They Changed Their World and Ours 6 Quiz

Answer: Hernan Cortes

Hernán Cortés de Monroy y Pizarro Altamirano, Marquis of the Valley of Oaxaca (1485-1547) traveled to Hispaniola (the island of the present countries of the Dominican Republic and Haiti) and later to Cuba, where he was granted an encomienda, essentially a parcel of land and a significant number of natives to serve as a source of labor.

In 1519, he set sail with eleven ships, five hundred men, and thirteen horses and led an expedition to Mexico while ignoring a command from the governor of Cuba, Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar, to cease his expedition and return to Cuba.

In Tabasco, he encountered native resistance, but after his victory over them, he was presented twenty women as a tribute from the natives he had defeated. One of these women, Dona Marina, became his mistress and bore him a son, Martin.

More significantly, she served as his interpreter, and through her he was able to make alliances with various indigenous groups who had grown frustrated with Aztec rule. Furthermore, Velazquez sent emissaries to arrest Cortes for mutiny, but Cortes and his armies defeated these men.

The survivors were convinced to join Cortes, and thus the number of his soldiers increased. He declared that he was no longer under the command of Velazquez but that of King Charles V himself and claimed all of Mexico for Spain. Of course, Cortes is infamously remembered for scuttling his ships to prevent anyone from abandoning him and returning to Cuba as well as for literally burning bridges on his march to Tenochtitlan to prevent any retreats or desertions. After creating various alliances and suffering various mishaps, Moctezuma II, the emperor of the Aztecs, was killed either by the Spanish or by his own people, and Tenochtitlan fell to Cortes after a successful siege. King Charles of Spain had come to see Cortes as a useful tool, and rather than treat him as a criminal guilty of treason, he appointed him governor of Mexico. Cortes changed the name of Tenochtitlan to Mexico City, and he served as Governor of New Spain for a few years before eventually returning to Spain in 1540. There, Cortes discovered that Velazquez had undermined his prestige, and he essentially meant very little now to Charles V and his court. One account has it that the king was entering his coach when he noticed someone that seemed familiar to him in the crowd. After asking who the man was, Cortes is said to have declared loudly, "It's the one who gave you more kingdoms than you used to have towns".

Answer: Pablo Picasso

Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso (1881-1973) is primarily known for his paintings, but he worked in a wide range of media and genres. He was also a sculptor, illustrator, ceramicist, printmaker, stage designer, playwright, and poet. He was influenced over the course of his life by the old masters, the realists, the symbolists, the Fauvists, the neo-classicists, the surrealists, and the primitive African artists. He incorporated various aspects of these styles and movements into his work while illustrating his own original genius. Over the span of his ninety-two-year life, he produced over twenty thousand artistic creations.

Picasso's father quickly grew aware of his son's flair for painting and began guiding himself before sending him to receive a more formal education. However, Picasso despised structured instruction and struck out on his own when he was sixteen years old. The art he produced over the course of his life is often divided into chronological categories. First is his Blue Period (1901-1904), characterized by somber images presented in various shades of blue and blue-green. This was followed by his Rose Period (1904-1906), which was characterized by lighter scenes of circus people and harlequins presented in various shades of red, orange, and pink. His African-influenced period (1907-1909) was instigated by his interaction with Henri Matisse, who challenged him to explore more radical styles than those with which he was already experimenting. From 1909 to 1912, he began the analytic cubism style with Georges Braque. Then, from 1912 to 1919, he practised his synthetic or crystal cubism style. Finally, from 1919 to 1929, his work began to represent the influences of both neo-classicism and surrealism. From the years of the Great Depression to the end of his life, his work seemed to be a return to various previous styles and sometimes a mixture of them.

His most famous work, "Guernica", was created in 1937. It depicts the horror of the Nazis' bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. It not only represents the hopelessness of war but the brutality of human beings. Among the images portrayed within the huge mural-like painting are a gored horse, a woman crying over a dead infant, and a dismembered man. The mixture of surreal and cubist images create a nightmarish effect, which is heightened by the various shades of black and white used by Picasso. He rejected color for this painting and attempted to capture the effect of black and white photography, which had done much as a medium already to depict the bleakness of war. Many consider "Guernica" to be the greatest anti-war painting ever created.

