Book-It '23! Book #1: "The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage" by Sydney Padua
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Title: The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage* *The (Mostly) True Story of the First Computer by Sydney Padua
Details: Copyright 2015, Random House
Synopsis (By Way of Front Flap): "...in which Sydney Padua transforms one of the most compelling scientific collaborations into a hilarious series of adventures.
Meet Victorian London’s most dynamic duo: Charles Babbage, the unrealized inventor of the computer, and his accomplice, Ada, Countess of Lovelace, the peculiar protoprogrammer and daughter of Lord Byron. When Lovelace translated a description of Babbage’s plans for an enormous mechanical calculating machine in 1842, she added annotations three times longer than the original work. Her footnotes contained the first appearance of the general computing theory, a hundred years before an actual computer was built. Sadly, Lovelace died of cancer a decade after publishing the paper, and Babbage never built any of his machines.
But do not despair! The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage presents a rollicking alternate reality in which Lovelace and Babbage do build the Difference Engine and then use it to build runaway economic models, battle the scourge of spelling errors, explore the wilder realms of mathematics, and, of course, fight crime-for the sake of both London and science. Complete with extensive footnotes that rival those penned by Lovelace herself, historical curiosities, and never-before-seen diagrams of Babbage’s mechanical, steam-powered computer, The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage is wonderfully whimsical, utterly unusual, and, above all, entirely irresistible."
Why I Wanted to Read It: In the first few months of the pandemic, book recommendations (as well as those for TV, movies, games-- you name it) flew like wildfire as people, shook up like never before it seems, were in many ways forced to slow down, or at least suddenly reconsider a few things. I'd written down this recommendation when I first saw it and then promptly forgot about it until fairly recently. Graphic novels are a part of me and this premise delighted me.
How I Liked It: I have an image for you. You're at a party. You idly mention some subject to someone with whom you're scarcely acquainted. You may or may not particularly care, you're mostly just making conversation. But it turns out you hit the jackpot, because that subject you just idly raised happens to be one of your acquaintance's areas of geekery, and they are only too happy to passionately enthuse to you about the subject. You might be a bit bored, this might be a little too much information and/or not the information you were really seeking, but isn't their pure, unadulterated joy in discussing their passion usually pretty beautiful?
With that in mind, let me introduce you to Lovelace and Babbage, not only the real life historical characters of Lady Ada of Lovelace and Charles Babbage but their counterparts as imagined by the author, a crime-fighting duo using their fantastical invention of the very first computer to interact with famous figures of the day, including Queen Victoria, and a host of other luminaries, all fastidiously footnoted by the author.
There's a preface wherein the author explains how this came about. Fascinated by the short life of Ada Lovelace, at the suggestion of a friend who organized a women in technology festival named for Lovelace, the author began a short comic about the life of Lord Byron's daughter. Finding the real world ending too sad (Lovelace died young of cancer and her collaborator, inventor Charles Babbage failed at inventing the computer and "died a miserable old man"), she would throw a couple of drawings of a better, imagined future for them at the end, fighting crime together.
To her shock, the author became incredibly popular as "someone who was going to do a web comic about Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage having adventures" which was absolutely not what the author intended at all. As a non-comic artist and someone who didn't know anything about Victorian era history, science, or mathematics, this was all a bit too much. But she found the web comic incredibly appealing to her schedule and the research a good excuse to procrastinate on other projects. But in the end, the research is what hooked her and pushed her hopelessly into geekdom:
Like all pure and disinterested lovers, I overflowed with sensations of generous evangelism. Everyone had to know how charming, how fascinating, how unjustly misunderstood my heroes were! Everyone must share in the joy of unearthing an illuminating primary document! This is how one finds oneself in the British Library trying to glean usable jokes from technical articles in the Anals of the History of Computing. (pg 8)
From there, the book is divided into sections. The first small chapter is a straightforward (but funny) retelling of Lovelace, Babbage, and their near-invention. It ends sadly, noting Lovelace's premature death and Babbage's failure and misery, and the first computers not being built until the 1940s. Everything is peppered with footnotes both informative and funny, and those footnotes have source footnotes (no, really) collected and discussed at the end of the chapter.
