They Changed Their World and Ours 11 Quiz

Answer: Henry VIII

Henry Tudor (1491-1547), the third child and second son of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York, reigned in England as Henry VIII for a relatively long time-1509-1547. His brother, Arthur, was due to be king, but as he died early, this responsibility fell on the shoulders of Henry, who then married Arthur's widow, Catherine of Aragon. For several years, Henry established great favor with the Catholic Church and its Popes through his sword (leading various military invasions and battles) and his pen (writing "Defence of the Seven Sacraments", which earned him the title of "Defender of the Faith" from Pope Leo X). However, after Catherine failed to provide him a male heir after two decades of marriage, Henry wanted an annulment. When the Pope refused to grant Henry what he wanted, Henry established his own national church separate from the Pope's authority, The Church of England. He set himself up as the "Supreme Head of the Church of England", granted himself an annulment, and began dissolving Catholic monasteries and convents and taking their property, the money from which he began using to support his own reckless spending. Often referred to as the English Reformation, Henry's actions together with Martin Luther's earlier Protestant Reformation led to the loss of the stranglehold the Roman Catholic Church had on the European continent and led to a more secularized European society.

Of course, as almost everyone knows, Henry's second marriage didn't last either, nor did the next three. He executed Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour died following the birth of Henry's only legitimate male heir, his marriage to Anne of Cleves was annulled, and then he executed Catherine Howard. His sixth wife Catherine Parr outlived him.

Henry VIII is also important for having tremendously and very wisely increased the size of the island nation's navy, which grew under his supervision from around ten ships to more than fifty. It would be this navy that would begin to establish world dominance under the reign of his daughter Elizabeth I. He also enforced the official union of Wales to England, became King of Ireland, and sufficiently handled Scotland militarily for most of his reign, all of which set the stage for the eventual United Kingdom we know today.

Answer: Margaret Sanger

Margaret Sanger (1879-1966) was born in Corning, New York, the sixth of eleven children. Her mother died at the age of 49 after being pregnant eighteen times in twenty-two years. Many of the chores and duties of a household and a mother then fell on the shoulders of Margaret, née Higgins, until she married architect William Sanger in 1902 and had three children of her own. Her father had been a "free-thinking" atheist and her husband was a supporter of leftist thinkers and politicians; influenced by her environment and her own experiences, Sanger joined the Women's Committee of the New York Socialist Party, began participating in strikes led the by Industrial Workers of the World (the Wobblies), and started work as a visiting nurse to the slums of the East Side of New York City. One day, while visiting a woman who was ill from having induced her own abortion, Sanger witnessed the attending doctor laughing at the woman's cry for help and telling the woman that if she wanted to avoid pregnancy, she should tell her husband to sleep on the roof. A few months later, Sanger returned to the woman's home because of another infection caused by another self-inflicted abortion. The woman died this time, and Sanger in fit of frustration vowed to do something for women in America to achieve access to birth control.

Sanger fled to Great Britain in 1914 after she was prosecuted for her book "Family Limitation", which educated women about the use of birth control. Authorities used the Comstock Act to charge her with a crime, as this law forbade individuals to use the postal service to disseminate material of a sexual nature. She remained in Britain until she felt she could safely return to the US. Then, in 1916, she was arrested after opening the first birth control clinic in the United States because the new establishment was distributing pamphlets concerning the use of contraception. Her trial and appeal of the resulting judgement created a tremendous amount of controversy, but in the end her legal hearings along with those of others who began following her lead led to the eventual legalization of contraception in the United States. In 1921, Sanger established the American Brith Control League, which eventually evolved into the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. From 1952-1959, she served the cause she so fervently defended by accepting the position of president of the International Planned Parenthood Federation. Over the course of her life, she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize thirty-one times, and William Marston claimed to have been inspired by Sanger when he created the comic book hero Wonder Woman.

Sanger was not a supporter of abortion as a means of birth control; however, she felt that abortion was sometimes justifiable and that women should not be prosecuted for seeking or having an abortion.

