Historical Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 46

[cahn]

Background: The kids' school has a topic for "Unit" every trimester that a lot of their work (reading, writing, some math) revolves around. These topics range from time/geographic periods ('Colonial America') to geography ('Asia') to science ('Space') to social science ('Business and Economics'). (I have some issues with this way of doing things, but that's a whole separate post.) Anyway, for Reasons, they have had to come up with a new topic this year, and E's 7/8 class is doing "World Fairs" as their new topic.

Me: I know E's teacher is all about World Fairs and I know she is great and will do a good job. But I feel like if we had a different teacher who wasn't so into World Fairs, they wouldn't do such a good job and another topic would be better.
Me: Like... the Enlightenment!
D: Heh, you could teach that! But you'd have to restrain yourself from making everything about Frederick the Great.
Me: But that's the thing! Everyone does relate to each other in this time period! Voltaire -- and his partner Émilie du Châtelet, who was heavily involved in the discourse of conservation of energy and momentum -- well, I've told you Voltaire had a thing with Fritz -- and then there's Empress Maria Theresa, who went to war with him a few times -- and Catherine the Great --
D, meditatively: You know --
Me: *am innocently not warned even though this is the same tone of voice that is often followed by, say, a bad pun*
D: -- it's impressive how everyone from this 'the Great' family is so famous!
Me: *splutters*
D, thoughtfully: But of course there's probably selection bias, as the ones who aren't famous don't get mentioned. You never see 'Bob the Great' in the history books...
Me: *splutters more*

Comments

Re: Løvenørn letters: August 1, 1730

[selenak]

Not to mention that England and Denmark have centuries of alliance tradition complete with marriages: legendary Queen Margaret (mentioned by Dirk in the Hanse series), She Who Ruled Denmark, Sweden AND Norway), married her adopted son to Henry IV's daughter, then there's the James VI and I/ Anne of Denmark marriage, of course, and alas for her finally Caroline Matilda/ Christian the Mentally Unstable in the 18th century.

(Mind you, if you go back even longer, you have a lot of Vikings raiding England and colonizing it for a while, and King Canute ruling both England and Denmark at some point...)

Re: Pro-English Marriage cabal among the envoys: well, not the Imperial and Brunswick ones for obvious reasons. :)

Re: Løvenørn letters: August 1, 1730

[mildred_of_midgard]

Re: Pro-English Marriage cabal among the envoys: well, not the Imperial and Brunswick ones for obvious reasons. :)

Right, sorry, I wasn't clear. What I meant was that withi the set of envoys, these three (Løvenørn, Rottembourg, Whitworth) are clearly in a cabal, sharing secret documents with each other and so forth.

You know, it occurred to me James Frederick Chance's book on the alliance of Hanover would have more details on Rottembourg and Løvenørn, but I've never been able to make it through that book. Even for yours truly, 800 pages on 2 years of foreign policy (1725-1727) is just *too much*. I might do what I did before, though, and search for their names and see if anything interesting comes up that I didn't have the context to appreciate a couple years ago. (If you'd told me then that I was going to be deciphering their unpublished correspondence, I would not have believed you!)