About me

Hello. I am Jacob. I was born on 10 January 2000, which makes me twenty-six, and I am studying history at college in Arizona.

If you have read the note and wondered who was behind it, this is the rest of the answer. It is a lot less carefully composed than the rest of the site, which feels about right.

Arizona

I am from Arizona, and I do not think this project makes much sense without knowing that.

The very first draft of the Register was barely about America at all. It was about Arizona, reorganised into something called the March of Arizona, with its own charter, its own frontier powers, and a strange set of borders that reached out to grab Las Vegas, El Paso, Durango, St George and a stretch of the Sea of Cortez. The rest of the country was scenery. I was building the place I am from and giving it a crown.

Ten months later the March of Arizona is one polity out of forty-nine and no longer the point of anything, but its borders are almost exactly what I drew at the beginning. It is the oldest thing here. Everything else got rewritten around it.

I also think growing up in the desert did something to how I write about places. A great deal of the Register is about water, distance, heat and the cost of getting things to people who live a long way from the capital, and I did not put that in on purpose. It is just what a place looks like to me.

How I got here

I got into history through Paradox games.

I know how that sounds to people who came to it through school or through books, and I have stopped apologising for it. Grand strategy games are not history and they will teach you some things that are flatly wrong, but they will also give you something no textbook gave me, which is a feel for history as a system. Not a sequence of events with dates, but a set of pressures acting on each other: succession law, terrain, trade, religion, legitimacy, distance, the difference between claiming a place and holding it. You lose a campaign because you did not understand how an inheritance worked, and then you go and read about how inheritances worked.

The Register is built out of that instinct. When I ask what would follow from a change, I am asking the question those games taught me to ask, which is not what would people have wanted but what would the machinery actually have done.

Europa Universalis, Crusader Kings and Victoria are the three I keep coming back to, and you can see all three in this project if you know where to look. The dynasties and the personal unions are Crusader Kings. The idea that a country is a set of institutions arguing with itself is Victoria. And the map, the constant temptation to redraw the map, is Europa Universalis and always will be.

The history I actually love

Here is the awkward part: my favourite periods are the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period, and I have built a setting that begins in 1775 and mostly concerns the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

I did not plan that either. The question I started with had a date attached to it and the date was not negotiable, so I ended up spending most of my time in a period I would not have chosen. It has been good for me. I have learned an enormous amount about the nineteenth century that I would never have gone looking for, and I have a much better sense now of how the medieval things I love actually ended, which is mostly by turning slowly into something else rather than by stopping.

The medieval instinct did survive in one place. The Realm is full of marches, palatinates, grand duchies, prince-bishops in the Lords, and titles that outlived whatever they were originally for, and that is not an accident. It is the one part of the setting I built for pleasure.

How this actually gets made

People ask about this more than I expected, so here is the honest version.

There is a single canon file behind the site, and it is the only thing that is truly authoritative. Every ruling I make about the world goes into it, in order, with dates. When something new contradicts something old, the file is where the contradiction gets caught, and the rule is that the file wins. It is now very long and it is the reason several hundred articles do not disagree with each other.

Most articles begin with real research. If I am writing about a language, a war, a constitution, or a public health system, I read about the real one first, and usually a good deal more than ends up on the page. The divergences only work if the thing they are diverging from is right.

Then there is a lot of asking myself questions. Long, tedious, specific questions: what is this office called, who holds it, who held it before, what happens if they die, who would be annoyed by that. Most of the interesting things in the Register came out of answering a question I did not think mattered.

And then the article gets written, checked against the canon file, and quite often sent back because it contradicted something I had forgotten I decided.

Things get rewritten constantly. If you find an article that has changed since you last read it, that is the system working rather than failing.

Away from all this

I like technology, reading, and watching television more than is probably defensible. I like learning things for no reason.

I love flying, mostly from the back these days, and I get to do it a great deal less than I would like, because a job and a family both have opinions about that. It is not a coincidence that this site has articles on seven airlines, a civil aviation authority and two airports, or that a fifty-year-old supersonic aircraft ended up with a plotline of its own. If you want to know what somebody actually cares about, look at what they wrote too much about.

Mostly, though, I like hanging out with my friends, travelling, and doing nothing in particular. I have spent a lot of hours building a very detailed world, and the thing that keeps it from becoming a problem is that I am not especially precious about it. It is the best hobby I have ever had. It is a hobby.

The arms

These are invented. The Ehlers family has no arms and never had any. Nobody granted them, no ancestor bore them, and there is no roll or armorial anywhere with our name in it. I made them up, recently, for a website. If you have come here looking for a real family coat of arms, this is not one, and you should be sceptical of anybody selling you one either.

I gave the family arms because it is the sort of thing you end up doing after ten months of writing about heraldry.

They are azure, a sheaf of three arrows argent, bound with a cord of copper: a closed tilting helm above, no crest, and two ravens either side. The arrows are a pun. Ehlers comes from the old German name Adalher, from adal and heri, noble and host, so three arrows bound into a sheaf is a host, and a bound one at that. Canting arms are the oldest joke in heraldry and I was not going to pass one up.

The helm is a closed tilting helm, which is the form a German burgher family is entitled to rather than the barred helm of the nobility, and choosing it correctly seemed more satisfying than claiming something we never had. The motto says the same thing: Gebaut, nicht geerbt. Built, not inherited.

The ravens are for the North German coast the name comes from. They are also the one part a heraldist would query, since supporters were an English privilege of peers and corporations and no burgher family had any business with them. I know. I wanted them anyway.

That last part is easier to say when you are not pretending to have inherited anything. Assuming arms without asking anybody is exactly how German burgher families got theirs, so in one narrow sense making these up is the most traditional thing about them.

Thanks

Sam Richardson has been an enormous help with this project. He has read a great deal of it, told me what was working and what was not, and been steadily encouraging about the whole thing for a lot longer than most people would have managed.

That last part matters more than it sounds. Building a world this size means making a very large number of decisions and then having to live with them, mostly alone, and the failure mode is not running out of ideas but quietly losing interest. Having somebody who actually reads the thing and says so is what keeps that from happening. A great deal of what is here is better for him being around, and some of it exists because he was still asking about it.

Come and find me

ehlersj41@gmail.com, or @UnivRegister on Twitter, which is faster.

I mean the invitation in the note seriously. Corrections, contradictions, requests, or just telling me you read something and liked it: all of it is welcome, and the last one more than people think.

Something I did not expect when I started: the world got interesting to me in a way it was not at the beginning. I set out to answer a question about America and a crown. What I actually built was a place with a language dying in Louisiane, a runic alphabet cut on gravestones in Minnesota, a Prime Minister who lost his ministry over a file nobody opened, and a Grand Duke who wanted to go to New York and was told, correctly, that he had no business being there.

None of those were in the plan. They are the reason I am still doing it.