From there, we have a kind of explanation of the Pocket Universe of the author's imagination, wherein we discover a slightly steampunk Lovelace and Babbage, crime-fighting duo!
Finally, Lovelace and Babbage begin their (fictional fantasy) adventures, and the same format follows. There is the comic action, the running informative/humorous footnotes on everything from period etiquette to joke explanations to historical tidbits and beyond. Lastly, there are endnotes about the source notes on the footnotes (yes, really). After these chapters, there's an appendix (of both source information with offered footnotes, and diagrams about how the machine works, and comics with more footnotes), and a epilogue (no footnotes) that ends with Lovelace and Babbage walking off together within the coils of their machine, happily engaged in conversation.
Whew. If that sounds exhausting and like a lot of information, it is. It's a madcap, non-stop, dizzying carnival of factoids and jokes (and jokes about the factoids) and you can't help but be swept up in the author's clear love and enthusiasm.
The footnotes become jokes themselves, with Queen Victoria at one point interrupting them, and a character marveling as she climbs a ladder that there are thankfully no footnotes on the page. At one point, Lovelace herself debates with the footnotes over her legacy (more on that later). There's so much meta and in-jokes it should be stultifying, but honestly it has the opposite effect: as I said, the author's enthusiasm is highly contagious.
Just a few favorite footnotes to give you an idea:
The list of titles a footman recites when announcing your presence is called a "style." In Her Majesty's style here I've omitted Empress of India, as this story occurs early in her reign; if this comic had taken place after 1876, she would also be styled Her Imperial Majesty. If this comic had taken place in France she would be styled Her Britannic Majesty. And if this comic had taken place in Soviet Russia, she would be styled Comrade Victoria, and then shot. (pg 58)
More Pocket Universe stories suggested in the footnotes, as the author explains some cameos:
Lined up for their spell-checking are some lady novelists, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Carlyle, Wilkie Collins, and Charles Dickens. On the far left is Jane Austen, who of course died in 1817 in our inferior universe. In the Pocket Universe, she lives to ninety-five and writes dozens of bestselling masterpieces and makes a mint and lives happily ever after. (pg 156)
The author makes an appearance:
"Silly Novels by Lady Novelists" was an anonymous 1856 essay by [author Marian Evans writing under male pen name George] Eliot lambasting what we would call "chick lit" for featured overidealized heroines-- "She is the ideal woman in feelings, faculties, and flounces"-- and for lacking in "patient diligence, a sense of the responsibility involved in publication, and an appreciation for the sacredness of the writer's art." The Lady Novelist is played by Yours Truly the Indefatigable Footnoter; though I'm debatably a lady, my novel is beyond all debate extremely silly. (pg 157)
The author clearly realizes that this is probably pretty overwhelming to many, but rightly doesn't really care, just hopes you're along for the ride:
The punch cards of the Analytical Engine are in a sense a computer language-- they hold a "code" written by a human, which is converted by a complicated widget into "machine language," that directly controls the Engine by flipping switches. Diagrams of this and many of the widgets mentioned in these notes can be found in Appendix II for the interested reader (of which I hope there exist some!). (pg 197)
Historical record in the form of a letter published in The Southern Review, a short-lived literary publication in the aftermath of the Civil War, by literature professor Henry Hope Reed, notes of Babbage and Lovelace "Speaking of Lady Lovelace's matter-of-fact mind, Mr. Babbage told me he used to have a good deal of good-natured fun by telling her all sorts of extraordinary stories" prompting this bit of delightful confession by the author:
The image of Babbage teasing Lovelace with shaggy-dog stories is so beautiful it kind of chokes me up a bit. (pg 269)
The artistic style of the illustrations is frankly superb. The author may not have thought of herself as a comic artist before this, but she easily stands with the best. Her style reminds me of a mix of Kate Beaton (of Hark! A Vagrant! fame and countless memes for which her work isn't credited) and the animators who made Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis into a movie (kind of brilliant in its own way, since it's both in Satrapi's style, but also distinctly different).
