curse my metal body! i wasn't fast enough!
today's random frustration: world history. specifically, medieval european/asian/north african history from about 1200-1900 and my lack of knowledge thereof. see, normally i have only generalized fault to find with my american public school education, but world history is a wide patch of quicksand -- i keep forgetting how little i know.
(see, by my recollection of history classes, the world exists like this, with the red in the diagrams showing what parts of the world were having important things happen at that time:
early history: people emerge from the northern ice in alaska and begin migrating down the americas where they form a number of civilizations ranging from hunter-gatherer to bloody empire.
medieval times: cortez and columbus spring into being somewhere in the middle of the atlantic ocean, bearing diseases and firearms and looking for gold.
1600s: various colonists spring into being on the far side of the atlantic ocean, possibly in holland like tulips, and migrate over.
1700s: england forms out of the seafoam as an oppressive but not terribly intelligent force on the other side of the atlantic ocean; taxes are demanded in return for tea, and glowing red soldiers are barracked in peoples' houses. [note: i do actually know a great deal about revolutionary america -- this is the one area in which a new england public school education will never ever fall short. what i don't know much about is england's side of the argument.]
late 1700s and 1800s: various other european countries begin to coalesce around england, having political and industrial revolutions. france in particular gains solidity when they have their own copy-cat revolution, while india and canada hover in fellow-colony sympathy. slave ships spring into being somewhere in the middle of the atlantic ocean.
early 1900s: the world wars explode, big-bang-like, bringing most of europe, russia, north africa, and japan into being just in time for war and post-war history.
late 1900s: the ussr forms from the leftover bits of the world wars, naturally war-like, and various communist countries spring into being in asia and central america. also, there's apartheid in south africa, quite suddenly, as south africa was a stealth colony.
so you can see that 1200-1900 was a kind of ahistorical time period for most of the world, as far as my early schooling indicates, so that everything i learn later about other countries' own uninterrupted histories tends to be vaguely surprising. i continue to expect that india, for example, existed briefly as a colony and then disappeared; the phillipines never quite instantiated at all; europe popped up briefly and then vanished again once the world wars were resolved; et cetera and so forth. also, you can see that the atlantic ocean's seafoam clearly had some interesting similarities to rotten meat pre-pasteur, in that it spontaneously generated westward-sailing ships.)
my point, anyway, was that i know very little about this area. this frustrates me on a fannish level, because this information is very important for theorizing about the fullmetal alchemist universe and also for that au i keep wanting to write about dante's early life where she was actually dante aligheri, who took up with roger bacon in the 1290s to try and resurrect beatrice and then began roaming the world (sometimes ensouled in a man's body, sometimes in a woman's) in search of philosopher's stones and genuine resurrection techniques. that's all i meant!
wow, i feel positively datlowenesque in my ability to keep on topic!
(see, by my recollection of history classes, the world exists like this, with the red in the diagrams showing what parts of the world were having important things happen at that time:
early history: people emerge from the northern ice in alaska and begin migrating down the americas where they form a number of civilizations ranging from hunter-gatherer to bloody empire.
medieval times: cortez and columbus spring into being somewhere in the middle of the atlantic ocean, bearing diseases and firearms and looking for gold.
1600s: various colonists spring into being on the far side of the atlantic ocean, possibly in holland like tulips, and migrate over.
1700s: england forms out of the seafoam as an oppressive but not terribly intelligent force on the other side of the atlantic ocean; taxes are demanded in return for tea, and glowing red soldiers are barracked in peoples' houses. [note: i do actually know a great deal about revolutionary america -- this is the one area in which a new england public school education will never ever fall short. what i don't know much about is england's side of the argument.]
late 1700s and 1800s: various other european countries begin to coalesce around england, having political and industrial revolutions. france in particular gains solidity when they have their own copy-cat revolution, while india and canada hover in fellow-colony sympathy. slave ships spring into being somewhere in the middle of the atlantic ocean.
early 1900s: the world wars explode, big-bang-like, bringing most of europe, russia, north africa, and japan into being just in time for war and post-war history.
late 1900s: the ussr forms from the leftover bits of the world wars, naturally war-like, and various communist countries spring into being in asia and central america. also, there's apartheid in south africa, quite suddenly, as south africa was a stealth colony.
so you can see that 1200-1900 was a kind of ahistorical time period for most of the world, as far as my early schooling indicates, so that everything i learn later about other countries' own uninterrupted histories tends to be vaguely surprising. i continue to expect that india, for example, existed briefly as a colony and then disappeared; the phillipines never quite instantiated at all; europe popped up briefly and then vanished again once the world wars were resolved; et cetera and so forth. also, you can see that the atlantic ocean's seafoam clearly had some interesting similarities to rotten meat pre-pasteur, in that it spontaneously generated westward-sailing ships.)
my point, anyway, was that i know very little about this area. this frustrates me on a fannish level, because this information is very important for theorizing about the fullmetal alchemist universe and also for that au i keep wanting to write about dante's early life where she was actually dante aligheri, who took up with roger bacon in the 1290s to try and resurrect beatrice and then began roaming the world (sometimes ensouled in a man's body, sometimes in a woman's) in search of philosopher's stones and genuine resurrection techniques. that's all i meant!
wow, i feel positively datlowenesque in my ability to keep on topic!