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Announcing Rheinsberg: Frederick the Great discussion post 10
So for anyone who is reading this and would like to learn more about Frederick the Great and his contemporaries, but who doesn't want to wade through 500k (600k?) words worth of comments and an increasingly sprawling comment section:
We now have a community,![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
rheinsberg, that has quite a lot of the interesting historical content (and more coming regularly), organized nicely with lots of lovely tags so if there's any subject you are interested in it is easy to find :D
We now have a community,
rheinsberg, that has quite a lot of the interesting historical content (and more coming regularly), organized nicely with lots of lovely tags so if there's any subject you are interested in it is easy to find :D
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I'd like to give your fandom a try too, although yeah, I have the same problem of not enough bandwidth, at least right now :)
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Jacobites
Then I got back into 18th century history 6 months ago, this time emphasis Fritz rather than emphasis Jacobites, and I returned to that book. Because of health reasons, I can no longer read physical books, so I asked for a Kindle copy for my birthday in October. I got about halfway through a reread before concentration difficulties kicked in and stopped me, but I still used it extensively for fic research for the treat I co-authored for Yuletide! And it's still on my reread list along with all the other items I got halfway through before November.
It's very bad about citing sources, and I don't consider it terribly reliable, but it's full of useful information, and it's the best I've got right now, given all my limitations. I'm glad I hung onto it for all those years.
I've been lowkey afraid
All of which is to say, if we ever move on from Fritz and some of my limitations lift (which includes people buying me books to report on), I might be able to regurgitate more than anyone ever wanted to know about the Jacobites and learn a whole lot of new things in the process.
I have actually learned one new thing about the Jacobites in the last year, which is that an actualfax descendant of Charles Edward, evidently not a crazy pretender after the throne, turned up about a year after I left the Jacobite fandom and stopped following new developments re claimants.
Yet, regardless of what 'rights' he may have, Peter Pininski...has never expressed a desire to challenge the House of Windsor.
He commented: "I would dearly like to stay right away from Stuart claimant-type charlatanism, because it’s not what I find interesting."
Contrast the almost certainly fake descendant who *is* after the throne.
Okay, I need to stop.
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So the fandom I am into is the 1925 book The Flight of the Heron by D K Broster, which is an extremely slashy book about the true love of a redcoat officer and one of the Cameron lairds, set during the '45. Am in the middle of writing a long fic about them. But obviously it's a tiny fandom (though much of the fic that exists is extremely good!), so I am diving headfirst into research where I might, in a large fandom, simply have kept to reading fic. I really knew nothing of this subject beforehand. Here are some books I've read so far, and I'm a third of the way through Christopher Duffy's The '45 which I find extremely readable, and then I have The Jacobite Clans of the Great Glen 1650-1784 by Bruce Lenman lined up.
ETA: *rereads comment* Clearly I should use the word "extremely" less. *facepalm* Also, bless university interlibrary loans.
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It was a massively educational endeavor and was responsible for me learning a surprising amount about history, including at least one thing that the otherwise learned
Okay, if you want a rundown of my plot, I find it entirely hilarious in hindsight. (I admit I knew at the time that it was implausible. Behold the field in which I grew my fucks, and see that it was barren. :P)
Our antihero I have described as a crossover between Joan of Arc and Alexander the Great. She explicitly models herself on Joan, because she's looked around Europe and decided Charles Edward will be desperate enough to listen to military advice from a woman (behold the field, etc.), then puts him on the throne of Great Britain. Once she has that momentum behind her, she uses this as a mere stepping stone on the path to ever greater glory, and I forget the order in which she conquered all the other countries, but you can take my word for it that it was glorious. :D
As I recall, I gave Fritz the honor of actually fighting her to a draw and status quo ante (see how historical I am? lol) during his lifetime, and a secret treaty in which she or her descendants get to inherit Prussia after he dies. Then, after marching her Prussian army to Vienna, she gets to be elected HRE! "Elected," obviously.
