18th-Century Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 32

[cahn]

:) Still talking about Charles XII of Sweden / the Great Northern War and the Stuarts and the Jacobites, among other things!

Comments

Re: Great Northern War: Johann Patkul

[cahn]

Tim Blanning wrote a review of the latest G3 biography for the London Review of Books, which seems looks like it‘s general tone is „G3: Slandered by Americans from Thomas Jefferson to Lin Manuel Miranda“ , „G3: A Much Better Man Than Most Of Your Founding Fathers Put Together“ and, to quote a contemporary (Samuel Johnson), „Taxation No Tyranny (Damn Yankee Tax Dodgers)“.

Ha! Yeah, I'm trying to remember -- I don't think George III was specifically presented as evil or whatever at school, but what I remember from school was what you say, where George kind of was the public face of British Tyranny vs. Our Heroes the Founding Fathers, and so small!me, along with presumably everyone else, drew conclusions from that. (The Britpop thing is all LMM, and I think (?) it's supposed to be hilarious, because that was definitely not in my mental picture before LMM.)

...Of course for my kids, they seem to be getting extremely little history in school at all, so a lot of it they would be getting from places like Hamilton, so, huh, yeah, maybe I need to do some damage control there.

Aaaanyway: wanting independence for yourself while oppressing someone else really is a fine international tradition.

Yeah, fair. Seems like a human condition sort of thing, not to see what's going on there.

Re: Great Northern War: Johann Patkul

[mildred_of_midgard]

Ha! Yeah, I'm trying to remember -- I don't think George III was specifically presented as evil or whatever at school, but what I remember from school was what you say, where George kind of was the public face of British Tyranny vs. Our Heroes the Founding Fathers, and so small!me, along with presumably everyone else, drew conclusions from that.

Yeah, similar. It wasn't that my history classes talked about how G3 was a terrible monarch or a terrible person. I barely remember G3 at all. What we talked about was how monarchy was bad, and how the lack of the rights that would end up in the American Bill of Rights was bad, and G3 and his ministers wanted to keep their subjects from having those rights, so we had to fight for them.

So less that G3 was terrible and more that he was not progressive enough, was the message I got. (Disclaimer: I haven't seen/listened to Hamilton.) I came away with a vaguely negative impression, but I certainly didn't have the sense that he was personally worse than any of the *other* monarchs we covered!