Appendix 1- Coming Full Circle

Hello, and welcome to Revolutions. Appendix one, coming full circle. Nine years ago, I set out to write a series exploring great revolutions in history. My goal was to synthesize as much information as I could about these revolutions and then craft narratives that laid them out from beginning to middle to end. But here, at the end of the end of the series, I wanna take a look back and survey all of these narratives and see if we can't draw some conclusions about the nature, form, and progress of revolutions. Each revolution was unique unto itself, but many of them seem to have similar characteristics. I think we've all noticed little patterns and recurrences that are nested inside of the contingent distinctiveness of each series. Stock characters and groups seem to show up over and over again, and events of striking similarity just keep happening. I mean, how many times did I say a large crowd gathered in a confined space and someone fired a shot, but we'll never know who and we'll never know why. Now, this absolutely is not about drawing out fundamental laws of history because those don't exist. But we can recognize that in all the events we've talked about on the show, they fall under the category of revolution because they have certain common characteristics. So I wanna spend some time together figuring out what those common characteristics are. I'd like to start these concluding episodes by returning to the very beginning. When I launched the show, I wrote an introduction, an episode zero to introduce the series. And since I published that introduction way back in September 2013, hand to god, I haven't listened to it since. I always needed to focus on whatever the topic of the week was, and I knew basically what I had said in the introduction, so there was never any need to go back and listen to it again. And so for the first time in nine years, I sat down and listened to it again. Because I thought that to end the show, it would be worthwhile to return to the beginning. Did I actually do what I set out to do? What can I say now that I couldn't say then? What did I get right? What did I get wrong? What was I vague and cagey about that I can now, after all these years, state more directly and confidently? So what we're gonna do here in appendix one is take an annotated look back at the introduction, kind of a director's commentary track on the things that I said oh so many moons ago. So I started the introduction by saying, the word revolution is one of those words that you think you know the definition of until you actually start trying to define it. Then it turns out to be a slippery fish. Because first of all, the word revolution, coined by Copernicus in 1543, is supposed to mean completing an …