She knows better than to invade Russia (she's a time traveler from the future who has the huge advantage of having studied everyone's tactics and strategy, natch), so she marries her granddaughter off to Alexander and tells her, "This country has a long history of women ruling. You know what to do."
I think Napoleon came out of one of her military schools, and then tried to start a revolt and he briefly ruled France, but by then she had decades of conquest experience under her belt, and of course had memorized his campaigns from when she lived centuries in the future (22nd or 23rd century?), and she kicked his butt handily.
*laughing so hard tears are coming out of my eyes*
You can see that self-restraint was not a feature of 15-yo me, but if you want to know why I've been able to regurgitate so much European history despite not taking a single history course other than AP US history in high school, I have to say years of fic research sticks in your head better than most things you're formally taught.
And that is my history with the Jacobites and 18th century history. :D If I hadn't decided to occupy my bored and understimulated high school brain with researching and writing that historical AU, we wouldn't be here having this lovely 700k word conversation today!
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And I know what you mean about how much you can learn from fic research, or indeed from anything where you learn for fun rather than from formal schooling (says the amateur bryologist).
Do you have any especial recs for books relevant to the '45 that I might miss?
Sadly I don't think The Flight of the Heron is available in electronic form. But next year it goes out of copyright, so I'm sure it will eventually end up on Gutenberg. Meanwhile, I have bought myself a (cheap, actually) first edition so that I can record the book for Librivox the minute the copyright goes out (I'm a podficcer). So if you like audiobooks you could listen to it then. : )
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SO. MUCH. FUN. \o/
Do you have any especial recs for books relevant to the '45 that I might miss?
I was actually thinking about that before you asked, you know. And I came to the conclusion that while I could name a bunch of books I read, I no longer remember what was in each of them, and even if I did, I definitely don't trust my 15-17 yo's judgment.
For fiction recs, though, if you want to read about 18th century Highlanders, including but not limited to the '45, I can recommend Diana Gabaldon with caveats. If you don't know her, she has an 8-doorstopper series and several novellas, that contain vast amounts of historical research, and also vast amounts of historical error. Even my 16-yo self was spotting errors left and right, and other people have bounced right out of her depiction of post-WWII Scotland in the opening chapters of the first volume. (She later admitted that chapter was entirely inaccurate.)
But I've enjoyed the characterization and writing style greatly, especially in the earlier books. Sequelitis is definitely a thing in this series. Will probably still pick up book 9 when it comes out, though.
There's also a show called Outlander based on the books (how far they've gotten, I don't know), which I have not seen but which a lot of people like. The protagonist is female, the book is sex positive, and the show apparently does female gaze well.
Trigger warnings for all the things, especially torture and graphic rape of main characters. Equal opportunity rape, fwiw: male on male, male on female, female on male...but if you're at all squeamish, don't go near this series.
So if you like audiobooks you could listen to it then. : )
Sadly, audiobooks don't work for me, but good for you! Maybe I'll have a solution to the book disability problems by then (one can hope I eventually do).
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Haha, our overused word on the Fritz side is "amazing".
Also, bless university interlibrary loans.
Indeed. I started out having only my parents' Compton's Encyclopedia set, plus the library of a very unacademic high school, but for one glorious summer my parents were willing to take me to the public library every weekend, and the public library would let me ILL books from the university. Any birthday or Christmas money I acquired was immediately spent on history books from the local used bookstore, and I got a very small handful of trips to the university library itself for school reasons (and yelled at by my parents, but fuck that).
If I had the ability to read physical books today, I'd be ILLing like crazy for Fritz (I'm keeping a wishlist for if that changes), but as it is, all I can say is "bless Google Books." (And bless our royal reader
Also bless Google Maps, Google Translate, Google Drive, Google Cloud Vision (for OCR), and of course Google Search. (I've joked to my wife that this is a very Google-enabled fandom!)
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