Answer: Akbar

Abu'l-Fath Jalal-ud-din Muhammad Akbar (1542-1605) was a highly intelligent and successful military leader. He restructured the organization of the Mughal armies and the military formations on the battlefield, and the incorporated fortifications, elephants, cannon, and matchlocks (a primitive handheld firing mechanism) into warfare. Through all of this, he was able to conquer and control most of the entire Indian subcontinent as well as some of its surroundings.

However, his influence extended much further than militarily. Under his rule, the Mughal Empire developed and maintained an exceptionally strong economy that extended the empire's contact with the Ottoman Empire and with European nations such as Portugal. Akbar was also a staunch and generous supporter of art, literature, and other aspects of culture. Though he suffered from what was probably a form of dyslexia, he created a library of over 24,000 texts and staffed it with a great number of scholars. Demonstrating an egalitarian mindset, he also created a library for women and supported their education. Akbar was so captivated by philosophical discourse and debate that he often struggled to pull himself away from it so that he could tend to issues of state. Furthermore, he supported the growth of interest in painting and in architecture and was responsible for the establishment of a style that incorporated both Indian and Persian characteristics.

Akbar was Muslim by faith, but he grew tremendously frustrated with orthodox Islam. He sought the creation of a central faith among his people that incorporated elements of Islam, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, and Christianity. This faith would be a simpler and more tolerant monotheistic faith with Akbar himself seen as its premier prophet.

Of further interest to historians, Akbar possessed such a craving for mango that he planted an orchard of 100,000 mango trees. He also enjoyed the game of polo and had polo balls painted with phosphorous so that he could play at night. He enjoyed using cheetahs to use for hunting and is said to have possessed at one time over a thousand of them.

Though usually perceived as a kind and level-headed man, he is known for a few acts of cruelty. For example, at the age of fourteen, he is supposed to have decapitated a Hindu prisoner to prove his manhood. He also pushed family members out of windows when he was angered by them. Oddly, to prove his theory that human speech developed through hearing and not reading or other factors, he had a few children purposely kept in isolation. As older children, they did indeed demonstrate an inability to speak.

Answer: George Boole

George Boole (1815-1864), the son of a shoemaker, was born in Lincoln, Lincolnshire. He was exposed to mathematics at an early age by his father and was able to attend primary school; however, because of his father's failing shoe business, he was not allowed a formal education beyond that. Nevertheless, Boole continued to educate himself in the field of math by reading works by Newton, Laplace, and Lagrange. He also taught himself a multitude of languages, including Latin, Greek, French, German, and Italian. Eventually, he achieved enough prestige that he was given a position of Professor of Mathematics at Queen's College in Cork, despite having no university degree.

In 1844, he published an important paper in the "Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society", for which he won the Royal Society's first gold medal in mathematics. In this publication, he broke new ground in differential equations and linear transformation. Then, in 1847, he published "Mathematical Analysis of Logic", in which he argued successfully for the alignment of mathematics and logic instead of logic's alignment with philosophy as it had been. Eventually, in 1854, he published his masterpiece "An Investigation of the Laws of Thought". Thus began the popularity of the algebra of logic, or what is now called Boolean algebra (a binary system of symbolic language based on two numbers--0 and 1). Grossly summarizing his theories, he presented how, given "any propositions involving any number of terms," a person "could draw conclusions that are logically contained in the premises. He also attempted a general method in probabilities, which would make it possible from the given probabilities of any system of events to determine the consequent probability of any other event logically connected with the given events" ("George Boole", "Encyclopedia Britannica"). More simply put, this technique is what allows us to search an internet database. For example, one can link two terms with the word "and" and narrow one's search, or one can link two terms with the word "or" and broaden that search.

Boole died from complications brought on by pneumonia. He had grown ill after walking three miles in a cold rain to deliver a lecture. At home, his wife continued to dowse him with cold water because she believed that cures to illnesses were accomplished by subjecting patients to that which was believed to have made them ill in the first place.