Ending with an additional almost-but-not justification for this reimagining of history in which Lovelace and Babbage invent the first computer is the author's haunting note:
Vacuum tubes and transistors rather than cogs and levers were the tools of the 1940s and '50s, so computing was born in an airy, disembodied thing of wires and electricity, rather than an earthy one of brass and steam. Which is a shame, I think, as maybe we'd all feel a bit more warmly about computers had they been born, like trains, huffing and rattling into this world. (pg 309)
The book is a dazzling, maximalist love letter, not only to Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage, but to fully embracing your passions and geekery, whatever it might be. The author is a delightful and compelling voice, communicating to you all about her geekdom in this masterpiece. You may not be as interested as she is in this topic, but it's well worth her telling.
Notable:
George Gordon, Lord Byron, unexpectedly inherited the Byron title after the deaths of his great-uncle William "the Wicked Lord" Byron and his father, "Mad Jack" Byron. "Poet" nowadays implies something rather modest and dainty-- Byron wrote epic novels in verse, smash-hit bestsellers full of brilliant scathing wit and brooding misunderstood antiheroes. Add his extraordinary good looks and charm; a fairy-tale elevation to the peerage from boyhood poverty; moody, eccentric behavior; and a predilection for lots and lots of all possible varieties of sex; and Byron was famous enough for ten modern celebrities put together. You'd have to combine Elvis with the chic political radicalism of Che Guevara, and the intellectual stature tinged with the ugly sexual rumor of a Roman Polanski, to approach the fame of Byron: Lady Byron coined the term "Byronmania" for the cult that surrounded her husband. (pg 33)
I'm, uh, seriously questioning the use of Roman Polanski here. For one, "intellectual stature"? I can think of at least four of his contemporaries far more deserving of intellectual stature, even separating this from his crimes. For two, (QUICK CONTENT WARNING! CHILD SEXUAL ABUSE AND SEXUAL ASSAULT, PLEASE PROCEED ACCORDINGLY) what Polanski did is most certainly not a rumor, it's the reason he rarely leaves France. Also, you can have ugly sexual rumors about you (see: Hollywood's golden era, particularly as depicted in Hollywood Babylon) and not have harmed anyone, let alone children. This is a rare misstep from this author.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
At one point, Lovelace debates the footnotes in regard to her legacy, as the footnotes are asked to judge which is the "real" Lovelace:
The Ada Lovelace of popular imagination (defining "popular" down to people who have actually heard of Ada Lovelace) was a supergenius mathematical prodigy and co-inventor of the computer. At an extreme end, she crowds Babbage out of his Engine, and quite rightly too, since he had actually stolen her ideas, and her contributions were overlooked by a patriarchal establishment.
Then there is what tends to call itself the "debunking" crowd, who claim Lovelace is merely an empty symbol for politically correct feminists. Babbage, his friendship and regard for her intellect a sham, disingenuously tolerated a deluded, incompetent Ada and used her famous name as a front for a paper he basically wrote himself, including, of course, all the computer programs. As one Babbage scholar huffily put it: "Ada was mad as a hatter, and contributed little more to the 'Notes' than trouble."
Both of these competing cartoon Avas, Super-Lovelace and Nega-Lovelace, are constructed from the ambiguous jumble of letters, papers, contemporary descriptions, etc., etc., which are the far from mathematically precise stuff of history. A footnote hardly knows what to think!
Oh, as a footnote, I should observe here that arbitrary symbols were a hot topic of debate in early-nineteenth-century mathematics. (pg 234)
It's an interesting premise and the fact that the author's Lovelace, both of the real and the Pocket Universe has elements of both Adas is telling.
Also, remember the days when reactionary bigots used "political correctness" rather than "wokeness"? So nostalgic.
I'm glad the author touches upon the "debunking" crowd, which is sadly not exclusive to Lovelace. Everyone from Katherine Johnson (enjoying long-overdue acclaim late in life for her invaluable contributions to American space travel) to Bass Reeves (one of the first Black U.S. deputy marshals rumored to be the inspiration for the Lone Ranger) seem to face a certain kind of "debunker." I'm not talking about people who are looking for a nuanced and accurate view of history, I'm talking about the people who use terms like "political correctness", "forced diversity", and/or "wokeness" because they are rightly challenged by the fact history is not only made by rich, white, heterosexual cisgender men, despite what institutions have pushed for generations. For those just claiming their concern comes from "historical accuracy", they sure are selective about the "accuracy" they accept.
