History ask no. 19?

@suffrajetpack asked me the same question:

Favourite historical book?

So I will answer this in two ways: favourite book about history and favourite book from history.

Unravelling the Franklin Mystery: Inuit Testimony by David C. Woodman is what I'll choose for a favourite book about history. I read this many years ago and it was mind-blowing to me. I had grown up on a steady diet of books about the Franklin Expedition, and while these sometimes included Inuit accounts of Franklin's men, they never correlated different testimonies or tried to make a cohesive narrative out of them. For a long time the Standard Narrative of the Franklin Expedition was that the men abandoned their ships in 1848 and attempted to walk out of the arctic, never to return to the ships, and Owen Beattie's 1980s discoveries only added "plus lead poisoning!" to this story.

While all that lead in the Franklin Expedition tinned foods probably did not help them, the consensus nowadays is that it ultimately had little effect on their fate, and the lead levels found in skeletal remains are actually not out of line for the typical urban Victorian. But Beattie and Geiger made it seem like the ultimate smoking gun in Frozen In Time: literally everything that went wrong was because of lead poisoning, somehow. Three men died the first winter because of lead poisoning! So many officers died because of lead poisoning from more canned food! They made poor decisions to walk south and not east towards the whaling fleet because... yeah you guessed it.

So I really did think that Franklin's men were completely lead-addled. And while this made them more sympathetic, in a way, because it excused their actions, it also stripped them of agency if not humanity. Learning from Woodman's careful reconstruction of events that Franklin's men were fighting for their lives as much as they could, actually making rational decisions despite all the odds stacked against them (which included being beset for two years in an isolated area with no game that was avoided by Inuit, who were also experiencing famine in the late 1840s); that turned all my assumptions upside-down. Pierre Berton sneered in The Arctic Grail that Franklin's men died while dragging useless junk because they were too stupid to live; in Woodman's book this was presented as a tactical decision to lighten the ships by dumping useless items on the shores on King William Island. Many such cases!

And for my favourite book from history: here's where I should put some celebrated classic like Les Misérables but SURPRISE!! It's The Naval Officer (Frank Mildmay) by Frederick Marryat. Love me an overwrought vindictive S.O.B. from 1829!

Here’s the part of the Wikipedia entry that matthewsatori conveniently skipped over.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kung_Fu_(TV_series)#Bruce_Lee.27s_involvement

In her memoirs, Bruce Lee's widow, Linda Lee Cadwell, asserts that Lee created the concept for the series, which was then stolen by Warner Bros.[8] There is circumstantial evidence for this in a December 8, 1971 television interview that Bruce Lee gave on The Pierre Berton Show. In the interview, Lee stated that he had developed a concept for a television series called The Warrior, meant to star himself, about a martial artist in the American Old West (the same concept as Kung Fu, which aired the following year), but that he was having trouble pitching it to Warner Brothers and Paramount.

In the interview, Pierre Berton comments, "There's a pretty good chance that you'll get a TV series in the States called 'The Warrior', in it, where you use what, the Martial Arts in Western setting?"

Lee responds, "That was the original idea, ...both of them [Warner and Paramount], I think, they want me to be in a modernized type of a thing, and they think that the Western type of thing is out. Whereas I want to do the Western. Because, you see, how else can you justify all of the punching and kicking and violence, except in the period of the West?"

Later in the interview, Berton asks Lee about "the problems that you face as a Chinese hero in an American series. Have people come up in the industry and said 'well, we don't know how the audience are going to take a non-American'?"

Lee responds "Well, such question has been raised, in fact, it is being discussed. That is why The Warrior is probably not going to be on." Lee adds, "They think that business-wise it is a risk. I don't blame them. If the situation were reversed, and an American star were to come to Hong Kong, and I was the man with the money, I would have my own concerns as to whether the acceptance would be there."[9]

Whether or not Kung Fu was based on a concept by Lee, he was undoubtedly considered for the starring role...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kung_Fu_(TV_series)#Bruce_Lee.27s_involvement

Another direct witness viewpoint from someone who isn’t white or Asian:

Jim Kelly on “Enter The Dragon”, Bruce Lee, discrimination – on April 10, 2010 

Jim Kelly, at WonderCon SF to meet fans, stopped to talk about what he remembered about Bruce Lee and how society has changed for African Americans and Chinese Americans. Kelly says he met Lee while making the film, but “I was looking for him before that. In 1970, I was looking to train with him, so I went down to Chinatown and I couldn’t find his school. But on the set, between shoots, we trained a lot together.”

Kelly says that the cast of Enter The Dragon didn’t know they were making a cult film; they were just looking to make a “very good film.”

What Kelly remembers about Bruce Lee is they both “had similar struggles” being people of color in America. Race relations in the United States have changed so much from the 70s that a whole generation has grown up without an intimate knowledge of the culture then. Kelly says that Bruce Lee had “caught hell” in Hollywood because he was Chinese. “They didn’t want him in Hollywood,” Kelly said.

Kelly asserts that Kung Fu, the TV show that starred the late David Carradine, was “made for Bruce Lee.” That claim is backed by Bruce Lee’s widow Linda Lee Cadwell, who in her book Bruce Lee: The Man Only I Knew said Bruce Lee created the concept in 1971 for the series which was then stolen by Warner Bros.

Kelly says the writer of the series Kung Fu took the script to Bruce Lee and Lee wanted to do it. The writer, Kelly explains, went to the major studios, who loved the project and “Hey, everything’s good. We just can’t have a Chinese guy that starred in an American (film). So we gotta get a white guy and make him look half-Chinese. But we don’t want Bruce because he’s Chinese.”

This part of our discussion was the source of some controversy on YouTube because of the generational lack of education on what is called institutional racism in America, especially during the 1970s and 1980s. The lack of desire to hear a discussion of a racial issue is complicated by the fact that the Warner Bros-studio-related explanations of why Bruce Lee was not selected for Kung Fu are watered down to remove any obvious concern about Bruce Lee as a Chinese American. Thus, we have two views: the Asian and progressive view and the white studio explanation.