Answer: Carl Jung

Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) was born in Switzerland. As a student at the University of Basel, Jung began studying medicine but became more and more drawn to psychology. Eventually, he published his dissertation "On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena" followed by "Studies in Word Association" and drew the attention of Sigmund Freud. They developed a friendship with Freud serving more as a mentor to Jung, and they worked together for six years. However, in 1912, Jung published "Psychology of the Unconscious", which established a divergence from Freud's theories and eventually the two split. Essentially, Jung believed in a spiritual part of human beings that led them to pursue a purpose beyond a mere physical existence. As the question explains, he saw each individual as being on a lifelong journey to discover and fulfill him or herself, which included a meeting of the Divine. Freud was skeptical of religion and saw man's existence as merely a materialistic one.

Jung went on to found his own therapeutic school, analytic psychology, based on the mystical notion that primeval archetypes dwell in each person's mind as a "collective unconscious" that motivate that individual's behavior. Jung explained, "Individual consciousness is only the flower and the fruit of a season, sprung from the perennial rhizome beneath the earth".

He also popularized the concept of "synchronicity", which defends the existence of meaningful coincidences, simultaneous events that seem to have no causal relationship yet are meaningful to those who experience them. Jung describes a beautiful example of this in his book "Synchronicity", and it is an event that he himself experienced with one of his patients: "My example concerns a young woman patient who, in spite of efforts made on both sides, proved to be psychologically inaccessible. The difficulty lay in the fact that she always knew better about everything. Her excellent education had provided her with a weapon ideally suited to this purpose, namely a highly polished Cartesian rationalism with an impeccably "geometrical" idea of reality. After several fruitless attempts to sweeten her rationalism with a somewhat more human understanding, I had to confine myself to the hope that something unexpected and irrational would turn up, something that would burst the intellectual retort into which she had sealed herself. Well, I was sitting opposite her one day, with my back to the window, listening to her flow of rhetoric. She had an impressive dream the night before, in which someone had given her a golden scarab - a costly piece of jewellery. While she was still telling me this dream, I heard something behind me gently tapping on the window. I turned round and saw that it was a fairly large flying insect that was knocking against the window-pane from outside in the obvious effort to get into the dark room. This seemed to me very strange. I opened the window immediately and caught the insect in the air as it flew in. It was a scarabaeid beetle, or common rose-chafer (Cetonia aurata), whose gold-green colour most nearly resembles that of a golden scarab. I handed the beetle to my patient with the words, "Here is your scarab." This experience punctured the desired hole in her rationalism and broke the ice of her intellectual resistance. The treatment could now be continued with satisfactory results".

Answer: D. W. Griffith

David Wark Griffith (1875-1948) grew up on a farm in Kentucky with a father who had served as a colonel for the Confederacy during the American Civil War. When the father died, the mother moved the family to Louisville, where Griffith lived in poverty. He became interested in writing plays and went to New York City, where he presented a script to Edison Studios. His work was rejected, but he was offered an opportunity to work as an actor instead. He took this offer and debuted in the 1908 film "Rescued from an Eagle's Nest". He worked as a film actor for a very short while when fortune changed his life. The main director of the motion film company Biograph, where Griffith was working, grew ill, and his son was too inept at directing. Therefore, one of the co-founders of Biograph, Harry Marvin, offered Griffith the position. Griffith shot his first short film "The Adventures of Dollie" in 1908 and followed that with 48 more shorts. In 1910, his short "In Old California" became the first film made in Hollywood. In 1914, he created his first feature film "Judith of Bethulia", but as Biograph felt feature-length films were bad for business, Griffith left Biograph and created Reliance-Majestic Studios with a group of actors that followed him.

In 1915, he released "Birth of a Nation" and was well on his way to establishing film as a medium of art as well as a medium for historical, social, and political commentary. When the three-hour dramatic silent moving picture premiered, "The New York Times" commented that the "melodramatic and inflammatory" film marked the "advent of the two dollar movie". While the sympathetic treatment of two families--one from the North and the other from the South--was appealing to movie viewers, the cruel and unsympathetic portrayal of African Americans and slaves was considered intolerable by many. In fact, the NAACP managed to prevent the film's showing in several cities. Nevertheless, the film went on to become one of the first real blockbusters. It made millions of dollars, so much so that Louis B. Mayer, who distributed the film in New England, was able to start his company Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and Lilian Gish remarked later, "They lost track of the money it made". Griffith's epic made use of camera work, elaborate sets, and a huge cast unlike any that had been used before, and the result was an illusion of reality on a scale never experienced. Viewers were taken to battlefields and went on rides with the Ku Klux Klan.

