Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Assessment/First Silesian War

Article promoted by Iazyges (talk) via MilHistBot (talk) 15:20, 6 July 2019 (UTC)

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First Silesian War
Instructions for nominators and reviewers
 * Nominator(s): 

This is the first (and shortest) in a series of articles I've written about the Silesian Wars of the eighteenth century. The "Silesian Wars" are mainly a feature of German military historiography, since from other perspectives they seem to generally be thought of as theatres of wider wars (the War of the Austrian Succession and the Seven Years' War), but they mark a watershed in German history, signalling the rise of Prussia to parity with Austria in German affairs. This article, along with the others in the series, was recently promoted to GA (after a helpful review by ), and I'd like to take it further up the quality ladder with help from this project! I'm particularly interested in help getting it into European English (I'm an American and can't tell when I'm noticeably writing like one). Thanks for your help with my first A-class nomination! -Bryanrutherford0 (talk) 22:01, 4 June 2019 (UTC)

Source review by Factotem

 * Technical checks all OK
 * External links
 * Ext. Link tool reports no problems
 * The ISBN provided for Asprey's Frederick the Great: The Magnificent Enigma relates to the 2007 edition published by iUniverse, according to Worldcat. The 1986 Ticknor and Fields edition appears to have ISBN 9780899193526, according to Worldcat. Not a huge issue, though, as both editions have the same pagination.
 * Fixed. ✅
 * The ISBN provided for Black's European International Relations 1648–1815 relates to the 288-page ebook edition. Although the GBooks link you provide links to the same edition, the GBooks preview is for a 304-page print edition. If you used that GBooks preview, then the ISBN number needs to be changed in the article bib to that edition. This is an issue because of the different pagination between the two editions.
 * Fixed. ✅
 * The ISBN provided for Crankshaw's Maria Theresa relates either to a German edition or an English edition published by Longmans. The Viking-published English edition has the different ISBN of 9780670456314. Notwithstanding a different pagination with the Longman-published edition that looks suspiciously like a typo, I'm not sure this is a huge issue, but I think you should really provide the ISBN of the relevant English edition unless you did actually consult the German language version.
 * Fixed. ✅
 * When I click the link for ISBN 978-0-7139-9774-3, provided for Fraser's Frederick the Great: King of Prussia, and click any of the online database links, I get a completely different book (East End Chronicles by Ed Glinert). Same for this ISBN search. Only the GBooks link you provided leads to the correct book. Can you check with the source you actually consulted - looks like GBooks has made a mistake here.
 * Oh, how bizarre! You're right, the final three non-checksum digits of the Google Books ISBN are wrong. ✅
 * Frederick the Great on the Art of War appears to be a primary source written by Frederick the Great and translated by Jay Luvaas, so the cite book template should give Frederick the Great for the author info and use the |translator-last1= |translator-first1= |translator-link1= parameters for Luvaas. Also, the GBooks link you provide links to a 416-page edition published in 2009 by Da Capo Press, but you cite a 1966 edition published by Free Press in the rest of the bib. Worldcat lists a number of these, but of the ones I checked, all were 391 pages, so that difference in pagination could cause problems with the page numbering in your refs.
 * Good clarification; it's a collection of Frederick's writings, both edited and translated by Luvaas; I think an "editor" credit is probably more to the point, since this book does not simply translate any single book originally written by Frederick, but I'll change it to "translator" if you feel strongly that it should be that. I'll also point out that the text I'm citing is from a sort of foreword by Luvaas, so I'm not actually citing Frederick's writing (though he is the original author of the principal contents of that book), which is why I had credited it to Luvaas. I'm a little unsure as to how best to format Frederick's name in the citation (and how to work that with the Harvard footnotes I'm using), if you have any guidance to offer! -Bryanrutherford0 (talk) 18:49, 5 June 2019 (UTC) ✅
 * Editor is fine. I see your problem here, it really should be cited to Luvaas, not Friedrich. Maybe if you format the ref along the lines of "Luvaas, p.3 in Friedrich, 2009"? Factotem (talk) 10:28, 6 June 2019 (UTC)
 * Er, okay, I've tried to do that as well as I can see how. Will this work? -Bryanrutherford0 (talk) 15:24, 6 June 2019 (UTC)
 * ISBN 9781134899968, provided for Shennan's International Relations in Europe, 1689-1789, appears to have been taken from the GBooks link, but looking this up in Worldcat and on isbnsearch.org results in a not found error. From the GBooks preview, the 2005 edition is an ebook edition published by Taylor & Francis from an original 1995 edition published by Routledge (the publisher you specify). The preview gives an ISBN-10 of 041507780x, which translates to an ISBN-13 of 9780415077804. This is an issue because the paginations between these two editions are different.
 * Fixed. ✅
 * As a general note on GBooks links, we're not required to provide them, and although they might look like a good idea, they often cause problems. Gbook previews are often from a different edition than that listed on the initial Gbook listing. If you source from a preview, use the publication info (ISBN, publisher, date) provided in that preview, not in the listing.
 * It's certainly a bit of a pain to iron out all the different editions. I like to include Google Books links where possible for the sake of previews that are now or may in the future be offered; ideally every editor and reader would have easy access to a comprehensive physical library of all the sources in the world, but, on a practical level, I like to make a digital text of the source instantly available to the reader if there's a straightforward way of doing so. Thanks for the guidance! -Bryanrutherford0 (talk) 18:49, 5 June 2019 (UTC)

