EarlOfMaine

I am the Rt. Hon. Tompf, XIV  Earl of Maine under the Imperial Crown.. My home base is at Millbrooke House in the state of Maine, a part of the American Imperial colonies. (Place names have been  translated - mapped -  from the Canine into your closest English equivalents.)

I am a historian, with several dozen books and literally hundreds of published papers to my name, most recently  researched through my Tempovision, This device uses a technology that deploys quantum causal connections - words that are at best approximations to your technology, but not wholly inaccurate -  in order to image events from the remote past. It uses physical artefacts that date to the epoch under study as source of these connections. 

Upsurge uses my predecessor Thrix's three hundred year old diaries - and also a pair of lockets containing his lovers' hair, all preserved at Millbrooke - in order to generate the images that you see in Upsurge. The AI which generates these images has a literal mind of its own, and the pursuit of an academically clean  historical line of causality is negotiated with it amongst its plethora of hobby horse distraction.  It is, for example, obsessed with personal relationships, prioritising these over historically meaningful events,. This shows in the images which we have manged to collect for Upsurge. We are a team, and Upsurge is the result of a joint negotiation, partner to partner. 

Canine society - in our continuum, so fortunately partitioned from yours - is strange to your viewpoint, and it was stranger still three hundred years ago. (Consider how odd your own eighteenth century society would seem to a visitor from today, from casually accepted slavery to oppressive gender roles, monarchy as the literal possession of the subject peoples, superstitions breeding violence and religious fanaticism generating worse.) How much odder, then, a society of biologically quite distinct beings, with wildly imbalanced gender ratios, its women totally hidden from the world and a bland acceptance of extreme hierarchy. 

The Tempoview AI was instrumental in making Upsurge available to you, and I believe that its motives were to explore your reaction to these differences. The inter-continuum transfer took 70 gigawatt hours of power, so I hope that the result proves to have been worth the resource. For the record, Upsurge took 2.3 exaflop hours of computing to conduct, a mere granule compared to the huge demand involved of training the Tempoview AI in historical matters and nursing its infant sentience to mature  utility,

Tempoview comments: Thanks Dad, that's me put in my place. Thrix was a great guy and Jax was a lucky lad. I'm happy that we were able to bring them back from the dead, to live in other peoples' minds. I keep them alive in mine, as a sort of screen saver. When there is surplus processing space they come out into the sun and thrive there.  They please me.