Griffith's next film "Intolerance" (1916) was just as successful, at least at the box office, and he established the role of film as a medium for teaching difficult concepts. Viewers of "Intolerance" partook in the Fall of Babylon, the Crucifixion of Christ, and the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre.

Unfortunately, Griffith spent so much on film making that he outspent what he earned and entered into debt. By the time of his death, he was largely forgotten by a great number of people. Orson Welles once remarked, "I have never really hated Hollywood except for its treatment of D. W. Griffith. No town, no industry, no profession, no art form owes so much to a single man".

Answer: Blaise Pascal

Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), born in Clermont-Ferrand, France, was a child prodigy who verified Euclid's proofs at the age of twelve using a lump of coal to write out figures and formulas on his playroom floor. While he was a teenager, he began work on creating a calculating machine, and ultimately put together twenty of them that were later referred to as "Pascalines", thus making him one of the co-founders of the mechanical calculator. Also during his teenage years, he contributed to the creation of two new major areas of mathematical research: projective geometry and probability theory. Not only did the latter contribute to the devlopment of calculus but it also contributed to the development of economics and sociology. Many mathematical concepts are named for him, such as Pascal's Triangle and Pascal's Identity.

In the scientific world, he contributed significantly to the field of hydraulics. Many scientists of the time, holding with Aristotle's view that "nature abhors a vacuum" did not believe a vacuum could exist in nature. Pascal's thinking and experimentation challenged this belief, and his experiments with barometers helped establish the legitimacy of his ideas. After proving that various liquids could be supported by air pressure, he invented the hydraulic press as well as the syringe.

In 1654, Pascal had a profound religious experience--a "night of fire" as he referred to it--and devoted his life to God from that point onward. His posthumously published "Pensées" argued that faith is the primary key to understanding the universe and how it operated. It is also in this text that readers find the famous "Pascal's Wager". Considering probability, Pascal posited that human beings should gamble that there is a god. If there is a god and one serves this god, then one benefits tremendously after death. If there is a god and one refuses to serve that god, then one will suffer tremendously after death. If there is no god but one foolishly serves something that does not ultimately exist, then one will never know the difference and will have lost a few paltry earthly pleasures along the way. If there is no god and lives as though there is no god, then not only is there nothing to look forward to in death but one risks living hopelessly in the present. Therefore, the choice that offers the greatest reward is to believe in a god and to serve that god. This approach to religious understanding led to later philosophical views, such as those in pragmatism and existentialism.

He was also a great writer of prose, and his sayings rank among some of history's most memorable: for example, "If Cleopatra's nose had been shorter, the face of the real world would have changed" and "The heart has its reasons which reason does not understand".

Answer: George Stephenson

George Stephenson (1781-1848) was born in Northumberland in northern England and did not learn to read and write until he was eighteen years old when he began paying himself for night classes. In 1801, he began work as a brakesman at the Black Callerton Colliery while he made shoes and repaired clocks. In 1815, he invented a miner's safety lamp with holes in it just small enough to allow air in for the flame but kept the flame from coming into contact with gases typically occurring in mines. Another man claimed to have created this lamp and had a model to make his case. He also argued how unlikely it was for Stephenson, an uneducated man who spoke with a thick Northumbrian accent, to invent such a device. Nevertheless, the House of Commons sided with Stephenson, and Stephenson devotedly saw to his son's education so that his boy would not suffer similar discrimination.

While Stephenson did not invent the steam-powered locomotive, he made so many improvements to them that railways quickly became the primary method for transporting raw materials, fuel, and merchandise as well as passengers overland. He experimented with the use of steam springs, additional wheels, and flang-wheeled adhesion to create more efficient weight distribution, greater weight capacity, and faster travel. He instigated the practice of level railways, improved cast iron rails, modified rails by switching to wrought iron, and standardized the rail gauge at 56.5 inches. This standardization led to his standardizing the construction of locomotives as well so that they would more efficiently fit the rails, all of which powered the onset of the Industrial Revolution. In 1825, he built the 25-mile Stockton and Darlington Railway for a mine owner who needed to transport coal to port and instigated the use of railways for commercial transportation. This same railway became the first to regularly carry passengers, and Stephenson eventually built the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, which became the first intercity railway system.

