Thank you so much for your passion in sharing knowledge. We are all better for it. Questions: 1. How would you describe Dany’s education up until her first chapter in the series? Especially compared to other royalty growing up in exile. Would you compile a (deliciously exhaustive) list of books, articles, etc that you refer to in your blog essays? Oh! And a list that you consider good for rounding out one’s own education? Basically just a list to read. Thanks again!

Question 1:

We don’t have a particularly precise picture of Dany’s pre-ASOIAF education. We know that she can read and write, and that she speaks both the Common Tongue, High Valyrian, and quite a bit of the dialects of the Free Cities. We know she has a rudimentary grasp of history – she knows Nymeria’s Conquest but not the Water Gardens of Dorne, 

My guess is that Daenerys’ formal education was rather brief, given that the servants who would have been educating her ran off when she was five and they didn’t include a maester; in the period thereafter where they were staying with magisters and archons and the like, she may have had tutors but how in-depth their curriculum was is unclear. But when the money ran out, I think her education did too, as Viserys seems to have filled in a lot by telling her stories of the past and of home, etc. 

Question 2:

Great question!

My list would skew to the historical, naturally, and to stuff that was important to me when I read it. I reserve the right to amend this list as I look across my bookshelves and think of more stuff. 

•  Karl Polayni’s Great Transformation. Totally changed my understanding of economic history, and the way we think about markets versus the way that markets actually came into existence. 
• E.P Thompson’s work in general, but especially Making of the English Working Class and Customs in Common. One of the original social historians, and also a hugely important figure in revisionist Marxism.
• Fernand Braudel’s The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. It’s a daunting read, but Braudel’s way of seeing the world as these interconnected geographical and commercial and cultural regions and the way that environmental forces shape our history without being aware of it, will change your mind.
• Eric Foner’s work in general, but Reconstruction if you need to pick just one. Totally rewrote our understanding of the period and the way that race has shaped American politics. 
• On the same note, David Blight’s Race and Reunion is abolutely key to understanding how historical memory of the Civil War was weaponized in the service of white supremacy in Soutth and North alike. 
• To understand cities, I would argue you should read William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis on how Chicago reshaped the American West and Midwest, Burrows and Wallace’s Gotham, which takes you from the founding of New Amsterdam to the consolidation of the five boroughs into New York City in 1898. 
• To understand what actually happened in the 1960s and how it led to our politics today, I would recommend Tom Sugrue’s Origins of the Urban Crisis and Sweet Land of Liberty, Martha Biondi’s To Stand and Fight, and Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland.