h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Okay, so we have an entry on the English Civil War, but not on the head of the winning side, Oliver Cromwell. Anyone know anything about him and fancy writing an entry?

Do we have a budding Antonia Fraser in the house?

winning

I belive we live in a constitutional monarchy not a republican commonwealth

A523450
A622937
for those intrested in the civil war

Well, he *did* win. It was those who superceded him who 'lost'. ish.

I don't even think ya can say that that with any great conviction as for most of the war he was not in charge either military or politically, with Sir Thomas Fairfax being i/c of the New Model Army and until his death Francis Pym the leading parliamentarian politician.

I think wot would be nice is a little uni of life style project covering the main characters from the civil war

say
Charles I
Charles II
Prince Rupert
Lord Capel
William Laud
Earl of Strafford
Prince Maurice
Oliver Cromwell
Francis Pym
Sir Thomas Fairfax
and maybe General Monk

Anyone who banned beer and football clearly didn't understand the English people... no wonder they lost in the long run.

I don't know anything about this topic, but it would be fun to find out - if anyone needs a hand writting it, I'd be happy to help with things of a GMLish nature..

The Irish have never forgiven Cromwell for what he did in Drogheda.

To expand on that last comment, Irish schools still teach children to think of Cromwell as comparable with Hitler.

... Whereas English schools rarely mention him at all

It occurs to me that I know even less about Cromwell than I realised, as 'Drogheda' means nothing to me.

Do you guys think this might make a good Collaborative project, in the style of the old Topics of the Week? We've been thinking about bringing them back in some way, and I think that more specific topics like this might be a good way to go.

What if we were to do a call for information on Cromwell? Would that be enough inspiration for one person to volunteer to compile the contributions, do you think? Or has anyone here already started work on this?

It would be great to have the topics of the week back - they were much more fun than the talking points and brought a lot of researchers into contributing to the EG for the first time.

The only thing with having very specific topics is that the researcher volunteer is going to have a lot of editing/ gap filling to do.

Unless they work like Master B's project of course, with people volunteering for one or more preset topics? Either way, a one week deadline wouldn't be long enough?

sprout

What we did with the later Topics was *promote* them for a week, but not set a deadline for them to close or be edited by a certain date.

Hmm... I think this is going to be a good topic to start with though, keep it specific so hopefully it *doesn't* get too chaotic at first...

keep me posted. it depends on where I'm at with teaching, but I'd be interested in contributing a thing or two. John Pym...did someone mention John Pym?

Keep your eyes peeled later on this week

Drogheda is a town in Ireland, just north of Dublin. Cromwell's army committed a huge massacre there, and then went on to commit similar outrages throughout a number of other towns in Ireland. Irish history is not kind to him.

I'm looking forward to seeing the talking points back, they were always fun to contribute too

I was wondering if it would be wise to have a volenteer researcher/editor before it went on the front page.

And we could have a page where researchers with ideas for talking points which they were willing to edit could volenteer.

Z

Ah, Z, ever the practical one, aren't you? I'd offer, but who knows what this quarter will bring?

I think we'll probably run this the way we did in the past. After one week, we'll ask if one volunteer (or, in cases where the entry looks to be getting hefty, a small group of volunteers) to collate the contributions into some kind of order, and then once it's ready it can go via Peer Review.