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: Historians and their No-Homo'ing: the Stuart Version

[selenak]

You're welcome. It's revealing to know English historians twist themselves the same way German historians did before mayyyyyyyybe conceding a famous monarch might have been gay, I guess. :) Though I hadn't known before there was a more recent "oh no he wasn't!" backlash; that, I would only have assumed of happening in places like Russia (because Putin) or in the US as part of the culture wars there.

I mean, there are monarchs where you really can make a case for "we just don't know", or "it's all slander by their enemies - James' granddaughter Anne comes to mind, because part of the claims about her having sex with her female faves comes from a vengeful Sarah Churchill commissioning a poem accusing Anne of this with Sarah's successor as Anne's favourite, Abigail Masham. But with James, we have the freaking letters to his favourites, private letters, not something written for publication and with an eye to later chroniclers.