Robert Smalls - US slave who stole a confederate ship and eventually became a US Congressman
The second red scare, from the point of view of ordinary people being accused to be dangerous subversives
Sooo many.
-
Mughal India. Literally each year could be a series theres so much happening.
-
Timurids. Post mongol central Asian. Life of Timur in particular.
-
The life of Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir and other French existentialists could be fun.
-
Borges. Blind Argentinian librarian and author. My favourite short story writer ever.
-
Ustad Mansur. A painter. Look at my posts on traditional art with his paintings and theres more context there.
-
Khusrau. A poet in several Indian courts in the 1200s. THE Sufi poet.
-
William Blake. Just the story of seeing an angel in the tree etc is fascinating.
-
Kushan empire in the 30-375 CE.
-
Burmese independence movement was fascinating.
-
There was a murder in Norwich in the 12th century which was a fascinating story. A boy was found hung in the woods. More and more children disappeared. Jews being blamed.
Theres honestly soooo soooo many that I will never stop. Every story can make for good art with the right mind.
-
Lisbon 1755, huge natural disaster November 1st on the morning of the feast of all saints day where at the height of their trading and colonialism an earthquake causes massive death and destruction, and as people fled to the ocean beach to escape the fires and collapsing buildings a massive tsunami wipes out a bunch more people, estimates at 30-50 thousand people when the city population was estimated at 200 thousand. It’s considered by many the event that kicked off earthquake science seismology and had major impacts on modern atheism and the enlightenment movement. If people aren’t going to read Voltaire, Rousseau, Locke then at least make a show to expose a broader audience to their ideas.
War of 1812
Maybe
I’d like to see something from the Canadians’ or Native American peoples’ perspective
Magellan’s voyage, but with Enrique of Malacca as the protagonist and central character. Technically the actual first person to circumnavigate the globe as claimed by some historians.
Based on wikipedia, there already have been a couple of foreign films and a Spanish mini-series in 2022, which I haven’t seen, so I’m not sure of his portrayal and how central the character is in the show.
A WWI era show focused on the inbred nobility that decided to have a war to settle personal differences.
I’d really like my grandma’s memoirs be made into a mini series. They show her life in Germany and other countries from the 1920s to the 1980s. So much to see. She moved around so much that she even wrote a small opinion piece for a big magazine on the merits of renting a home.
For as big as Pirates of the Carribbean got in the U.S., and as big as One Piece has become globally, there isn’t really that much good “Golden Era of Piracy” media. I wonder if it’s just really hard to film boats.
Black Sails is pretty fucking good though.
I love the show black sails. 100% recommend it
The Patrick O’Brian novels, for sure. A really well done animated series would absolutely dominate.
Edward Ellsberg. Literally no one has heard of him. He was a super smart Navy engineer who went into salvage operations and worked for a year to salvage the submarine S-51 when she was rammed and sunk off Block Island, which was big news in the day and the Navy was trying to save some face.
He then went on to salvage a bunch of scuttled ships in the Red Sea and get a harbor back in operation after the Italians blew it all up in their retreat from North Africa.
His books are out of print except On The Bottom, about the S-51, and although it is all in his own words, its a cross between Macgyver and, well I don’t know, the US Navy. Oh this was in the 20s so it was all with the old school helmet and canvas suit diving gear, 150 feet down. All kinds of crazy things happened.
He wrote some youth fiction that isn’t bad, albeit 100 years old now.
A Ghengis Khan era show about a group of soldiers, but more like The Office
The fight to publish Ulysses in the english speaking world and all the people it involved other than James Joyce (I wouldn’t necessarily even focus it on James Joyce, rather the fight to publish Ulysses would be the overall framework of a bunch of stories of heroes from the time).
Anything with women. Like, there were so many women doing cool, important spy stuff in WW2, but every time we get another film, it’s just more dudes. Something along the lines of Hidden Figures, but for every other major event in modern history.
Then War’s Unwomanly Face from Svetlana Alexandrovna Alexievich might interest you. The book somehow doesn’t have it’s own Wikipedia article, but there is even a japanese manga adaption of this book. Which apparently is even faithful, haven’t read it myself yet though.
If done right you could make just an absurdly good series about the South American Revolutions, probably mainly focused on Simon Bolivar since he’s so pivotal to the story but you obviously have to do more than just him. Either way I think it’d be a great story to tell because so much of the western audience doesn’t know enough about it. If anything.
