Caesar of Bread
Trans Gordon Ramsay
This is about people from history that you perceive as "the best" or any cool thing you think about them
Cool Historical People Thread
- Thread starter Caesar of Bread
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For warriors, I'd start with Hannibal Barca and Napoleon I.
Caesar of Bread
Trans Gordon Ramsay
In the warrior sense, I like Vercingitorix, Genghis Khan (because he was able to create a good legal system while being known as a world conqueror), Belisarius, Ulysses S Grant, Teddy Roosevelt (Rough Riders), and John Pershing (who led a campaign to desegregate the US military)
Caesar of Bread
Trans Gordon Ramsay
But not the man who created the first PINEAPPLE pizza. That man sinned against humanity.Einstein: the smartest.
Churchill: first to resist Hitler..who knows what the world would look like now without him.
And whoever made the first pizza
Probably much the same, I imagine. It was Chamberlain who declared war on Germany.
Ajidica
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Caesar of Bread
Trans Gordon Ramsay
This man is a total legend:
en.wikipedia.org
"You tell me to do this
He tells me to do that
You're all *******s
Go **** your mother"
Zhang Zongchang, Poem About *******s
Zhang Zongchang - Wikipedia
"You tell me to do this
He tells me to do that
You're all *******s
Go **** your mother"
Zhang Zongchang, Poem About *******s
Teddy Roosevelt, but not because of the Rough Riders. That's only slightly cooler than being president, which puts it pretty far down the list. Although the fact that he resigned as Assistant Secretary of the Navy to form the regiment that became the Rough Riders is cool. Not many people in that rank would want to serve on the front lines, and indeed quite a few of his peers at the time thought he was daft to do so.
No, he was cool because he overcame a sickly, asthmatic childhood to lead a very adventurous life, and became involved in politics to try to make the world a better place. His father had set a precedent in that regard, being actively involved in caring for the poor children of New York City. Around the time he was 10, the entire family, including all of his siblings, would go on a Grand Tour of Europe, visiting his mother's brothers in Liverpool (where they were in exile for having been blockade runners during the Civil War), hiking in the Swiss Alps, and staying in Italy over the winter, among other adventures.
As a young adult he served in the New York State legislature, but resigning after his wife died in childbirth, he moved out west, raising cattle in Montana for a few years until an especially severe winter culled the herds of nearly all the ranchers in that part of the country.
Moving back east, he would raise in the political ranks of New York City and eventually the federal government, leading to the familiar parts of the story to most, San Juan Hill and becoming president. Although the policy details differ, I still generally believe in the progressive idea that he believed in - that it is possible to improve the human condition through good government policy.
The other famous part of the story is the 1912 election with the Bull Moose party, and continuing his speech as planned despite being shot in the chest - it would be another 80 years until someone else made a credible third-party run. But I find his adventures of 1914 - 1915, when he organized and went on an expedition to chart a river whose course was unknown in South America, to be far more fascinating. He had been President of the U.S., and could have done anything he wanted to (other than win in 1912), but he chose to go on a great adventure. He nearly died of tropical illness during the expedition, which claimed the lives of three others. It is hard to imagine any other world leader doing something similar after leaving office.
In short, he wasn't just a lawyer who wound up being president, but someone who lived life to the fullest, even when that meant going against the grain of societal expectations.
I'd recommend the books Mornings on Horseback and River of Doubt for more about Roosevelt's childhood and early adulthood, and his post-presidential adventures, respectively.
Teddy also had an aunt who was a pretty cool aunt, as she brought a cow into her small back yard in Manhattan. At least her nieces and nephews thought she was pretty cool for bringing a cow into Manhattan. The neighbors were less impressed; having a cow in Manhattan was not much more acceptable then than it is now.
No, he was cool because he overcame a sickly, asthmatic childhood to lead a very adventurous life, and became involved in politics to try to make the world a better place. His father had set a precedent in that regard, being actively involved in caring for the poor children of New York City. Around the time he was 10, the entire family, including all of his siblings, would go on a Grand Tour of Europe, visiting his mother's brothers in Liverpool (where they were in exile for having been blockade runners during the Civil War), hiking in the Swiss Alps, and staying in Italy over the winter, among other adventures.
As a young adult he served in the New York State legislature, but resigning after his wife died in childbirth, he moved out west, raising cattle in Montana for a few years until an especially severe winter culled the herds of nearly all the ranchers in that part of the country.
Moving back east, he would raise in the political ranks of New York City and eventually the federal government, leading to the familiar parts of the story to most, San Juan Hill and becoming president. Although the policy details differ, I still generally believe in the progressive idea that he believed in - that it is possible to improve the human condition through good government policy.
