Trivia / Revolutions

• Accidentally-Correct Writing: While Duncan makes an effort to get the pronunciation right, it is hard to imagine that he actually researched whether or not the town of Slovenj Gradec was pronounced "Vindish grahtz" or "Vindish graetz" (i.e. with a German "a" or a German "ä") in the nineteenth century. Duncan went with the former easier to pronounce form, ignoring of the "ä", which turns out to be the way a learnéd Austrian of the 19th century would have pronounced it and almost certainly the way Alfred I Prince of Windisch Grätz would have pronounced his own last name. Most German speakers who are not experts of 19th century Austrian nobility would likely assume Duncan had made a mistake, when he in fact had not.
• Milestone Celebration: Episode 30 of season 3 was Duncan's 250th recorded podcast episode (of both Revolutions and The History of Rome) and so celebrated with a Q & A episode. His first since the one he did for The History of Rome.
• Old Shame:
  • A minor version, but Duncan has said that he looks back at the American Revolution season as the one that would look the most different if he was writing it in 2022 as opposed to 2014. Specifically, he would place much, much more emphasis on slavery than he did when he made the season back in 2014 — the existing season does discuss the reality of American slavery and the hypocrisy of the colonists claiming they were fighting for liberty while owning human beings as chattel, but it's not a focal point.
  • On a lighter note, he's said that he feels the English Revolution was the most hamstrung by the Early-Installment Weirdness of his initial attempt to limit the number of episodes in each season. Duncan has claimed there's easily over fifty episodes worth of content there and that he believes it suffers the most from being squeezed into fifteen.
• Schedule Slip: Generally avoided, and Duncan is usually transparent and proactive about notifying listeners of a forthcoming break in the usual schedule. The truest example came in season 10, when Duncan scheduled a six-month hiatus in the middle of the season so he could buckle down and write his book on the Marquis de Lafayette. That turned in to a nine-month gap, but since it was the result of a long medical emergency occurring in the middle of his book writing, while Duncan was living overseas and trying to navigate a foreign medical system, all against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, pretty much everyone cut him some slack.
• Real Song Theme Tune: A clip from the middle section of the second movement of Joseph Haydn's Symphony No. 92 "Oxford" in G Major. (This can make it a little hard to find, as this middle section is notably intense and in a minor key, while the rest of the movement—is slower and in a major key.) The selection of this piece may be a bit of sly joke on Duncan's part, as it was first performed in Paris in 1789.
• Recycled Script: To provide an episode during a stretch in the ninth season where he was promoting the paperback edition of his first book, Duncan literally read a paper on the Mexican Revolution he wrote in grad school.
• What Could Have Been: Ireland, Cuba, Iran, and Algeria were all candidates to get covered in the podcast before the scope of the project expanded well-beyond Duncan's original vision and he decided things needed to end with Russia.