the populace prior to the Revolution.

But the broader point that the French Revolution was proceeded by a radicalized literature [0] is accurate (Sieyes' "What is the Third Estate?" is the most famous work [1]). Though it's contribution to the origins of the Revolution is the matter of some debate [2].

[0] For a good overview, see the work of Robert Darnton, esp. https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674536579 [1] https://fr.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Qu’est-ce_que_le_tiers_état... (I don't recall if there's a full English translation of this... there are excerpts in Keith Baker's French Revolution reader (U Chicago Press) [2] One of the better treatments of this is https://www.dukeupress.edu/The-Cultural-Origins-of-the-Frenc...