Cimorene

I totally watched several history explainer videos about her and read her wikipedia page when the first season of The Great came out, whenever that was.

Haha, you are not the first person I have mentioned Frederick the Great to, and they have been like, "I know a little bit about this period from The Great"!

And I see this guy came to power shortly before the Jacobite rebellion (the invasion that ended with the battle of Culloden, which I see now is called the Jacobite Rising of 1745...

Ah, yes, and this guy actually kicked off the war that indirectly led to the '45 Jacobite Rising! See, a good time to invade England is when most of the troops are busy fighting on the Continent and there is limited manpower for dealing with threats at home. And when France is fighting England, they're often quite happy to have Scots invade England and force England into a two-front war (this has been going on since the 13th century).

Of course, I think this war would have started anyway, so I think Macaulay is overdoing it when he writes:

On the head of Frederick is all the blood which was shed in a war which raged during many years and in every quarter of the globe— the blood of the column of Fontenoy, the blood of the brave mountaineers who were slaughtered at Culloden. The evils produced by this wickedness were felt in lands where the name of Prussia was unknown; and, in order that he might rob a neighbor whom he had promised to defend, black men fought on the coast of Coromandel, and red men scalped each other by the great lakes of North America.

But never let it be said that Macaulay didn't have a way with words, whatever the quality of his opinions.

luzula is our resident Jacobite expert and I'm sure would be happy to talk about Waverley! I actually got into the 18th century via the Jacobites, who got me into 18th century military history, and then I quickly realized that if I wanted to learn about European military history of the 1740s, there was one guy I'd never heard of but I was absolutely going to have to learn about: Frederick the Great. Now, that was some 25 years ago, and I haven't read Waverley or studied the Jacobites since then, but I still have at least a 100-level understanding of the subject.

Meissen porcelain figures!

Frederick was super into porcelain! He got a porcelain industry going in Prussia, invaded Saxony, occupied Meissen and raided the manufactories and sent all the figures and recipes back home, and founded and ran an entire porcelain factory in Berlin!

From then on, it was called the Königliche Porzellan-Manufaktur Berlin ("Royal Porcelain Manufactory Berlin") and became a model of how to run a business. There was no child labour, there were regular working hours, above-average incomes, secure pensions, a healthcare fund and assistance for widows and orphans.

The manufactory's most important client was Frederick the Great, who sometimes jokingly referred to himself as his "best customer".

He also had his own subgenre of Rococo, named Frederician Rococo after him.

So there's lots to investigate there if you're into material culture! I'm somewhat into art history, so we might be able to find some common ground there.