Historical movers and shakers

[Mayabird]

I'm looking to make a list of "great men" types. I mean any person, male or female, that essentially came out of nowhere and changed history in some way. By that, I mean I don't want people who get remembered because of circumstance, like "Some neighboring kingdom invades, and the local king just so happens to be already there and gets remembered for stuff that happens." I also don't want people who are replaceable or interchangeable. No citing Newton for calculus since if he'd been dropped on the head as a kid, Leibniz had it covered, but if you can make a good case that it'd have taken a lot longer for someone else to figure out the laws of motion and that would've had a major effect on many things later, I'd count that.

The one that I think of off the top of my head is Genghis Khan. The Mongols were a bunch of warring tribes that would probably stay just like all the rest of the warring tribes all over the world. And then all of a sudden this guy Temujin takes over and unifies the tribes, institutes advanced tactics in the army, and conquers and/or slaughters half of Asia. It wouldn't have happened otherwise and everything gets changed dramatically.

[frigidmagi]

Cathrine the Great perhaps? A German noblewomen who married to a psycho Russian prince manages to convince enough people to support her to not only get a divorice but to throw her husband (who hung a rat for treason). Then manages to enlarge russia's domains and attempt some modernization.

[Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman]

I'm looking to make a list of "great men" types. I mean any person, male or female, that essentially came out of nowhere and changed history in some way. By that, I mean I don't want people who get remembered because of circumstance, like "Some neighboring kingdom invades, and the local king just so happens to be already there and gets remembered for stuff that happens."

Basically, you're talking about influence instead of fame, am I correct?

It seems there's already such list.

Fixed your bloody link,

-Stofsk

[frigidmagi]

It would be more impressive if the link wasn't busted to hell... Not sure why it is busted.

[Mayabird]

I'm looking to make a list of "great men" types. I mean any person, male or female, that essentially came out of nowhere and changed history in some way. By that, I mean I don't want people who get remembered because of circumstance, like "Some neighboring kingdom invades, and the local king just so happens to be already there and gets remembered for stuff that happens."

Basically, you're talking about influence instead of fame, am I correct?

It seems there's already such list.

It's not influence per se. A king who inherits a powerful country and army from his dad could be highly influential but not on this list. I don't want people who just so happen to be there or is a part of an existent trend. Someone who invents something that probably would've been invented a few years later by someone else because there was a lot of interest also stays off.

I also highly disagree with that list. A bunch of people shouldn't be there.

[Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman]

It's not influence per se.

The one that I think of off the top of my head is Genghis Khan. The Mongols were a bunch of warring tribes that would probably stay just like all the rest of the warring tribes all over the world. And then all of a sudden this guy Temujin takes over and unifies the tribes, institutes advanced tactics in the army, and conquers and/or slaughters half of Asia. It wouldn't have happened otherwise and everything gets changed dramatically.

Well I it seems to me that what the author means by "influence" is similar with what you're thinking; people that changed history in certain ways that without their existence, the change just wouldn't happened. Only your definition is more strict that Hart's, because he still includes people that are "interchangeable" in his list (Cortes in an example), am I correct?

[Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman]

It would be more impressive if the link wasn't busted to hell... Not sure why it is busted.

IIRC, Adam once posted a tip on how to include "(" or ")" in a link, but I don't exactly remember the tip anymore. :sad:

I'm going to search some old threads.

[Stofsk]

I'm looking to make a list of "great men" types. I mean any person, male or female, that essentially came out of nowhere and changed history in some way. By that, I mean I don't want people who get remembered because of circumstance, like "Some neighboring kingdom invades, and the local king just so happens to be already there and gets remembered for stuff that happens." I also don't want people who are replaceable or interchangeable. No citing Newton for calculus since if he'd been dropped on the head as a kid, Leibniz had it covered, but if you can make a good case that it'd have taken a lot longer for someone else to figure out the laws of motion and that would've had a major effect on many things later, I'd count that..

Based on the above criteria, I nominate Thomas Edward Lawrence, colloquially known as Lawrence of Arabia.

