Great podcast. About the political situation in the 1840’s there was in 1848 an outbreak almost simultaneously of revolutionwry reform of governments all over the place. The old monarchies were changed to the forms that held until World War One.
A history podcast I listen to covers this year in a whole series. It is called “Revolutions” it is done by Mike Duncan. Each series he covers a different revolution and in series 7 he covers 1848. It is about 20 some episodes each from 30 to 50 mins long about this year. I’m not this far in his podcast yet, I’m on series 5 currently, but each episode is extremely well made and informative while being entertaining.
I’m sure Poe was current with the political tempest that was brewing at the time he wrote this story. It makes me even more interested to get to this series about the history.
I've heard a lot of great things about that podcast but have never checked it out -- I'll have to add it to my rotation. And I'd be really interested to see what the discourse about democracy was during the 1840s -- were Americans generally in favor of democratic revolutions in Europe or were they afraid of destabilizing geopolitics? If they were in favor of them, were they in favor of actively spreading democracy through direct involvement in foreign affairs? These are questions that have mattered a great deal to our contemporary politics (and my military service), but I have no idea how people felt about them in the 1840s.
It occurs to me, too, that because we're exclusively Anglophone, we're also exclusively democratic -- we haven't read any stories from a society without a democracy. It would be interesting to check out some stories coming out of nineteenth-century monarchies.