18th-Century Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 33

[cahn]

And, I mean, it doesn't have to be just 18th century characters, either!

(also, waiting for Yuletide!)

Comments

Re: 1730 Trending Topics: Dunkirk

[mildred_of_midgard]

I'm glad it was simple and funny enough for you! As Blanning said,

Even the most gifted narrator would find it difficult to construct an account of the 1720s both coherent and interesting, or indeed either of those things.

I at least have the advantage over most of these potential narrators of being able to use fandomspeak to keep it interesting! But it was still crazy hard, omg. I had to read the Whitworth bio 3 times! and various other things at least twice. My notes doc has 36,000 words (copy-pasted passages, mostly).

Then once I had all this information in my head, I struggled to figure out how to present it. Eventually I settled on breaking it into sections, because no one way of structuring it (trending topics, people, international relations, treaties) was sufficient.

Finally, at one point I was preparing to write an essay, until I realized that you all would fall asleep while reading it, except you wouldn't have the chance, because I would fall asleep while writing it. :P Then I remembered my dialogue trick, and then it was fun to write. (And yes, I realize countries keep switching back and forth between first person singular and first person plural. Neither really feels right, ugh.)

So there we go: an intro to the 1720s, with emphasis on pedagogy rather than scholarship (with an eye toward my future self wanting to reference this when I've forgotten the details).