Overly Sarcastic Productions

    This channel has a split between the two who talk on it; the two personas are Blue and Red. Blue covers more of the idea of traditional history, red covers literature and mythology; they also cover more modern works. They, as in the name, love to use sarcasm when they talk about history; they will do scenes where they do character comedy or just comment. I love how passionate they are about the history, literature, and mythology they cover. Blue has an obsession with domes and Venice. 

The Queen of the Adriatic

 https://youtu.be/7cHK4xzAhzE?si=mpPV_WJ6bXuZV6Bj

     Venice, by all means, shouldn't have existed as a nation, a city paved in marble, sitting on a lagoon with nothing but piles keeping it afloat. It was a republic, which wasn't a very popular idea in Europe during most of its existence. The city of Venice is over 1300 years old. The Republic of Venice lasted from the 8th to the 19th century in a very lets say, hostile work environment, and through that time maintained a stable government. 

   The city of Venice first came into existence around 600 ADS during the Lombard invasion of Italy. The city of Aquilla and neighboring cities didn't want to put up with the Lombards' crap. so they fled to the Venetian lagoon, which was a bunch of swampy small islands at the time they started building what we would now of venire the building of Venice was really labor-intensive because it was a salt lagoon with rapidly changing tides creating a very unstable ground to remedy this they drove long wooden piling into the ground before leveling and covering it what's really cool is instead of the wood rotting it petrified creating stable ground to build on. literally building Venice from the ground up. Because they had the world's biggest mote and the Lombards were from a landlocked region, the Lombards couldn't do anything. For a while, they stayed a part of the Byzantine Empire. Around 700 ADS, Venice got independence, forming an independent republic. The Doge or duke was elected, overseen by tribunes with the power of veto, and assisted by a citizens' assembly and small councils. They also had effective checks and balances for a medieval government. It was really effective. They also added to play the Franks and the Byzantines off each other to stay independent. skipping forward cause this will turn into an essay. Venice was in a golden era for most of its history, peaking around the Renaissance. a center of trade and culture. The Republic died during the Napoleonic War during the Austrian French war 1797. surrendering itself to France. After Napoleon was defeated, it went into Austrian hands until the unification of Italy. 

Voltaire

https://youtu.be/DhTVrjAChic?si=OtLcAa6eqSGlrR3w

     The Enlightenment, also known as the Age of Reason, spanned from the late 16th century to the end of the 17th century. The idea was that Europe was moving away from things like traditional religion and more towards science and reason. This period is gold-plated because people are still people. The world looked arguably worse with things like the triangle trade, and Europe invented the idea of global war with the 7 years' War. Even the most celebrated minds as philosophers like Voltaire and Rousseau were probably the most insane people because of each other. One of the best satires of this era was Voltaire's Candide on optimism. 

    First is Voltaire's history. By the middle of the 1700 Voltaire already wrote on a lot of different subjects and became wealthy from being a lottery scammer. He'd be banished from banish from Paris, settling in Geneva. Despite this, he became the most renowned writer in the French world. During this period, the fashionable philosophy was optimism, the belief that god made the best world for us to live in so whatever happened, good or bad, was in service of this nearly perfect world. Voltaire thought that was BS. He wrote a 108-line poem on the recent Lisbon disaster, poking holes in the optimistic philosophy, sending it to Rousseau, who was just upset that we live in a society. This caused a fight between them and led to the writing of Candid. Candid of optimism follows suprise suprise Candid, a naive, eager, and personable youth. this naivity is encouraged by this optimist tudor Panglos. Candid would be booted from the castle for an affair with the baron's wife and thrust into a journey across the world. Along the way, Candid and his followers suffer almost every disaster.