Final Grade: A
DON'T FORGET I'M ON BLOGSPOT NOW!
The all new 50 Books Challenge!
Title: The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage* *The (Mostly) True Story of the First Computer by Sydney Padua
Details: Copyright 2015, Random House
Synopsis (By Way of Front Flap): "...in which Sydney Padua transforms one of the most compelling scientific collaborations into a hilarious series of adventures.
Meet Victorian London’s most dynamic duo: Charles Babbage, the unrealized inventor of the computer, and his accomplice, Ada, Countess of Lovelace, the peculiar protoprogrammer and daughter of Lord Byron. When Lovelace translated a description of Babbage’s plans for an enormous mechanical calculating machine in 1842, she added annotations three times longer than the original work. Her footnotes contained the first appearance of the general computing theory, a hundred years before an actual computer was built. Sadly, Lovelace died of cancer a decade after publishing the paper, and Babbage never built any of his machines.
But do not despair! The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage presents a rollicking alternate reality in which Lovelace and Babbage do build the Difference Engine and then use it to build runaway economic models, battle the scourge of spelling errors, explore the wilder realms of mathematics, and, of course, fight crime-for the sake of both London and science. Complete with extensive footnotes that rival those penned by Lovelace herself, historical curiosities, and never-before-seen diagrams of Babbage’s mechanical, steam-powered computer, The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage is wonderfully whimsical, utterly unusual, and, above all, entirely irresistible."
Why I Wanted to Read It: In the first few months of the pandemic, book recommendations (as well as those for TV, movies, games-- you name it) flew like wildfire as people, shook up like never before it seems, were in many ways forced to slow down, or at least suddenly reconsider a few things. I'd written down this recommendation when I first saw it and then promptly forgot about it until fairly recently. Graphic novels are a part of me and this premise delighted me.
How I Liked It: I have an image for you. You're at a party. You idly mention some subject to someone with whom you're scarcely acquainted. You may or may not particularly care, you're mostly just making conversation. But it turns out you hit the jackpot, because that subject you just idly raised happens to be one of your acquaintance's areas of geekery, and they are only too happy to passionately enthuse to you about the subject. You might be a bit bored, this might be a little too much information and/or not the information you were really seeking, but isn't their pure, unadulterated joy in discussing their passion usually pretty beautiful?
With that in mind, let me introduce you to Lovelace and Babbage, not only the real life historical characters of Lady Ada of Lovelace and Charles Babbage but their counterparts as imagined by the author, a crime-fighting duo using their fantastical invention of the very first computer to interact with famous figures of the day, including Queen Victoria, and a host of other luminaries, all fastidiously footnoted by the author.
There's a preface wherein the author explains how this came about. Fascinated by the short life of Ada Lovelace, at the suggestion of a friend who organized a women in technology festival named for Lovelace, the author began a short comic about the life of Lord Byron's daughter. Finding the real world ending too sad (Lovelace died young of cancer and her collaborator, inventor Charles Babbage failed at inventing the computer and "died a miserable old man"), she would throw a couple of drawings of a better, imagined future for them at the end, fighting crime together.
To her shock, the author became incredibly popular as "someone who was going to do a web comic about Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage having adventures" which was absolutely not what the author intended at all. As a non-comic artist and someone who didn't know anything about Victorian era history, science, or mathematics, this was all a bit too much. But she found the web comic incredibly appealing to her schedule and the research a good excuse to procrastinate on other projects. But in the end, the research is what hooked her and pushed her hopelessly into geekdom:
Like all pure and disinterested lovers, I overflowed with sensations of generous evangelism. Everyone had to know how charming, how fascinating, how unjustly misunderstood my heroes were! Everyone must share in the joy of unearthing an illuminating primary document! This is how one finds oneself in the British Library trying to glean usable jokes from technical articles in the Anals of the History of Computing. (pg 8)
From there, the book is divided into sections. The first small chapter is a straightforward (but funny) retelling of Lovelace, Babbage, and their near-invention. It ends sadly, noting Lovelace's premature death and Babbage's failure and misery, and the first computers not being built until the 1940s. Everything is peppered with footnotes both informative and funny, and those footnotes have source footnotes (no, really) collected and discussed at the end of the chapter.