Lawrence was no doubt a great man. He was quite the insurgent and desert fighter, and train wrecker. He also had big plans for the Arabs and had hoped that Great Britain would honour the agreement they had with them, namely grant them independence. At least some of the continual problems plaguing the Middle-East no doubt comes from the fact Britain and France fucked over the Arabs after the conflict.

But Lawrence came out of nowhere. He was literally stuck in a Cairo bureau as an intelligence officer, and might have stayed there if he wasn't even slightly ambitious and had the desire to assist the war effort in a more tangible way.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

By chronological order (roughly):

The King of Kings Sargon the Great: The first man in history to unify city-states into a cohesive Empire. Every other Empire-builder in history followed in his footsteps.

The Prophet Zoroaster: The founder of the first widely spread and popular monotheistic religion in history, Zoroaster is unquestionably the man who was able to define the religious history of the whole western world.

Pythagoreas: Womens' rights, geometry, vegetarianism, he stamped his mark on fields so vast, and so far in advance of everyone else, as to define much of the debate that followed in the history of western philosophy. Archimedes and Heron but followed in his footsteps.

Solon of Athens: The architect of democracy, and therefore of the whole political history of the recent world, universally pervasive through all peoples and cultures.

Epaminondas of Thebes: As the innovator of the tactics which were used by Philip II and Alexander, he created the climate for their tremendous victories.

Qin Shi Huangdi: The developer, architect, and executor of the first centralized totalitarian police state in world history. His grim shadow has had countless imitators--none of them quite so good at the job of oppression as the First Sovereign Emperor, and all pale shadows of him--and guaranteed the unity of China, and much of its culture to the present day, causing huge influence on a vast swathe of the human race.

Caesar Augustus Octavianus: Julius was the better General, but Octavian's political reforms created an Empire which lasted for nearly 1,500 years after his death, defined every form of European monarchy, and guaranteed that Rome would last long enough to decisively influence the culture of all of Europe.

Petrarch: His reinvigoration of classical literature blew open the door for the Renaissance to take place, and therefore for all rational inquiry that followed from its innovations. Without him, the great and influential scientists of the 17th century, Newton, et al., would have never have lived in a climate in which they could have succeeded in changing our views of the universe.

Hernan Cortez: The man every other Imperialist sought to emulate; his conquest of Mexico opened the way for the complete destruction of traditional Mesoamerica and Peruvian civilization and its redevelopment on western lines. Two-thirds of the Americas were fated to be destroyed and remade by the courage and intelligence, the bravery and the sheer brutality, of his actions. Latin American culture is an eternal monument to his fame, for good or ill, and all colonial efforts after him are but imitations of his supreme effort.

Peter the Great: He completely reformed the otherwise Oriental world of Slavdom on western lines, and therefore opened up the "dark half" of the European continent into the age of Reason, and with it, a course for political and industrial power which would culminate in the orbit of the first man in space--and the gulags and tens of millions dead.

Voltaire: Created the climate of the modern world. Without him, the French Revolution might well have not happened, nor Napoleon come to power, nor would the time have been right for the fruits of Solon's old ideas to be reinterpreted into modern democracy in its vastness.

Woodrow Wilson: Demonize him, certainly, but if he hadn't forced the concept of nationalist democracy on the Versailles conference, the world today would be incomprehendably different, as would our ideas of government and international relationships. Millions died due to his decisions, and their legacy continues to kill millions more; hundreds of countries were formed because of his ideas, and hundreds of wars and conflicts fought; he was the final key in the propagation of the universal shibboleth of modern humanity, democratic society.

[Comrade Tortoise]

Charles Darwin: A failure in med school and a mediocre theology student at best, connections got him a position on the HMS Beagle as the Captain's Companion (IE the guy the elitist captain talked to over dinner to avoid depression) When he returned, he came up with the idea, natural selection, that unified all of biology

[Mayabird]

Charles Darwin: A failure in med school and a mediocre theology student at best, connections got him a position on the HMS Beagle as the Captain's Companion (IE the guy the elitist captain talked to over dinner to avoid depression) When he returned, he came up with the idea, natural selection, that unified all of biology

Oof. Tricky here. I was thinking about using Darwin as another example but I wasn't entirely sure if he'd fit my criteria. Alfred Russel Wallace figured out natural selection independently, although Darwin did think of it first and had twenty years more knowledge, thinking, and evidence to back it up. Of course, with just an essay and not The Origin of Species to drop on the world, things would have been quite different. Probably the evolution (ha) of the theory would have been much slower, for better or worse and with subsequent changes from then on. But then again, Darwin also did a lot of important research in many other fields. So I don't know. Really big and important? Yes. Fits the definition I made? Dunno.