Recently, Sanger has been criticized by a number of individuals because of her positions concerning ideas related to eugenics, the practice of "improving" the genetic quality of a population by excluding certain groups believed to possess "inferior" genes and promoting other groups believed to possess "superior" genes. Sanger saw that certain populations around the world tended to increase their poverty, squalor, and disease because they became overpopulated with families consisting of too many children that they could not adequately support and nurture. These mothers tended to live lives of degradation and misery. While her support of the practice of negative eugenics, the use of social intervention to reduce reproduction of those considered "unfit", is offensive if not horrific to our society today, Sanger always maintained that her support of this practice was due to her duty to women and her belief that women held a duty first and foremost to themselves to seek their own happiness and to seek out and create environments in which they could be happy.

Answer: Alexander von Humboldt

Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) was born in Berlin, Prussia, a region now part of the larger nation of Germany. During his youth and early adulthood, Humboldt developed a passion for scientific expedition and traveled throughout various sections of Europe for the purposes of observation and experimentation. An early publication of his had an influence on the important German writer Goethe, whose Romantic philosophy in turn influenced Humboldt's worldview. Then in 1799, Humboldt embarked upon his famous Spanish American expedition that took him from Spain to the Canary Islands and then across the Atlantic to Venezuela, Cuba, Peru, Mexico, and New England. (The boundaries of Venezuela and Peru in Humboldt's time included lands recognized today as parts of Colombia and Ecuador).

Over the course of the last twenty-one years of his life he published his "Kosmos" in four volumes, and he was working on the final fifth volume, which was published posthumously, when he died. The impact of his published work as well as his discoveries is difficult to summarize. His studies spurred the development of several fields of science, including biogeography, physical geography, and meteorology, and laid the groundwork for contemporary geomagnetic and meteorological monitoring. He recorded mountains of data on various plant and animal species. He helped establish the view that the study of science should be a holistic or universal one (meaning a study that incorporated all the other scientific fields). He became one of the first scholars to propose that South America and Africa were at one point united as one landmass. He is considered the very first individual to argue for the reality of human-induced climate change. He discovered that the earth's magnetic field became less and less intense the farther one moved away from the poles to the equator. His use of isothermal lines on maps helped him demonstrate to others how elevation above sea level affects temperature and atmospheric disturbances. He had even a tremendous influence on the skill and study of cartography.

Answer: Erasmus

Desiderius Erasmus Roterdamus (ca.1466-1536) was born in The Netherlands, reportedly in Rotterdam though some have argued the city was Gouda. His namesake is Saint Erasmus of Formiae, a personal favorite of his father Gerard, who also made certain that his son received an education of the highest available quality at that time in monastic and Latin schools. Poverty eventually left Erasmus little choice but to seek a canonical life within the Church, and after taking vows in 1488, he was officially ordained as a priest in 1492.

In 1516, Erasmus published his collation of various Greek texts as the "Novum Instrumentum omne," or "All of the New Teaching," which served as the first publication of a modern critical Greek version of the New Testament. He eventually followed this with a publication of a compilation of Vulgate texts to offer a modern critical version of the Latin New Testament. The intended result of his simultaneous studies and simultaneous publications was to make the Greek and the Latin versions of the New Testament compatible as well as to make the unification of the two the basis for an understanding of Christianity.

Erasmus's New Testament coupled with his writings illustrating his disdain for religious dogmatism helped to ignite protesters like Martin Luther. In fact, Erasmus believed that many of the church's practices should be abolished or amended, and he supported the spread of the Gospel among the common people, expressing, "Would that the farmer might sing snatches of Scripture at his plow". However, while he admired Luther, he could never bring himself to support Luther's separation from the Catholic Church. Luther actively sought Erasmus's cooperation but was consistently frustrated and sometimes angered by Erasmus's refusal, which appeared to Luther to be cowardly. Erasmus defended his decision by explaining that he had always avoided connections with various factions so as not to appear biased in his work. He wanted to devote himself as much as possible to a pure approach to study. Furthermore, he feared that Luther's actions would force the nobility of Europe to respond with violence against innocent people. He also disagreed with Luther's view of predestination and the lack of free will. In one of his works, Erasmus ridicules Luther's concept. Luther responded with a work of his own that attacked the idea of free will and attacked Erasmus personally by claiming that Erasmus was not a Christian.

Answer: Marsilius of Padua

Marsilio dei Mainardini, aka Marsiglio da Padova, aka Marsilius of Padua, lived from circa 1275 to circa 1342. He was an Italian trained as a practitioner of medicine but was a celebrated scholar in other fields as well. He at one point served as the rector for the University of Paris. Though perhaps little known by our current societies, Marsilius of Padua's book "Defensor Pacis" (meaning "The Defender of Peace"), published in 1324, may well be the root of European secularism, nationalism, and popular sovereignty. Louis of Bavaria, the elected candidate for Holy Roman Emperor, had entered into conflict with Pope John XXII due to his policies in Italy. As a result, Pope John excommunicated Louis. Marsilius, a supporter of Louis and a detractor of Roman Catholicism, wrote "Defensor Pacis" to demonstrate through reason and Biblical authority that the Holy Roman Empire, and by extension any civil state, existed separately from the control of the Papacy. Marsilius demonstrated that Jesus never claimed any worldly position of power and never indicated that the church was to serve as a governing body. In fact, the New Testament, he argued, made clear that the church should be subordinate to the state. Ultimately, Marsilius concluded that both the church and the state were to be controlled by the will of the people themselves, and he envisioned societies existing as republics with elected officials who served the people in general. He also argued that democracy was the best form of government as it tended to legislate just laws that were more likely to be obeyed and it promoted the general welfare better than any other form of government. After Emperor Louis had Pope John deposed, he rewarded Marsilius with the position of Archbishop of Milan.

So significant and influential were Marsilius's ideas that Martin Luther, John Wycliffe, and Henry VIII were all students of "Defencis Pacis".

Answer: Guglielmo Marconi

Guglielmo Giovanni Maria Marconi, First Marquis of Marconi, (1874-1937) was born in Bologna, Italy, his father being an Italian aristocratic landowner and his mother, the granddaughter of the founder of Jameson & Sons whiskey distillers. Marconi attended no regular school as a child nor attended any college or institution of higher learning. All of his accomplishments were built upon the scientific and mathematical knowledge he acquired from private tutors paid for by his parents.

By December of 1894, Marconi had developed radio telegraphy, demonstrating its successful use to his mother by causing a bell to ring through wireless signals received by one machine on one side of a room and transmitted from another machine from the other side of the room. Eventually, through vertically polarized radio waves and grounded receivers and transmitters, Marconi was sending signals over the span of several miles rather than a few feet. His success gathered the attention of the British. He sent the first wireless message over open waters-nearly four miles over the Bristol Channel-in May of 1897: "Are you ready?" He demonstrated wireless telegraphy in the United States in 1899, and after the turn of the century, he was demonstrating its use by sending signals over the Atlantic Ocean. Still, there were skeptics and detractors, but following the use of radio during the tragedy of the sinking of the Titanic, Marconi and his wireless communication became truly famous.

In 1909, Marconi was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, and at his death in 1937, he was working on the development of microwaves. Perhaps, had he lived long enough, he would have been credited with the invention of microwave ovens and radar. Of course, the radio is more than significant enough. The 1920s turned the device into a medium for reaching massive numbers of people, particularly for the purposes of entertainment and advertisement, two fields that exploded into hugely profitable occupations. By 1995, the British Broadcasting Corporation's services were begin broadcast in forty-one different languages to over 160 million regular listeners in one hundred different countries, and the United States had 1.2 radios for every citizen.

Answer: P. T. Barnum

Phineas Taylor Barnum (1810-1891) was the son of Philo Barnum, a shop and inn keeper as well as a tailor; however, P. T. Barnum's true influece was his grandfather Phineas, who was a legislator and justice of the peace but more importantly a lottery schemer.

