(no subject)
Well, it's been a while, and that's mostly down to the fact that last week turned out to be an unexpected week of doom (week of unexpected doom?). It was my final week of lectures, the first one on the Seven Years' War and the second one on the American Revolution, so I wasn't particularly worried going in. I was more or less like "an excuse to purchase and read Fred Anderson, Crucible of War: The Seven Years' War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1776 and D. Peter MacLeod, Northern Armagedon: The Battle of the Plains of Abraham: Eight Minutes of Gunfire that Shaped a Continent, you say? Excellent, I say! And then write two connected lectures about them, you say? Easy, I say!"
As it turns out, I was right about the purchasing and reading being excellent, but not so much about the easy. Between them they include 1051 pages of detailed and totally gripping history, and excavating two coherent, fifty-minute lectures out of all that information was much harder than I anticipated. I dedicated my first all-nighter of the week this past Tuesday to writing my Seven Years' War lecture, because I kept going on long tangents that I then had to delete, and I still ended up having to talk off the cuff about the Battle of the Plains of Abraham in my 9:00 section because that part wasn't done in time. The second almost all-nighter, on Thursday night, came about as a result of still being tired and thus a little distraught from my first all-nighter, being additionally distraught as a result of the resolution of my plagiarism case (the boom has now been lowered on my plagiarist), and being even more distraught as I realized that I was preparing to lecture on the American Revolution to Americans. In the end, I don't think they actually knew much about the American Revolution going in (or at least, when I asked them what they already knew, they didn't have much to say), and I'm not sure I enlightened them a lot. But I did compare and contrast Pontiac's War and the American Revolution, with a side of consumer revolutions...
The other aspect of the week's lecture-writing that I totally did not anticipate was ALL THE FEELS. I have a LOT OF FEELINGS about the fall of New France, as was brought home to me very clearly as I started to do the research for these lectures. Those FEELINGS are mostly "OMG NEW FRANCE I CAN'T BEAR TO WATCH! THIS IS GOING TO BE A DISASTER! DON'T MAKE THOSE MISTAKES! FRANCE, HAVE A BETTER NAVY AND CARE MORE ABOUT NORTH AMERICA AUGH AUGH AUGH!!!" I mean, I have been on Team Wrong Side of the Eighteenth Century for a long time (since birth, even, given that as office mate J and I were wasting time doing some genealogical googling on Monday, I discovered that my Nova Scotia relatives seem to be descendents of soldiers who fought on the British side in the American Revolution in a loyalist regiment in New Jersey), but still.
The upshot of ALL THE FEELINGS is, naturally, that I want ALL THE HISTORICAL RPF about the Seven Years' War. ALL OF IT, and there doesn't appear to be any. How can I deal with all these feelings without FIC? So far, signs point to dealing by rereading and also maaaaybe spending several hours looking up the history of French infantry regiments that were involved in the Battle of the Plains of Abraham (Guyenne! La Sarre! Languedoc! Béarn! Royal-Roussillon!) on wikipedia and elsewhere on the internets. And I am now maaaaaybe contemplating a Seven Years' War RPF/Nicholas Le Floch crossover, because that would be awesome (and I mean, the Nicholas Le Floch mysteries are basically already historical RPF, so it would hardly even be a crossover...).
Anyway, for those of you who have newly subscribed to my journal (and those of you I've newly subscribed to) as a result of
kouredios' friending meme, welcome, and this is what I mean by history is totally a fandom, right? It's also what I mean when I say that I talk a lot about the course I've been teaching for the first time, although that may, at least, die down a little over the holidays.
This entry was originally posted at http://monksandbones.dreamwidth.org/700368.html. Talk to me here or there, whichever you prefer.
As it turns out, I was right about the purchasing and reading being excellent, but not so much about the easy. Between them they include 1051 pages of detailed and totally gripping history, and excavating two coherent, fifty-minute lectures out of all that information was much harder than I anticipated. I dedicated my first all-nighter of the week this past Tuesday to writing my Seven Years' War lecture, because I kept going on long tangents that I then had to delete, and I still ended up having to talk off the cuff about the Battle of the Plains of Abraham in my 9:00 section because that part wasn't done in time. The second almost all-nighter, on Thursday night, came about as a result of still being tired and thus a little distraught from my first all-nighter, being additionally distraught as a result of the resolution of my plagiarism case (the boom has now been lowered on my plagiarist), and being even more distraught as I realized that I was preparing to lecture on the American Revolution to Americans. In the end, I don't think they actually knew much about the American Revolution going in (or at least, when I asked them what they already knew, they didn't have much to say), and I'm not sure I enlightened them a lot. But I did compare and contrast Pontiac's War and the American Revolution, with a side of consumer revolutions...
The other aspect of the week's lecture-writing that I totally did not anticipate was ALL THE FEELS. I have a LOT OF FEELINGS about the fall of New France, as was brought home to me very clearly as I started to do the research for these lectures. Those FEELINGS are mostly "OMG NEW FRANCE I CAN'T BEAR TO WATCH! THIS IS GOING TO BE A DISASTER! DON'T MAKE THOSE MISTAKES! FRANCE, HAVE A BETTER NAVY AND CARE MORE ABOUT NORTH AMERICA AUGH AUGH AUGH!!!" I mean, I have been on Team Wrong Side of the Eighteenth Century for a long time (since birth, even, given that as office mate J and I were wasting time doing some genealogical googling on Monday, I discovered that my Nova Scotia relatives seem to be descendents of soldiers who fought on the British side in the American Revolution in a loyalist regiment in New Jersey), but still.
The upshot of ALL THE FEELINGS is, naturally, that I want ALL THE HISTORICAL RPF about the Seven Years' War. ALL OF IT, and there doesn't appear to be any. How can I deal with all these feelings without FIC? So far, signs point to dealing by rereading and also maaaaybe spending several hours looking up the history of French infantry regiments that were involved in the Battle of the Plains of Abraham (Guyenne! La Sarre! Languedoc! Béarn! Royal-Roussillon!) on wikipedia and elsewhere on the internets. And I am now maaaaaybe contemplating a Seven Years' War RPF/Nicholas Le Floch crossover, because that would be awesome (and I mean, the Nicholas Le Floch mysteries are basically already historical RPF, so it would hardly even be a crossover...).
Anyway, for those of you who have newly subscribed to my journal (and those of you I've newly subscribed to) as a result of
kouredios' friending meme, welcome, and this is what I mean by history is totally a fandom, right? It's also what I mean when I say that I talk a lot about the course I've been teaching for the first time, although that may, at least, die down a little over the holidays.
This entry was originally posted at http://monksandbones.dreamwidth.org/700368.html. Talk to me here or there, whichever you prefer.