I had hoped to get to Stephen Inwood’s The Forgotten Genius before doing this chatter segment, but unfortunately that was not in the cards. I am very curious to read it, as my knowledge of Hooke as a man comes primarily from biographies of other people, like Newton or Halley, in which Hooke is the jealous jerkwad who so beat Newton into the ground when he presented his early ideas on optics that Newton vowed never to go public with his ideas again, causing him to sit on gravitation and calculus for years and years and years. And while I don’t believe Inwood argues that this is a gross perversion of Hooke’s behavior, I understand that he modifies it by saying Hooke was not ALWAYS that way, that there are some pretty heavy duty biographical facts that slowly twisted him into that position. If you’ve actually read it, chime in on our Facebook page – otherwise keep checking in and we’ll talk about it soonish!
In books that I have read, I just added Juliane Haubold-Stolle’s Oma ist die Beste to the Good Reads page. It’s in German, which takes it out of the running for some of y’all, but for those who know the language, it’s a fun cultural history of grandmothers. I was pleasantly shocked to find that the picture of The Grandmother that I had thought was a constant of Western Civilization has been actually backwards written into the history – that if you look at the original documents, rather than the, say, Victorian representations of those time periods, the position of this figure was something else entirely, and watching that representation change is very interesting and delightful.
And as to this Katte fellow – that is a story for another day!
– Count Dolby von Luckner
Ideologically, the Dickinsons and Pierces couldn’t have been more different. Pierce’s father was a Revolutionary War hero and a firm Jeffersonian Democrat, and Franklin followed faithfully in his steps even as many other Democrats abandoned party principle whenever it was profitable to do so. The Dickinsons were equally staunch in their Whig boosterism, Emily’s father continuing to hold himself as a Whig long after the party ceased to exist. This seems a little sad, but then again Firefly went off the air nearly ten years ago and I’m still hopping on every moderately organized resurrection bandwagon, so I’m not precisely one to judge….
So WHAT they believed was entirely different, but how they believed it was entirely similar. Really, Franklin, in terms of behavior, was a little bit of everything that Emily respected in her father and her way awesome looking (but also condescendingly dickish and chronically undermotivated) brother Austin. If they had ever met, who is to say that they would not have become star crossed lovers of two warring houses?
In other news, if you have not read The Berenstain Bears and the Green Eyed Monster, you really have yet to live. I mean, it’s one of the NINETIES Berenstain books, which is for the Berenstains what the eighties was to Doctor Who, but it’s mid-act Guilt Nightmare Scene is worth the price of admission.
– Count Dolby von Luckner
Back in the day I was reading this biography of Lord John Russell, and it seemed like Every Other Page, Lord Derby was being called in to form a government that would inevitably crumble and reset the system. To be fair, he was only Prime Minister three times, and of those, the third time out he managed to pass a substantial Reform Act, and one out of three ain’t bad. To add to that, his translation of the Iliad was something of a commercial phenomenon, running through edition after edition.
Lord North you have to feel sorry for. He wanted out of power so very much, but George III kept bullying him back into it to carry out his policies. That included distributing royal funds to buy parliamentary votes for crucial matters. What is really strange is that North and arch-George-enemy Charles Fox actually shared a cabinet for a while.
Edward II is more sad than anything. When your people come to you and say, “We really don’t think you’re that good of a king. Could you please stop, you know, being king?” and you do, it’s a good sign that you weren’t right for the post.
Warren Hastings did some good stuff in India while making himself obscenely wealthy. He was the first to recommend a policy of understanding Indian culture as a way of better administering the province, and was a genuine admirer of many of its aspects. Then, he came back and got wrapped up in a parliamentary charge of corruption that ended up getting split along party lines and so dragged on for years and years.
Napoleon III is the plucky comic relief of 19th century European history. His early adventures consisted of repeatedly gathering up a few die-hard supporters, landing somewhere in France, attempting to start an army revolution in his name, and then failing spectacularly to get anybody interested. Things would start off well and properly Napoleonic until some officer would call him on inciting treason, at which point Napoleon would in essence pull the “Is That A Rabbit Over There?” trick and try to run away. But eventually his name came to be useful to the right people, and so he found his way to the throne and, through it, to total devastation at the hands of Prussia in 1870, though it should be said his projects for improving the infrastructure of France were actually pretty sensible and admirable.
There’s basically no excuse for Frederick William IV. He tried his best to strike down the promises and advances made by the Hohenzollerns during the resistance to Napoleon, and when finally compelled to make some changes after 1848, he let Bismarck loose to effectively choke any chance at actual representation in the new assembly. Really, though, you can pick pretty much any 19th century Hohenzollern for this spot.
– Count Dolby von Luckner