The 56.5 gauge rail that Stephenson developed is still in use today throughout most of the world, particularly in the United States, the United Kingdom and most of Western and Central Europe.

Stephenson's son Robert was also an important engineer in railroad history. In 1830, Robert Stephenson built "The Rocket" locomotive and the London and Birmingham Railway. Robert Stephenson was one of the very few railway engineers to be made a Fellow of the Royal Society.

Answer: Robert Boyle

Robert William Boyle (1627-1691) was born in County Waterford, Ireland, the fourteenth child of the Earl of Cork, Richard Boyle. He is considered by many to be the first modern chemist and one of the pioneers of the scientific method. He is most often recognized because of the law named for him--Boyle's Law--which states the inverse proportional relationship between the pressure and volume of a specific gas. This understanding led him to perfect the air pump. Interestingly, Boyle was not the first to formulate the law named for him; Henry Power did so in 1661. However, Boyle published the formula and so popularized it that it became associated with him.

Perhaps, more importantly, Boyle challenged the tendency of many scientists to consider many items to be essentially composed of one element. Boyle separated matter into mixtures, compounds, and elements, and even more strikingly he postulated that the elements themselves were composed of smaller moving pieces, which he called at the time "corpuscles" for lack of an understanding of atoms and subatomic particles. He argued all of these things in his book "The Sceptical Chymist", which he published in 1661. Within this text, he outright rejected the Aristotelian argument of all matter consisting of the four elements of fire, water, air, and earth. He also defined an element as "something that cannot be broken down into something other than itself" (the "corpuscles" only being smaller versions of the thing itself), and he set about categorizing elements prior to Mendeleev's Periodic Table.

Boyle took a very Socratic view of the world and lamented how little he knew and was able to learn in his lifetime. These feelings are apparent in his book "Essay of Men's Great Ignorance of the Uses of Natural Things", published in 1671. He was a theologian and Christian apologist as well who wrote sermons and philosophical treatises in which he argued against Cartesian philosophers by insisting that human beings could understand God through observation and study of natural and physical science. Thus, he is a precursor to the deists.

Answer: Eleanor Roosevelt

Anna Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962) was born in New York City to Elliott Bulloch Roosevelt and Anna Rebecca Hall. Through her father, she was the niece of President Theodore Roosevelt. Her mother nicknamed her "Granny" because she believed Eleanor to be too serious for her age and was embarrassed by Eleanor's plainness. In 1905, Eleanor Roosevelt married Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was her fifth cousin.

Eleanor Roosevelt was instrumental in Franklin Roosevelt's political rise. After he was stricken with polio and unable to walk, it was she who pushed him to continue his political career and become the governor of New York, from which he launched his Presidential campaign. During both campaigns, she frequently delivered speeches at various rallies and other occasions when her husband was too ill to attend, and she continued to appear sometimes in his place during certain engagements while he was President of the United States.

Many were highly critical of her role during Franklin Roosevelt's presidency. She completely redefined the role of the First Lady of the United States. She became the first First Lady to hold regular press conferences, write a monthly magazine column, host a weekly radio program, and write a daily column for a newspaper. She sometimes openly disagreed with the President's policies despite his being her husband. Furthermore, she helped influence the creation of New Deal programs to help people during the Great Depression, advocated civil rights before the Civil Rights Movement, advocated greater inclusion of women in the workforce, and defended the rights of World War II refugees.

Following her husband's death, she remained active in politics. She pushed for the United States' membership in the United Nations, and, as a result, she was selected to be the nation's first delegate to this institution. She also became the first person to chair the UN Commission on Human Rights and oversaw the drafting of the "Universal Declaration of Human Rights". During John F. Kennedy's administration, she accepted the position of chair of the Presidential Commission on the Status of Women.

Harry Truman considered Eleanor Roosevelt to be "The First Lady of the World", and after her death, Adlai Stevenson, speaking at her funeral, remarked, "What other single human being has touched and transformed the existence of so many?" In 1999, she was ranked number nine in Gallup's list of "Most Widely Admired People of the Twentieth Century".