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: 1764-1772 Foreign policy: Austria: Partitions, partitions, partitions

[selenak]

Oh, absolutely, and I think she knew it, and knew this was one of the things which in the faith she very much believed in God would held her acountable for. LOL on the Joseph passage, which I remember from Beales' biography. BTW, the MT series skipped over the partitioning of Poland entirely, not least because they kept FS alive so much longer and went straight from his death to shortly before MT's, but that's practically minor in terms of all the other liberties they took.

Incidentally, one long term effect of the Austrian participation in the Partitioning of Poland is that not only do you have a lot of Austrian era derived architecture in the relevant parts of the countries (plural, since today they include not just Poland but also parts of Ukraine, for example), but also some of the greatest poets in German in the 20th century, Paul Celan and Rose Ausländer, hailing from what was at the time of their births Austrian-governed. (Today it's Southern Ukraine.)