The other famous part of the story is the 1912 election with the Bull Moose party, and continuing his speech as planned despite being shot in the chest - it would be another 80 years until someone else made a credible third-party run. But I find his adventures of 1914 - 1915, when he organized and went on an expedition to chart a river whose course was unknown in South America, to be far more fascinating. He had been President of the U.S., and could have done anything he wanted to (other than win in 1912), but he chose to go on a great adventure. He nearly died of tropical illness during the expedition, which claimed the lives of three others. It is hard to imagine any other world leader doing something similar after leaving office.
In short, he wasn't just a lawyer who wound up being president, but someone who lived life to the fullest, even when that meant going against the grain of societal expectations.
I'd recommend the books Mornings on Horseback and River of Doubt for more about Roosevelt's childhood and early adulthood, and his post-presidential adventures, respectively.
Teddy also had an aunt who was a pretty cool aunt, as she brought a cow into her small back yard in Manhattan. At least her nieces and nephews thought she was pretty cool for bringing a cow into Manhattan. The neighbors were less impressed; having a cow in Manhattan was not much more acceptable then than it is now.
Julie d'Aubigny is frequently cited as a real historical badass. She was famous for being a bisexual, cross-dressing duellist, and one of her most famous stories about her life is that whilst just a teenager, she joined a nunnery specifically to 'rescue' a girl she was interested in and set fire to part of the nunnery to aid her escape.
Buster's Uncle
AC2 Owner
Fred Rogers.
I'm serious - it takes strength to be peaceful, and he was one of the most influential people of my lifetime, if you think about it.
I'm serious - it takes strength to be peaceful, and he was one of the most influential people of my lifetime, if you think about it.
PhroX
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As British Civil Engineer, I'm probably obliged to talk about Isembard Kingdom Brunel, who is admittedly pretty "cool", but instead, I'm going with one of the other Victorian greats of the profession, Joseph Bazalgette. As head of the Metropolitan Board of Works, he was responsible for many public engineering projects in London in the second half of the 19th century, including several of the embankments and bridges on the Thames, but the one that rightly made him famous was the sewer network. It wasn't the first modern sewer system - I believe that Hamburg had had one for about a decade - but the scale was immense for the era, with almost a hundred miles of trunk sewers and over ten times that of smaller street sewers. Of course, Bazalgette can't take 100% of the credit, any project of that scale will have involved many people, be he was central to the design process, setting out the principles that the system would be designed to and personally checked many thousands of technical drawings prior to construction (many of which are still kept in archive). The sewer system was a public health triumph, undoubtedly saving a huge number of lives in London (although not entirely for the reasons people expected - they didn't have a good understanding of germ theory at the time and instead thought that they would be preventing disease by getting people away from the smell of sewage...), and remarkably, over a century and a half later, many of the original Bazalgette sewers are still in good condition and are in constant use. I've personally done some work at one of the treatment works that was later built at the downstream end of the main sewers, and frankly, they had held up way better than much of the works that was merely a few decades old.
Emily Hobhouse who campaigned against British concentration camps during the Boer War.
privatehudson
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Can't remember his name but one of the last "German" survivors of WW1 actually considered himself French, and although he served Germany in Ww1, he joined the French army in WW2. His son was conscripted into the SS and died in Normandy in 1944. He reverted back to being his preferred nationality of French after the war
Sarin
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Talking about warriors, I'd be remiss to not mention Jan Žižka. Best commander and military innovator my country spawned, he's the reason why several weapons have names originating in Czech language (most notably, pistol and howitzer). Although, as common for the military types, he left something to be desired as a human being.
Henri Christophe
L'empereur
And my vote goes to:
Toussaint L'Ouverture!
Toussaint L'Ouverture!
Plains-Cow
Best Resource; Always Wins
What a fancy hat.And my vote goes to:
Toussaint L'Ouverture!
Bonyduck Campersang
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Karim Khan Zand. Coming to power at a time when Iran was devastated by war and the cruelty of Nader Shah's reign, Karim Khan was probably the nicest ruler in Iranian history. For one thing, he never took the coveted title 'Shah', instead preferring the humble 'Vakil e-Ra'aayaa' (Representative of the People).
This thread reminds me of the countdown on the A&E channel not long before the turn of the century, listing the 100 most influential people of the previous 1000 years.
I'd never heard of a lot of them. I was flabbergasted at some of them because they seemed rather shallow and trivial to me.
Shakespeare came in at #5, which wasn't bad. I'd have rated him a step or two higher, for the incredible number of words and phrases he gave the English language.
I totally approve of who took first place, though: Johannes Gutenberg. His invention of the movable type printing press made widespread literacy possible, and changed the world.
I'd never heard of a lot of them. I was flabbergasted at some of them because they seemed rather shallow and trivial to me.
Shakespeare came in at #5, which wasn't bad. I'd have rated him a step or two higher, for the incredible number of words and phrases he gave the English language.
I totally approve of who took first place, though: Johannes Gutenberg. His invention of the movable type printing press made widespread literacy possible, and changed the world.