From there, we have a kind of explanation of the Pocket Universe of the author's imagination, wherein we discover a slightly steampunk Lovelace and Babbage, crime-fighting duo!
Finally, Lovelace and Babbage begin their (fictional fantasy) adventures, and the same format follows. There is the comic action, the running informative/humorous footnotes on everything from period etiquette to joke explanations to historical tidbits and beyond. Lastly, there are endnotes about the source notes on the footnotes (yes, really). After these chapters, there's an appendix (of both source information with offered footnotes, and diagrams about how the machine works, and comics with more footnotes), and a epilogue (no footnotes) that ends with Lovelace and Babbage walking off together within the coils of their machine, happily engaged in conversation.
Whew. If that sounds exhausting and like a lot of information, it is. It's a madcap, non-stop, dizzying carnival of factoids and jokes (and jokes about the factoids) and you can't help but be swept up in the author's clear love and enthusiasm.
The footnotes become jokes themselves, with Queen Victoria at one point interrupting them, and a character marveling as she climbs a ladder that there are thankfully no footnotes on the page. At one point, Lovelace herself debates with the footnotes over her legacy (more on that later). There's so much meta and in-jokes it should be stultifying, but honestly it has the opposite effect: as I said, the author's enthusiasm is highly contagious.
Just a few favorite footnotes to give you an idea:
The list of titles a footman recites when announcing your presence is called a "style." In Her Majesty's style here I've omitted Empress of India, as this story occurs early in her reign; if this comic had taken place after 1876, she would also be styled Her Imperial Majesty. If this comic had taken place in France she would be styled Her Britannic Majesty. And if this comic had taken place in Soviet Russia, she would be styled Comrade Victoria, and then shot. (pg 58)
More Pocket Universe stories suggested in the footnotes, as the author explains some cameos:
Lined up for their spell-checking are some lady novelists, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Carlyle, Wilkie Collins, and Charles Dickens. On the far left is Jane Austen, who of course died in 1817 in our inferior universe. In the Pocket Universe, she lives to ninety-five and writes dozens of bestselling masterpieces and makes a mint and lives happily ever after. (pg 156)
The author makes an appearance:
"Silly Novels by Lady Novelists" was an anonymous 1856 essay by [author Marian Evans writing under male pen name George] Eliot lambasting what we would call "chick lit" for featured overidealized heroines-- "She is the ideal woman in feelings, faculties, and flounces"-- and for lacking in "patient diligence, a sense of the responsibility involved in publication, and an appreciation for the sacredness of the writer's art." The Lady Novelist is played by Yours Truly the Indefatigable Footnoter; though I'm debatably a lady, my novel is beyond all debate extremely silly. (pg 157)
The author clearly realizes that this is probably pretty overwhelming to many, but rightly doesn't really care, just hopes you're along for the ride:
The punch cards of the Analytical Engine are in a sense a computer language-- they hold a "code" written by a human, which is converted by a complicated widget into "machine language," that directly controls the Engine by flipping switches. Diagrams of this and many of the widgets mentioned in these notes can be found in Appendix II for the interested reader (of which I hope there exist some!). (pg 197)
Historical record in the form of a letter published in The Southern Review, a short-lived literary publication in the aftermath of the Civil War, by literature professor Henry Hope Reed, notes of Babbage and Lovelace "Speaking of Lady Lovelace's matter-of-fact mind, Mr. Babbage told me he used to have a good deal of good-natured fun by telling her all sorts of extraordinary stories" prompting this bit of delightful confession by the author:
The image of Babbage teasing Lovelace with shaggy-dog stories is so beautiful it kind of chokes me up a bit. (pg 269)
The artistic style of the illustrations is frankly superb. The author may not have thought of herself as a comic artist before this, but she easily stands with the best. Her style reminds me of a mix of Kate Beaton (of Hark! A Vagrant! fame and countless memes for which her work isn't credited) and the animators who made Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis into a movie (kind of brilliant in its own way, since it's both in Satrapi's style, but also distinctly different).