Quality/comprehensiveness of sources
 * Of the 84 references, just over a third (30) cite primary (Frederick the Great's work, 2), tertiary (Encyclopdia Britannica, 4) or aged works (Clifford, 1914; Hirsch, 1881; and Carlyle, 1858; 24). I understand the subject is not well covered in its own right, especially in English-language sources, but is it so poorly covered that we have to rely so heavily on such old sources? Aren't there better, more recent secondary sources? Isn't the war covered reasonably well in general works dealing with the War of the Austrian Succession, Frederick the Great or the rise of Prussia? I have to confess, a quick Google has so far only surfaced Anderson's The War of Austrian Succession 1740-1748, but that appears to include a chapter (chapter 4) of some 30 pages dedicated to the First Silesian War, but hasn't been used in this article.
 * Hmm, well, let's see. The Luvaas citation, as mentioned above, is actually a citation to the editor's foreword, not to Frederick's original writings. The first Britannica citation is just to confirm that the name "First Silesian War" is a real historiographic thing; the citation doesn't really bear on the content of the article. The second is a duplicate, probably left over from an earlier draft of the article; I've removed it. The third is to confirm a specific date, but I'll look through my other sources and see if I can get that date from a different one. Likewise, I can probably replace the fourth citation with another source.
 * In fact, the date of the Treaty of Breslau is in the Carlyle citation on the previous sentence, so I'll just let that cover both sentences. -Bryanrutherford0 (talk) 15:24, 6 June 2019 (UTC)
 * Now, for the dated citations: most of these are from Carlyle, and Carlyle's history is the longest, most detailed account of these events to be had in English; the biography is 8 million characters long, and more than half of it is about these wars. Nobody else has written twelve hundred pages about the Silesian Wars in English, and there's a lot of detail in there that would be hard to assemble even from a combination of other sources. So, yes, the war is covered reasonably well in general works dealing with the War of the Austrian Succession (Browning's "The War of the Austrian Succession"), Frederick the Great (Fraser's "Frederick the Great: King of Prussia" and Asprey's "Frederick the Great: The Magnificent Enigma") or the rise of Prussia (Clark's "Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600–1947"), and that's why those are the citations supporting the big-picture claims in the article, while Carlyle is mostly supporting details of military maneuvers and the dates of specific events not given in other, more general sources. The number of separate citations each source receives is not necessarily in proportion to the weight of content it carries (I don't cite every sentence where a source supports a series of sentences, for example).
 * As for the other two older sources: the Hirsch source is a German-language biographical dictionary cited for a life detail of an obscure early-modern German minor noble whose story happens to touch on the casus belli of this conflict; it doesn't play a large role in the article, but I can try to find a more recent source that mentions this guy, if you think it would strengthen the article's verifiability. The Clifford source is also not playing a huge role here, and I can attempt to replace its citations with ones from newer books, if you like. -Bryanrutherford0 (talk) 18:49, 5 June 2019 (UTC)