Barnum began his career as a general store owner before trying book auctioning, dealing in real estate, and operating a statewide lottery network. Eventually, he began his own weekly newspaper before finally settling on life as a showman. He opened a variety show he called "Barnum's Grand Scientific and Musical Theater" before buying Scudder's American Museum, which he quickly renamed Barnum's American Museum. While the museum exhibited many scientific curiosities, it also showcased hoaxes, which Barnum used profitably to his advantage. For example, the mummified remains of the Feejee or Fiji mermaid were really the head and torso of a monkey sewn to the bottom half of a large fish. General Tom Thumb, the so-called "Smallest Person that Ever Walked Alone", was really a four-year-old boy, at least when he first began working for Barnum. However, it was Tom Thumb that boosted Barnum's career by gaining Barnum an audience with Queen Victoria which in turn opened the doors to visiting many other royal families throughout Europe. Returning from this European tour, Barnum brought back to the United States Jinny Lind, the "Swedish Nightingale", by offering her $1000 per night for 150 nights to be paid in full up front and with all other expenses paid. This was a salary completely unheard of at this time. At the age of sixty, he established P. T. Barnum's Grand Traveling Museum, Menagerie, Caravan & Hippodrome, a traveling circus that showcased an assortment of animals as well as what the public considered "freakish" human beings. In 1881, Barnum partnered with James Bailey to create a larger, more successful traveling circus. After a split and a reunion, they named their phenomenon "Barnum & Bailey Greatest Show on Earth" and then later "Barnum & Bailey Circus".

Barnum was also involved in politics. He served four terms in the Connecticut legislature as a Republican and spoke against slavery, arguing, "A human soul, that God has created and Christ died for, is not to be trifled with. It may tenant the body of a Chinaman, a Turk, an Arab or a Hottentot-it is still an immortal spirit". He also served as mayor of Bridgeport, Connecticut, where he improved the city's water system, brought gas street lights, started Bridgeport Hospital, and fought against prostitution and the sale of liquor.

Barnum remains a controversial figure in United States history. While he has been creidited with the statement, "There's a sucker born every minute", there is no evidence that he ever said this. Nevertheless, his methods of operating his businesses certainly suggest that he was capable of such a remark. He often comes across as an unscrupulous individual who was concerned primarily with his own profit. Most people are unaware that he began his career as a showman by purchasing a slave woman who was blind and mostly paralyzed. Then, he exploited this human being by selling tickets to people so that they might view "the 161-year-old former nurse of George Washington", as he led people to believe. Even at her death, she was exploited as Barnum sold tickets for people to view her autopsy, which was performed in a New York saloon. He also frequently used morality to make a profit. He could not afford to pay Jinny Lind all the money he promised her, so he had to borrow $5,000 from a minister after convincing the man that Jinny Lind's presence in America would lead to a heightened sense of morality among Americans because of Lind's reputation as a charitable philanthropist. Furthermore, at one point, when Barnum was in debt, he toured and lectured as a temperance speaker, merely to make money for himself. In fact, Barnum himself coined the phrase "profitable philanthropy" to describe one of his business strategies.

He was also the master of "hype". He kept journalists on his payroll to write articles weeks if not months ahead of his appearances in their towns so that the masses would be worked up into great excitement to see whatever it was that he had to show to them.

Concerning all of the hoaxes, which Barnum himself referred to as "humbugs", Barnum saw nothing wrong about people's paying to see them. He often argued that the general public were well aware that many of the things he offered for viewing were not truly what they were purported to be and that they paid to see such sights merely from their own curiosity. He believed that all he did was excite people's interest through successful advertisement and then please them by allowing them to pay money to see what they wanted to see.

In the end, he had the Bridgeport newspaper print his obituary before his death so that he could read it himself before he died.

Answer: Zhu Xi

Zhu Xi (aka Chu Hsi, Yuanhui, or Hui'an) (1130-1200) became the prominent Neo-Confucian of China. He was a most precocious boy, asking at the age of only five years such profound questions as what existed beyond the heavens themselves. As an adult, he was eventually undone by politics. In 1179, he began a patterned of being appointed to a position within his government only to be demoted after criticising corruption and ineptitude in other officials or crossing other powerful individuals through his insistance on moral living. Eventually, a chief political rival, Han Tuozhou, had Zhu Xi arrested and eventually executed on charges of various crimes he was most likely innocent of committing. Despite the campaign to smear Xi's reputation, around a thousand people attended his funera, and after Tuozhou's death, Xi's version of Neo-Confucianism was made the dominant philosophy of the Song Dynasty.

Part of the popularity of Xi's philsophy was its explicit and clear ideas as wells as its emphasis on high moral purpose. Zhu Xi also rejected the Buddhist doctrine that the world is an illusion and argued that the physical universe was real and upheld by the same moral law that controls human behavior. He believed human nature was forged by a balanced combination of vital force and rationality; as a result, human nature is innately good and incorruptible. When a human appears to be evil, this appearance is the result of an imabalance that occurs when too much vital force overwhelms the rationality so that rationality is "clouded", so to speak, as a pearl might be in a bowl of dirty water.

