Alphabetical Notable Historical People Name Game

Victor Thomas Trumper (2 November 1877 – 28 June 1915) was an Australian cricketer known as the most stylish and versatile batsman of the Golden Age of cricket.

Pope Urban II

Pope Urban II (Latin: Urbanus II; ca. 1042 – 29 July 1099), born Otho de Lagery (alternatively Otto, Odo, or Eudes), was the head of the Catholic Church from 12 March 1088 to his death in 1099. He is best known for initiating the First Crusade (1096–1099) and setting up the modern-day Roman Curia in the manner of a royal ecclesiastical court to help run the Church.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Urban_II

Rudolph Valentino: May 6, 1895 – August 23, 1926. Cod romantic.

Andrew Wyeth

Andrew Newell Wyeth (July 12, 1917 – January 16, 2009) was a visual artist, primarily a realist painter, working predominantly in a regionalist style. He was one of the best-known U.S. artists of the middle 20th century.

In his art, Wyeth's favorite subjects were the land and people around him, both in his hometown of Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, and at his summer home in Cushing, Maine. One of the best-known images in 20th-century American art is his painting, Christina's World, currently in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Wyeth

Iannis Xenakis (Greek pronunciation: [ˈʝanis kseˈnakis], Greek: Γιάννης Ξενάκης; 29 May 1922 – 4 February 2001) was a Greek composer, music theorist, and architect-engineer. After 1947, he fled Greece, becoming a naturalized citizen of France. He is commonly recognized as one of the most important post-war avant-garde composers. Xenakis pioneered the use of mathematical models in music such as applications of set theory, stochastic processes and game theory and was also an important influence on the development of electronic and computer music. He integrated music with architecture, designing music for pre-existing spaces, and designing spaces to be integrated with specific music compositions and performances.

Boris Yeltsin

Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin (Russian: 1 February 1931 – 23 April 2007) was a Russian politician and the first President of the Russian Federation, serving from 1991 to 1999.

Originally a supporter of Mikhail Gorbachev, Yeltsin emerged under the perestroika reforms as one of Gorbachev's most powerful political opponents. On 29 May 1990 he was elected the chairman of the Russian Supreme Soviet. On 12 June 1991 he was elected by popular vote to the newly created post of President of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (SFSR), at that time one of the 15 constituent republics of the Soviet Union. He won 57% of the vote in a six-candidate contest and became the third democratically elected leader of Russia in history. Upon the resignation of Mikhail Gorbachev and the final dissolution of the Soviet Union on 25 December 1991, Yeltsin remained in office as the President of the Russian Federation, the USSR's successor state. Yeltsin was reelected in the 1996 election; in the second round of the election Yeltsin defeated Gennady Zyuganov from the revived Communist Party by a margin of 13%. However, Yeltsin never recovered his early popularity after a series of economic and political crises in Russia in the 1990s.

Howard Zinn (August 24, 1922-January 27, 2010)

Zinn is most famous for his 1980 book A People's History of the United States, a "radical" approach that has earned him the reputation of revising history with an anti-American bias. Called "history from the bottom up" by some, Zinn's book sought to tell the story of the United States from the perspective of the disenfranchised minorities rather than the more traditional perspective of the powerful elite.

A decorated veteran of World War II, Zinn was educated at Columbia University in New York, then taught in Georgia during the 1950s. In the late 1960s he began teaching at Boston University in the political science department, and he and Noam Chomsky (of MIT) were two of the nation's most prominent academics in opposition to the war in Vietnam; in the '70s and '80s he was a critic of U.S. policy in Central America; and in the '90s he was a critic of the Gulf War. His social activism and written works earned him scorn over the years, but his history book is now a standard text in many U.S. high schools and he had a strong influence on the public's perception of Columbus, the Founding Fathers and American foreign policy.


Born within the 5 boroughs of New York City he is said to have died in Santa Monica, California of heart failure.

Marie Antoinette

Marie Antoinette (November 1755 – 16 October 1793), born an Archduchess of Austria, was Dauphine of France from 1770 to 1774 and Queen of France and Navarre from 1774 to 1792. She was the fifteenth and penultimate child of Holy Roman Emperor Francis I and Empress Maria Theresa.

Even after her death, Marie Antoinette is often considered to be a part of popular culture and a major historical figure, being the subject of several books, films and other forms of media. Some academics and scholars have deemed her frivolous and superficial, and have attributed the start of the French Revolution to her; however, others have claimed that she was treated unjustly and that views of her should be more sympathetic
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Antoinette

Charles Babbage (December 26, 1792-October 18, 1871)

An inventor and a mathematician, Babbage created calculating machines which earned him a top spot in the history of mechanical computing.

Babbage's early career was devoted to practical applied science, particularly in manufacturing. But he is most famous for his work on what he called the Difference Engine and, later, the Analytical Engine. As early as 1822 he speculated that a machine could be used to compute complex mathematical problems and calculate and correct errors in logarithm tables and astronomical charts. He obtained government grants and began work on the Difference Engine, only to decide later that it would be easier to scrap the work and start fresh on a new idea, the Analytical Engine.

