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: Lady Grange: Her story

[luzula]

OMG, thanks for summing this up. Yeah, she sounds like a potentially difficult person to live with, but that in no way justifies abducting her and isolating her on some distant island. Hmm, I wonder if this was before the time when there existed convenient lunatic asylums where you could get your wife imprisoned if you could get a doctor to say that she was mad? Seems like that could be the case.

Lord Lovat! Why am I not surprised that he was involved in this.

Re: Lady Grange: Her story

[mildred_of_midgard]

Not sure about early 18th century Edinburgh, but by coincidence, about an hour before you posted this, I was reading about Hugo van der Goes going mad in the 15th century, and how there were at least a few insane asylums around in the Low Countries.

But probably if you had a bunch of Jacobite clan chiefs as your friends, St. Kilda was easier. :P

Lord Lovat! Why am I not surprised that he was involved in this.

I had the same reaction! Like, I don't even know if he *was*, but I immediately believe that he was, all the more as he's denying it (but siding with Lord Grange). :P

For those of you who may not remember what we've said about Lord Lovat in salon, I'll just say that he's the kind of the person you wouldn't give the benefit of the doubt on anything. Diana Gabaldon summarized him as having "a character that would enable him to hide conveniently behind a spiral staircase."