The Labyrinth
Hello and welcome to Revolutions. Simón Bolívar was sick. Plagued by an almost certain case of tuberculosis, he traversed the hard road from Ecuador to Colombia in the fall of 1829, slowly and painfully. Where old Iron Ass had once ridden from dawn till dusk, he now struggled with even a few hours of continuous […]
Out The Window
Hello and welcome to Revolutions. On May 18th, 1804, just a few weeks after young Simón Bolívar arrived in Paris from Spain, the French Tribunate voted to transform First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte into Emperor Napoleon I, transforming the enlightened French Republic into an autocratic empire. Bolívar found himself simultaneously attracted to and repelled by Napoleon’s […]
The Tangled Swords
Hello and welcome to Revolutions. While Simón Bolívar was off liberating Peru and Bolivia, and even contemplating riding down into the Río de la Plata, his old homeland of Gran Colombia was falling apart. As Vice President Santander had written over and over, the government was in bad shape financially, and the wider economy was […]
The Republic of Bolivar
Hello and welcome to Revolutions, The surprise victory at Ayacucho ended Spanish rule in South America. On the eve of the Abdications of Bayonne way back in 1807, the Spanish controlled millions of square miles of land from Mexico on down to the tip of South America, but after nearly 20 years of revolts, insurrections and […]
Ayacucho
Hello and welcome to Revolutions. Okay, so I’m back. I managed to survive the last month and get the main script turned in on time, so everything is aces. The general timeline for the book from here on out, for those of you who have been asking, is that we plan to have all revisions […]
The Guayaquil Conference
Hello and welcome to Revolutions. By the summer of 1822, General José de San Martín was not a happy man. After more than a decade of obsessive striving, he had finally fulfilled his dream when he triumphantly entered Lima in July of 1821. But that was probably the last time he was even remotely happy. […]
The Third Sister
Hello and welcome to Revolutions. We have strayed a bit from Bolívar in the past few episodes, abandoning him after the victory at Carabobo so we could go down and snag José de San Martín and bring him up to Lima. So when last we left our intrepid Liberator, it was October of 1821, and […]
The Sea Wolf
Hello and welcome to Revolutions. So last week, we brought José de San Martín, Bernardo O’Higgins, and all their friends through the Andes, where after a couple of years of fighting the Spanish and arguing amongst themselves, they all liberated Chile. Now, as we’ll see today, there were still a few Spanish strongholds left in […]
The Army of the Andes
Hello and welcome to Revolutions. Last time, we finally liberated Venezuela from the Spanish. After the great republican victory at Carabobo, Venezuela was now independent, and the future of unified Gran Colombia began to take shape. But as I mentioned at the end of the episode, Simón Bolívar himself did not plan to be on […]
Liberation
Hello and welcome to Revolutions. Now, when last we left, our intrepid Spanish American revolutionary Simón Bolívar had just signed a six-month armistice with the royalist General Pablo Morillo. And then they had gotten drunk and plopped a big rock down on the side of the road to mark the occasion. But though a monument […]