Ending with an additional almost-but-not justification for this reimagining of history in which Lovelace and Babbage invent the first computer is the author's haunting note:
Vacuum tubes and transistors rather than cogs and levers were the tools of the 1940s and '50s, so computing was born in an airy, disembodied thing of wires and electricity, rather than an earthy one of brass and steam. Which is a shame, I think, as maybe we'd all feel a bit more warmly about computers had they been born, like trains, huffing and rattling into this world. (pg 309)
The book is a dazzling, maximalist love letter, not only to Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage, but to fully embracing your passions and geekery, whatever it might be. The author is a delightful and compelling voice, communicating to you all about her geekdom in this masterpiece. You may not be as interested as she is in this topic, but it's well worth her telling.
Notable:
George Gordon, Lord Byron, unexpectedly inherited the Byron title after the deaths of his great-uncle William "the Wicked Lord" Byron and his father, "Mad Jack" Byron. "Poet" nowadays implies something rather modest and dainty-- Byron wrote epic novels in verse, smash-hit bestsellers full of brilliant scathing wit and brooding misunderstood antiheroes. Add his extraordinary good looks and charm; a fairy-tale elevation to the peerage from boyhood poverty; moody, eccentric behavior; and a predilection for lots and lots of all possible varieties of sex; and Byron was famous enough for ten modern celebrities put together. You'd have to combine Elvis with the chic political radicalism of Che Guevara, and the intellectual stature tinged with the ugly sexual rumor of a Roman Polanski, to approach the fame of Byron: Lady Byron coined the term "Byronmania" for the cult that surrounded her husband. (pg 33)
I'm, uh, seriously questioning the use of Roman Polanski here. For one, "intellectual stature"? I can think of at least four of his contemporaries far more deserving of intellectual stature, even separating this from his crimes. For two, (QUICK CONTENT WARNING! CHILD SEXUAL ABUSE AND SEXUAL ASSAULT, PLEASE PROCEED ACCORDINGLY) what Polanski did is most certainly not a rumor, it's the reason he rarely leaves France. Also, you can have ugly sexual rumors about you (see: Hollywood's golden era, particularly as depicted in Hollywood Babylon) and not have harmed anyone, let alone children. This is a rare misstep from this author.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
At one point, Lovelace debates the footnotes in regard to her legacy, as the footnotes are asked to judge which is the "real" Lovelace:
The Ada Lovelace of popular imagination (defining "popular" down to people who have actually heard of Ada Lovelace) was a supergenius mathematical prodigy and co-inventor of the computer. At an extreme end, she crowds Babbage out of his Engine, and quite rightly too, since he had actually stolen her ideas, and her contributions were overlooked by a patriarchal establishment.
Then there is what tends to call itself the "debunking" crowd, who claim Lovelace is merely an empty symbol for politically correct feminists. Babbage, his friendship and regard for her intellect a sham, disingenuously tolerated a deluded, incompetent Ada and used her famous name as a front for a paper he basically wrote himself, including, of course, all the computer programs. As one Babbage scholar huffily put it: "Ada was mad as a hatter, and contributed little more to the 'Notes' than trouble."
Both of these competing cartoon Avas, Super-Lovelace and Nega-Lovelace, are constructed from the ambiguous jumble of letters, papers, contemporary descriptions, etc., etc., which are the far from mathematically precise stuff of history. A footnote hardly knows what to think!
Oh, as a footnote, I should observe here that arbitrary symbols were a hot topic of debate in early-nineteenth-century mathematics. (pg 234)
It's an interesting premise and the fact that the author's Lovelace, both of the real and the Pocket Universe has elements of both Adas is telling.
Also, remember the days when reactionary bigots used "political correctness" rather than "wokeness"? So nostalgic.
I'm glad the author touches upon the "debunking" crowd, which is sadly not exclusive to Lovelace. Everyone from Katherine Johnson (enjoying long-overdue acclaim late in life for her invaluable contributions to American space travel) to Bass Reeves (one of the first Black U.S. deputy marshals rumored to be the inspiration for the Lone Ranger) seem to face a certain kind of "debunker." I'm not talking about people who are looking for a nuanced and accurate view of history, I'm talking about the people who use terms like "political correctness", "forced diversity", and/or "wokeness" because they are rightly challenged by the fact history is not only made by rich, white, heterosexual cisgender men, despite what institutions have pushed for generations. For those just claiming their concern comes from "historical accuracy", they sure are selective about the "accuracy" they accept.
Final Grade: A
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