I'm sorry to be giving you such a rough ride in your first ACR. :( Factotem (talk) 12:18, 5 June 2019 (UTC)
 * Oh, you're not giving me hard time at all! This is exactly what I came here for; thank you for your attention and advice! :) Thanks, also, for introducing me to WorldCat; that will be helpful in the future. I'll look into replacing the Britannica citations and some of the older sources tonight. -Bryanrutherford0 (talk) 18:49, 5 June 2019 (UTC)
 * Firstly, let me apologise. I meant to look up just what you were citing to some of those sources to see how much of an issue it might be, but forgot. Your points about Luvaas and the EB are reasonable. I'm still not sure about the extensive use of Carlyle, and would be surprised to learn that there are not more recent reliable sources. Is Anderson, for example, not able to source the information currently sourced to Carlyle? Another issue with Carlyle I meant to mention but forgot is that the source does not have page numbers. Ref #7, for example, points to 4,000 words of 19th-century narrative. I'm not sure that qualifies as being clear or precise enough to meet policy. Factotem (talk) 10:14, 6 June 2019 (UTC)
 * I'll look back through my other sources and try to replace any Carlyle citations I can, but all of them combined don't contain the level of detail found in Carlyle's account; there are indeed more recent reliable sources, but none as lengthy and thorough. As for the lack of pagination in the Carlyle citations, it appears that Google Books (haha) has a full scan of a 1901 print edition of Carlyle's biography (with pagination), and I could switch all the citations in all four articles over to that edition, if you feel that the page numbers are necessary for verifiability. -Bryanrutherford0 (talk) 15:24, 6 June 2019 (UTC)
 * I've added a few more citations from the Fraser source (which is richer in military detail than the others) to support the citations to Carlyle for dates and maneuvers. -Bryanrutherford0 (talk) 15:41, 7 June 2019 (UTC)
 * G'day, how do you think your source review is travelling? Happy or need more things addressed? Cheers, Peacemaker67 (click to talk to me) 08:13, 4 July 2019 (UTC)
 * I'm still not sure about the heavy use of such an old source as Carlyle, but in the absence of any alternative that I can find and in light of Auntieruth's more positive, not to mention more informed source review, I'm not going to oppose. Factotem (talk) 08:40, 4 July 2019 (UTC)

Comments Support by PM
I reviewed this and its three sister articles at GAN, and tend towards a pretty detailed review there, so I didn't find much that hadn't already been addressed from my perspective. I have a few comments:
 * in the lead, the colon in "provoking the conflict: Maria" isn't necessary, just end the sentence and start a new one.


 * "The newly crowned King Frederick" there is a repetition of newly crowned from earlier in the section, which probably isn't necessary
 * Good point. ✅


 * move link to Francis Stephen of Lorraine to first mention
 * Good catch, thanks! ✅


 * perhaps state that the Sudetes are mountains, as I initially assumed it was a river
 * Fair enough. ✅


 * "extensive new lands in Silesia" substantially repeats the first para of the section, and could be trimmed without losing anything
 * In the first paragraph of "Outcomes", it briefly says what Prussia gained (territory, resources, prestige) as part of an overall summary of the outcomes. Then, in the first paragraph of the Prussia section, these topics are explored in greater detail: the territory mattered not just because it made Prussia bigger on the map, but because it was densely populated and industrialized, yielding manpower and taxes; the victory over the preeminent German power took Prussia's prestige to a new level and started its rise to great-power status. That seems to me like it adds detail and clarity that's not in the half-sentence summary in the first paragraph of the section, doesn't it? I've edited the section a bit to try to make the first instance more clearly a cursory summary and the second a detailed explanation. -Bryanrutherford0 (talk) 15:19, 10 June 2019 (UTC)

That's all I have. Peacemaker67 (click to talk to me) 02:50, 8 June 2019 (UTC)
 * Thank you for taking one more look at this! -Bryanrutherford0 (talk) 15:19, 10 June 2019 (UTC)
 * No worries, supporting. Peacemaker67 (click to talk to me) 01:59, 14 June 2019 (UTC)

Source review Support by Auntieruth
This is well done. I'm familiar with all the sources that the editor has cited, and found no problems with them, although (agreed) there is a reliance on Carlyle, this isn't unusual in the 1740s wars. Luvaas (full disclosure: he was one of my professors) includes a concise and pungent assessment of Frederick in his introduction, and his assessments of Frederick, the wars with Austria, etc., have yet to be overturned.