Also, medicine totally sucked back then. You can't really blame him for not wanting to cut screaming conscious patients.


Also, thanks everyone. Keep 'em coming if you can.

[Lord Iames Osari]

Adolf Hitler springs immediately to mind.

[Stofsk]

Adolf Hitler springs immediately to mind.

Yeah, but he was a cunt.

[Josh]

Adolf Hitler springs immediately to mind.

Yeah, but he was a cunt.

A cunt who changed the world from out of nowhere, though.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Hitler didn't do anything that large numbers of people before him had done, he just used industrial technology to do so. That doesn't qualify him as having as much impact on the world as someone who'd begun the process of conquering other peoples and killing all their men and selling the women and children into slavery, i.e., Sargon and the Akkadians, who pretty much started large-scale war and tribute collecting Empires. Before then people just skirmished over cropland.

I might add Muhammad to my list, however: He was the first person to combine the teachings of monotheistic religion as propagated by Zoroaster and the Empire-building innovations of Sargon into a single cohesive whole as an ideology, and that was an extremely world-changing innovation for a spice trader from Mecca. His ideology also guaranteed the advance of Islam by creating a systematic process of a religion bent on conquest.

There might be two other people who also warrant inclusion, both around the development of Christianity as a universal religion. Cortez, of course, is responsible for spreading it to the New World on top of everything else he did, but in Europe itself there was no guarantee that it would become top dog, and of course it's been hugely influential in the world. China has swallowed most religions whole and spat them out into more of its syncretic cultural melange, so I'd say there's only room for one other person on the "great missionary" list, namely, if any single person was responsible for Buddhism in Southeast Asia. Otherwise religious patterns don't show much of a chance to have been spread largely by one person, except the "great religious philosopher" who started them--who is just walking in the footsteps of Zoroaster.

So, for those two great missionaries:

Constantine the Great: Oh, come on, this one is obvious. Augustus made Europe Roman; Constantine made it Christian, and it's still both of those things today.

Anna Porphyrogeneta: Without her, Slavdom would have never become Christian. Peter the Great made it modern; but she established the ties to the modern world through Christendom. She was a very canny woman, well-versed in court politics and intelligent enough to navigate them well, sister of the perpetual bachelor, Basil II Bulgaroktonos, who had refused marriage to the King of France and the Holy Roman Emperor before.

In Vladimir of Kiev, however, she either saw something she liked, or was aware of the magnitude of converting the other half of the European continent to Christianity and went along with it out of sake of duty. For Vladimir's part, well, the guy certainly had to like her quite a lot, considering her had to get rid of nearly eight hundred wives and concubines to marry her in a Christian ceremony. How many women are there that would get a guy to give up eight hundred other women for her? And then go back home and demolish a massive number of pagan sites and spend lots of treasure on building new Christian basilicas. There's nothing to suggest any other woman would have been able to get to the heart of the very worldly Vladimir, who previously rejected Islam because he liked booze to much.

[Josh]

Hitler changed the public perception of genocide, though. Every reference to genocide almost always refers back to the Holocaust. That in and of itself is quite significant.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Hitler changed the public perception of genocide, though. Every reference to genocide almost always refers back to the Holocaust. That in and of itself is quite significant.

But he would have never been able to gain power like he did if Wilson hadn't meddled with Versailles to the point of succeeding only in making it to stiff for the Germans to be happy with it, but still to weak to succeed in crippling Germany.

[Josh]

But he would have never been able to gain power like he did if Wilson hadn't meddled with Versailles to the point of succeeding only in making it to stiff for the Germans to be happy with it, but still to weak to succeed in crippling Germany.

