Pontvs Podcast

In 1864 a Habsburg archduke sailed to Mexico to be crowned emperor of a country he had never seen; three years later he was shot on a hill outside Querétaro. This piece traces the Second Mexican Empire — from Cortés and the Spanish Habsburgs, through Iturbide's short-lived first empire, to the war between liberals and conservatives that Benito Juárez's reforms set alight. Napoleon III wa...

In 1969, Paul VI's new Mass swept aside a rite that had stood for centuries — and split the Catholic Church along a fault line that still runs today. This episode traces the long war between the Traditional Latin Mass and the Novus Ordo: from Archbishop Lefebvre's resistance, through the opposing policies of Benedict XVI and Francis, to its revival under the new pope, Leo XIV. We break d...

In 1918, KOMUCH — the "democratic counter-revolution" — tried to challenge the Bolsheviks on their own terms, fighting under a red flag to restore the dissolved Constituent Assembly. Backed by the Czechoslovak Legion and holding Russia's gold reserve, this socialist government sought a "third path" for Russia. But internal contradictions — especially the distrust between s...

In 1917, the political vocabulary of Russia became inseparable from its social conflict. The same words — "democracy," "the people," "the bourgeoisie" — meant different things to different groups, and each reading drew its own line between friend and enemy. This is how the language of the revolution turned, word by word, into a primer of hatred for the civil war to co...