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: Lehndorff AU!

[mildred_of_midgard]

Mildred, didn't you guys at least do some Boswell/Johnson?

Nope! As I recall, and my memories have faded, they told us who Johnson was and maybe gave us a couple sample definitions from the dictionary, but no assigned reading.

I mean, I didn't expect them to assign you Lord Hervey, Lady Mary or Alexander Pope

Ha! Pope was the guy we were actually assigned! We were supposed to read Rape of the Lock, and no one did, and because it was AP English, the teacher was like, "I'm just preparing you for the AP exam. If you don't want to be prepared, that's on you." And so we never actually read him or discussed him in class.

There was *probably* some shorter poetry and *maybe* a play, but nothing that I'm remembering, so maybe not.

but my guy Boswell writing the first modern biography is considered v. v. important, surely?

Nope! I could be wrong in this, but I don't think they even told us who Boswell *was*. I remember learning about him in my outside reading. Definitely no assigned reading from him, either way.

So the 18th century is basically our Elizabethan age with Shakespeare and Marlowe in German literature, one big difference to English literature school canon. :)

Yeah, we were up to our ears in Elizabethan stuff, no time for the 18th century!