Radically, rather than focusing on the "I Ching", Zhu Xi advocated the following of the "Four Books"--the "Great Learning", the "Doctrine of the Mean", the "Analects of Confucius", and the "Mencius". His commentaries on the "Four Books", though widely rejected at first, eventually became essential to Chinese society, and the "Four Books" became the core curriculum for the civil service exam in Imperial China from 1313 to 1905.

Answer: Babur

Babur (1483-1530) was born Zahir ud-Din Muhammad in Andijan in the Fergana Valley, located in what is now Uzbekistan. His great-great-grandfather was Amin Timur or Tamerlane, who was himself a descendant of Genghis Khan. He inherited his father's Fergana kingdom in 1494, and, because he was but twelve years old, he immediately faced rebellion and challenges to his rule. The next twenty-five years, give or take, Babur experienced a cycle of gains and losses. He would conquer neighboring territories, such as Samarkand and Kabul, only to lose what he had previously controlled. Then, when he would try to recapture previously held land, he would lose what he had newly captured. Eventually, Babur set his sight on the Indian subcontinent controlled by the Lodi dynasty. In 1526, he defeated Ibrahim Lodi's forces at the First Battle of Panipat and established his own empire, the Mughal Empire. Quickly, Rana Sanga of the Hindi Rajputana area of India rose to push Babur out of the subcontinent. Rana Sanga had initially supported Babur's attack on the Lodi dynasty; however, he turned on Babur when he realized Babur's goal was to remain in India and start his own empire. Nevertheless, Babur's forces handled Rana Sanga's threat in 1527 at the Battle of Khanwa.

Because Babur was himself highly influenced by Persian culture, his rule over a significant portion of the Indian subcontinent bathed the people and culture of this region in Persian practices and thought as well, practices and thought that linger to this day. Babur also wrote several poems and books, and his influence was increased through these media. Many of his poems exist as folk songs in the region. Many people in the areas of present-day Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, and northern India think of Babur as heroic or legendary.

Answer: Queen Victoria

Alexandrina Victoria of Kent (1819-1901) became Queen Victoria in June of 1837 and ruled until her death in 1901. The length of her rule is surpassed only by Queen Elizabeth II, and that same length of her reign is generally referred to as Great Britain's Victorian Era. During this time, Britain's government grew more democratic as it passed reform bills that extended the right to vote to more and more citizens. London became the center of the world for banking and commerce, and the population of this city grew from two million in 1837 to six and a half million by 1901. Britain was leading the world in technology and industry through the use of such advances in steam power, railways, iron ships, printing presses, combines, telegraphs, intercontinental cable, photography, anesthetics, and universal compulsory education. Britain controlled markets all over the world and had the largest navy and merchant fleet. Britain's empire consisted of so much real estate that it controlled nearly one quarter of the world's population.

During all of this, little was known of Victoria's influence upon Britain's policies and her nation's advancement. In fact, many supposed that she had little influence at all. However, after the publication of her very detailed diaries, written from 1832 until right before her death, the world discovered just how involved she was and just how extensive her influence was.

Queen Victoria and the Victorian culture in general are now often associated with sanctimoniousness or at least a moralistic demeanor. Victoria offered the following advice to her daughter about her behavior in the marriage bed: "Lie still, and think of the empire". Furthermore, as legend would have it, when presented with the possibility of a law forbidding sexual relations between women, Victoria refused to enact such a law because she believed no women would ever consent to behave in such a manner in the first place.

Victoria is often referred to as the "Grandmother of Europe". She and her husband Albert had nine children and forty-two grandchildren, many of who found themselves married to various royalty and nobility throughout Europe, connecting Britain with Russia, Greece, Spain, Denmark, and others. Unfortunately, Victoria was a carrier of the haemophilia B gene so that her youngest son Leopold suffered from haemophilia and two of her daughters-Alice and Beatrice-were themselves carriers of the illness. Victoria's great-grandson Alexei Nikolaevich, the son of Tsar Nicholas II and wife Alexandra, famously suffered from haemophilia and was treated, though improperly, by Rasputin.