I’ve decided to make the entire series FREE. Think of it as a Xmas present. Huzzah!
Inventing The Messiah
Just a plug for Cameron’s latest project:
A secular documentary about early Christianity called “Inventing The Messiah”. Check out the teaser video on Kickstarter and support it if you can! Whether you’re a Christian, atheist, agnostic, pastafarian, or something else, you will probably agree with us that the tale of the rise of Christianity is one of the most amazing in all of history. How did a fringe, desert, Jewish cult, whose founder ended up being executed by the authorities because he was accused of being a terrorist, manage to take over the Roman Empire?
The Vegas Sessions – Part One
On January 12, Cam, David, and Ray Harris, Cam’s co-host from the Life Of Caesar podcast, sat down in front of a live audience in Las Vegas for 70 minutes to discuss Napoleon, Caesar and Alexander.
The is the video of that session is now available for a measly $9 (US). Register for access here.
Once you’ve registered for access, you will be able to stream it from this site or download it to watch it on your phone, tablet, PC or TV. It’s a ~700 MB download.
The Rothschilds and Waterloo
I’ve always been fascinated with the story of how Nathan Rothschild supposedly used his early knowledge of the result of the Battle of Waterloo to make a killing on the London Stock Exchange. However, this new article claims that the story is false, just a piece of anti-Semitic libel. Unless you read the whole article. Buried towards the end of the article you read:
“So, while it is confirmed that Rothschild had early news, he was not the only one. Did Rothschild have time to buy shares? Apparently, but in the thin market of the period, it could not have been enough to accumulate holdings sufficient to earn him the millions that Dairnvaell wrote of.”
The entire article up to this point seems to be designed to discredit the old story – but then, at best, it moderates it, so say yes, he had early news, early enough to buy shares, but he probably didn’t make much money out of it.
What I find fascinating is that this story is always portrayed as anti-Semitic. While I don’t doubt at all that anti-Semitism was rife during the 19th century, there were plenty of reasons for people to hate the Rothschilds that had nothing to do with them being Jewish. For a start, Nathan had almost single-handedly financed the unjust British war effort against Napoleon. How many hundreds of thousands of deaths, how many destroyed homes and towns, were the result of his money?
A New Napoleon Podcast Is Online!
After a break of 3.5 years, WE’RE BACK, BABY!
Sir J. David Markham – yes, he’s an actual KNIGHT now (see photo below) – and Cameron Reilly are back with a brand new episode. And what brought the show out of retirement, we hear you ask?
The wonderful new 800-page biography by Andrew Roberts “Napoleon The Great”, we reply.
Andrew joined us from NYC to explain how he manages to both be British *and* a fan of Napoleon; why Napoleon was a funny dude who cracked jokes even while on the battlefield; why Napoleon wasn’t the evil warmonger he’s often portrayed as by the British; why his marriage to Josephine wasn’t Romeo & Juliette; and what his biggest mistake was.
Andrew’s book has recently been awarded the Grand Prix prize by the Fondation Napoleon and as of this Saturday will be listed in the NY Times bestseller lists (which, as you can probably guess, doesn’t happen with Napoleonic books very often).
If you want to listen to the interview, you’ll need to be a premium subscriber. You can find the details about how to do that here.
Napoleon Bonaparte Podcast #60 – Andrew Roberts, Napoleon The Great
After a break of 3.5 years, WE’RE BACK, BABY!
Sir J. David Markham – yes, he’s an actual KNIGHT now (see photo below) – and Cameron Reilly are back with a brand new episode. And what brought the show out of retirement, we hear you ask?
The wonderful new 800-page biography by Andrew Roberts “Napoleon The Great”, we reply.
Andrew joined us from NYC to explain how he manages to both be British *and* a fan of Napoleon; why Napoleon was a funny dude who cracked jokes even while on the battlefield; why Napoleon wasn’t the evil warmonger he’s often portrayed as by the British; why his marriage to Josephine wasn’t Romeo & Juliette; and what his biggest mistake was.
Andrew’s book has recently been awarded the Grand Prix prize by the Fondation Napoleon and as of this Saturday will be listed in the NY Times bestseller lists (which, as you can probably guess, doesn’t happen with Napoleonic books very often).
If you want to skip the preamble between David and Cameron and get straight to the interview, it starts about 20 minutes in.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Podcast (premium-podcasts): Play in new window | Download
Check Out The Caesar Show
Here’s a plug for the Life Of Caesar podcast, hosted by Cameron and Ray Harris. It’s been going since Dec ’13, has about 80,000 listeners and ranks in the Top 100 podcasts in the USA, UK, AUS and CAN, so check it out!
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Napoleon Book Partly Basis For Book Of Mormon?
A couple of Canadian whizzkids recently released the results of a breakthrough textual analysis they did on The Book Of Mormon and highlighted the books they believe LDS founder Joseph Smith used as inspiration when he wrote the book (Mormons, of course, believed he magically translated it from hieroglyphics on ancient golden plates, left by ancient Jews who arrived in North America before the Native Americans, using two magic stones… but that’s another story).
Now this is fascinating news in its own right. But what’s even more of interest to us is that one of the books they claimed he used was a book written in 1809 about Napoleon!
It’s a book I confess I’ve never heard of before – “The First Book of Napoleon, the Tyrant of the Earth: Written in the 5813th Year of the World” by Modeste Gruau who, it seems from the little information I’ve been able to find out about him, was only fourteen years old when he wrote it.
According to this Wikipedia page (translated from the French by Google), Modeste Gruau de La Barre, born in La Chartre-sur-le-Loir on 25 March 1795, is known for being loyal to Karl-Wilhelm Naundorff, a Prussian watchmaker, who claimed to be the real Louis XVII .
Anyway, back to the book. It is written in the style of the King James Bible and tells the story of “the Tyrant Napoleon” in dramatic style. You can read the whole thing, thanks to Archive.org and Google Books, but here’s the opening verse. Anyone who is familiar with The Book Of Mormon (I’m married to an ex-mo and have spent lots of time in Utah) will recognise the style immediately.
Has anyone heard about this book or its author before? Can anyone shed light on who he was and how he managed to write this thing at 14 years of age?