Nobody makes movements in a vacuum. Certainly conditions were primed for him to do his thing, but a large part of leadership acumen is precisely in determining which way the mob is moving and jumping in front of it at the right moment.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

But he would have never been able to gain power like he did if Wilson hadn't meddled with Versailles to the point of succeeding only in making it to stiff for the Germans to be happy with it, but still to weak to succeed in crippling Germany.

Nobody makes movements in a vacuum. Certainly conditions were primed for him to do his thing, but a large part of leadership acumen is precisely in determining which way the mob is moving and jumping in front of it at the right moment.

But that doesn't qualify as being unique or revolutionary enough in nature to warrant inclusion on this specific list.

[Josh]

But that doesn't qualify as being unique or revolutionary enough in nature to warrant inclusion on this specific list.

I'd call it borderline myself. Until somebody tops the productivity of the Holocaust and gets so publicly outed for it, Hitler's going to be -the- Genocide Guy in Western Civ.

[Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman]

Also, medicine totally sucked back then. You can't really blame him for not wanting to cut screaming conscious patients.

Wait, wait. This reminds me of something.

Who's the guy who invented modern anesthesia? I don't quite remember, but I think his name is T.G. Morton or such. I think he deserved to be put on the list --I mean, imagine the world today without anesthesia!

[Destructionator XV]

The thing with science is if you take the guy out who is noted for it, someone else almost certainly would have developed it in about the same time frame (or at most, plus about 20 years). It seems to me that this is true of all scientific related disciplines - from the tools (mathematics) to the applications (such as medicine and engineering).

Science simply isn't a revolutionary field. Every advance is someone making evolutionary advancements to the vast amount of previous work done. The only reason most the advancements didn't come earlier is we didn't have the technology yet to make the appropriate measurements. Once it is available, there are many researchers worldwide who work on it, and many times, they solve the same problem independently at about the same time.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

The thing with science is if you take the guy out who is noted for it, someone else almost certainly would have developed it in about the same time frame (or at most, plus about 20 years). It seems to me that this is true of all scientific related disciplines - from the tools (mathematics) to the applications (such as medicine and engineering).

Science simply isn't a revolutionary field. Every advance is someone making evolutionary advancements to the vast amount of previous work done. The only reason most the advancements didn't come earlier is we didn't have the technology yet to make the appropriate measurements. Once it is available, there are many researchers worldwide who work on it, and many times, they solve the same problem independently at about the same time.

That's why I chose for the scientific advancement category entirely Philosophers, because they were responsible for establishing the framework in which scientific progress could take place, rather than simply participating in the evolutionary process itself, which does not need the major achievements of singular individuals nearly so much as the act of setting up the intellectual climate for science does. So Petrarch is more important to the Renaissance than Galileo or Copernicus.

[Mayabird]

Wait, wait. This reminds me of something.

Who's the guy who invented modern anesthesia? I don't quite remember, but I think his name is T.G. Morton or such. I think he deserved to be put on the list --I mean, imagine the world today without anesthesia!

The thing with science is if you take the guy out who is noted for it, someone else almost certainly would have developed it in about the same time frame (or at most, plus about 20 years). It seems to me that this is true of all scientific related disciplines - from the tools (mathematics) to the applications (such as medicine and engineering).

Science simply isn't a revolutionary field. Every advance is someone making evolutionary advancements to the vast amount of previous work done. The only reason most the advancements didn't come earlier is we didn't have the technology yet to make the appropriate measurements. Once it is available, there are many researchers worldwide who work on it, and many times, they solve the same problem independently at about the same time.

Modern anesthesia is a perfect case in point. Although Morgan gets the credit most of the time, a doctor in rural Georgia (a little town called Jefferson, about ten miles from where I lived) named Crawford Long actually discovered it a few years earlier. (He didn't publish until afterwards, so no credit for him.) He'd gotten the idea (according to the stories) by watching some college students party with diethyl ether and noticing how they'd get injured and not feel pain from it. Apparently it was the hip drug of the time. If it hadn't been Long or Morgan, no doubt someone else would have come across it sooner or later, and probably sooner.

[frigidmagi]

Well what about Einstein? I mean before he came along people were pushing the idea of the Ether of the universe and all. Was there anyone else working a theory of relativity or anything close at the time?