Announcing Rheinsberg: Frederick the Great discussion post 10

[cahn]

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We now have a community, rheinsberg, that has quite a lot of the interesting historical content (and more coming regularly), organized nicely with lots of lovely tags so if there's any subject you are interested in it is easy to find :D

Comments

Re: Peter Keith

[mildred_of_midgard]

Aha! I had wondered where this description of Peter had come from: "medium height, straight, thin, brown, a little pallid, and squint-eyed."

Well, Lavisse just told me it was from FW's attempt to get Peter arrested in London! And he linked me to Preuss, whom we conveniently already had in the library (see, I knew he was going to be useful for primary sources!), and sure enough, the sourcebook to volume 2, page 157, FW writes to his staatsminister in London, September 19, 1730: "Von Natur ist derselbe mittelmäßig, doch schmal und mager; etwas blaß von Gesichte, hat hellbraune Haare und schielet stark." [ETA: Koser, contra Preuss, says that should read "Von Statur", not "Von Natur".]

I don't care if Lavisse has inadequate sympathy for teenage abuse victim Fritz, he's <3 about primary sources! [Besides, he has much more than Mitford.]

Also, yay for the ability to edit Rheinsberg posts. ;)