Based on my assessment of sources, there isn't much new in the field:
 * 1987: The Origins of war in early modern Europe / edited by Jeremy Black contains some information generally about the war as a precursor to the nature of modern warfare.
 * 2013: Prussian Musketeers of the War of Austrian Succession and the Seven Years War : uniforms, organisation and equipment / Dr. Stephen Summerfield -- more of an analysis of uniforms and specific organizational structures. This might fit into an article about an individual battle, but not for an overarching article.
 * 2015: John Forbes : Scotland, Flanders and the Seven Years' War, 1707-1759 / John Oliphant. focuses more on the relationship between Flanders and Scotland during the war, but covers generally the broader conflicts between the European states.
 * 2000: The short Oxford history of Europe. The eighteenth century : Europe, 1688-1815 / edited by T.C.W. Blanning. Bryan has used a newer book by Blanning, which covers the topic better.

Carlyle had a mixed intellectual relationship with Frederick. There is a school of thought that his effort to write about Frederick's reign killed him. It certainly didn't help his health, although he lived another 20 years after completing this.

All this said, The First and Second Silesian wars were Prussia's coming of age. And the Seven Years' War (or the Third Silesian War) cemented this status. If this is going on to Featured Article, I'd suggest a bit more editing to strengthen this aspect of it. Prussia was, until the early 1700s, a third rate power with first rate goals. 20 years of fighting (off and on) against two of the strongest powers on the European continent cemented Frederick's goal. He was incredibly lucky; the Austrians and the French were incredibly careless; Frederick was crafty; the French and Austrians put some 40-watt generals into the field.

Thanks, Bryan, for pulling this together. Support auntieruth (talk) 16:10, 13 June 2019 (UTC)
 * Thank you for reviewing it! Your feedback on the first version of Third Silesian War a couple of years ago was helpful in starting this process! -Bryanrutherford0 (talk) 18:24, 13 June 2019 (UTC)


 * Comment That's a useful counter to my source review, and backs up my own cursory but largely unsuccessful effort to find more recent sources. I'm curious, though, to know whether the chapter in Anderson's The War of Austrian Succession 1740-1748 is relevant. Have you seen it? Factotem (talk) 16:23, 13 June 2019 (UTC)
 * yes it could be. However, I don't recall that there is anything in there that isn't already covered.  I think I have access to it and I will check and see.  Cheers  auntieruth (talk) 14:23, 14 June 2019 (UTC)

Image review - pass

 * File:Wilhelm Camphausen-Die Huldigung.jpg 1. Needs a USPD tag. 2. The source does not link to the actual source of the image.
 * 1. ✅ 2. ✅, I think? -Bryanrutherford0 (talk) 18:24, 13 June 2019 (UTC)


 * File:MariaTheresia Maske.jpg 1. Needs a USPD tag. 2. The Source/Photographer link is dead.
 * 1. ✅ 2. I've switched it to an alternate (slightly less clear, unfortunately) image of the painting that does have a working source. ✅ -Bryanrutherford0 (talk) 18:24, 13 June 2019 (UTC)


 * File:Prussian Army during battle of Mollwitz 1741.jpg requires a USPD tag.
 * Replaced it with another image with better license. ✅ -Bryanrutherford0 (talk) 18:24, 13 June 2019 (UTC)


 * File:Mária Terézia koronázása a Szent Márton székesegyházban.jpg requires a USPD tag.
 * ✅ -Bryanrutherford0 (talk) 18:24, 13 June 2019 (UTC)


 * File:Map for the Silesian and Seven Years Wars.jpg requires a USPD tag.
 * Er, I think it already had one (PD-1923), but I've clarified in the template that it's a scan of a PD 2-D work of art. ✅ -Bryanrutherford0 (talk) 18:24, 13 June 2019 (UTC)
 * That was swift. All good. Gog the Mild (talk) 19:03, 13 June 2019 (UTC)

Gog the Mild (talk) 17:01, 13 June 2019 (UTC)

Support Comments by Sturmvogel_66

 * Link Kingdom of Spain to Spanish Empire
 * Good point. ✅ -Bryanrutherford0 (talk) 23:12, 30 June 2019 (UTC)


 * well trained hyphenate this as it's a compound adjective
 * Okay. ✅ -Bryanrutherford0 (talk) 23:12, 30 June 2019 (UTC)


 * Very nicely done.--Sturmvogel 66 (talk) 22:44, 30 June 2019 (UTC)
 * Thank you! -Bryanrutherford0 (talk) 23:12, 30 June 2019 (UTC)