The British government withdrew funding in 1842 and stuck the incomplete Difference Engine in the Science Museum, where it still sits. Charles Babbage, using his own money, spent the rest of his life working on the Analytical Engine, but never finished it. He was assisted by Lord Byron's daughter, Ada Augusta, the countess of Lovelace and an amateur mathematician. In spite of his failure to completely develop a working machine, Babbage (and Lady Lovelace) are legendary heroes in the prehistory of the computing age; he is sometimes called "the grandfather of modern computing."

Enrico Caruso

Enrico Caruso (February 25, 1873 – August 2, 1921) was an Italian tenor. He sang to great acclaim at the major opera houses of Europe and the Americas, appearing in a wide variety of roles from the Italian and French repertoires that ranged from the lyric to the dramatic. Caruso also made approximately 290 commercially released recordings from 1902 to 1920. All of these recordings, which span most of his stage career, are available today on CDs and as digital downloads.

Caruso's 1904 recording of "Vesti la giubba" from Leoncavallo's opera Pagliacci was the first sound recording to sell a million copies.

Caruso's 25-year career, stretching from 1895 to 1920, included 863 appearances at the New York Metropolitan Opera before he died at the age of 48. Thanks in part to his tremendously popular phonograph records, Caruso was one of the most famous personalities of his day and his fame has lasted into the present time. Caruso is an early example of a global media celebrity, made possible in the 20th century by new media technology. Beyond records, Caruso's name was made familiar to millions through newspapers, books, magazines, silent film and communication made possible by the telephone and telegraph. Caruso toured widely both with the Metropolitan Opera touring company and on his own, giving hundreds of performances throughout Europe, and North and South America. He was a client of the noted promoter Edward Bernays, during the latter's tenure as a press agent in the United States. Beverly Sills noted in an interview: "I was able to do it with television and radio and media and all kinds of assists. The popularity that Caruso enjoyed without any of this technological assistance is astonishing."

Caruso biographers Pierre Key, Bruno Zirato and Stanley Jackson attribute Caruso's fame not only to his voice and musicianship but also to a keen business sense and an enthusiastic embrace of commercial sound recording, then in its infancy. Many opera singers of Caruso's time rejected the phonograph (or gramophone) owing to the low fidelity of early discs. Others, including Adelina Patti, Francesco Tamagno and Nellie Melba, exploited the new technology once they became aware of the financial returns that Caruso was reaping from his initial recording sessions.

Caruso made more than 260 extant recordings in America for the Victor Talking Machine Company (later RCA Victor) from 1904 to 1920, and he earned millions of dollars in royalties from the retail sales of the resulting 78-rpm discs. (Previously, in Italy in 1902–1903, he had cut five batches of records for the Gramophone & Typewriter Company, the Zonophone label and Pathé Records.) He was also heard live from the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House in 1910, when he participated in the first public radio broadcast to be transmitted in the United States.

Caruso appeared also in silent films. These include not only two commercial feature films, but newsreels too, as well as a short experimental film made by Thomas Edison. For Edison, in 1911, Caruso portrayed the role of Edgardo in a filmed scene from Donizetti's opera Lucia di Lammermoor. In 1918, he appeared in a dual role in the American silent film My Cousin for Paramount Pictures. This movie included a sequence of him on stage performing the aria "Vesti la giubba" from Leoncavallo's opera Pagliacci. The following year Caruso played a character called Cosimo in another movie, The Splendid Romance. Producer Jesse Lasky paid Caruso $100,000 to appear in these two efforts but they both flopped at the box office.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enrico_Caruso

Jaques Derrida; July 15, 1930 – October 9, 2004. The father of deconstructionism. Which is, I think, that nothing means anything anybody doesn't want it to mean. Or anything means anything anybody wants it too mean.

Carmen sang the idea in the opera.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

Dwight David "Ike" Eisenhower; October 14, 1890 – March 28, 1969) was the 34th President of the United States from 1953 until 1961. He was a five-star general in the United States Army during World War II and served as Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe; he had responsibility for planning and supervising the invasion of North Africa in Operation Torch in 1942–43 and the successful invasion of France and Germany in 1944–45 from the Western Front. In 1951, he became the first supreme commander of NATO.

Enrico Fermi

Enrico Fermi (29 September 1901 – 28 November 1954) was an Italian physicist, best known for his work on Chicago Pile-1 (the first nuclear reactor), and for his contributions to the development of quantum theory, nuclear and particle physics, and statistical mechanics. He is one of the men referred to as the "father of the atomic bomb". Fermi held several patents related to the use of nuclear power, and was awarded the 1938 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on induced radioactivity by neutron bombardment and the discovery of transuranic elements. He was widely regarded as one of the very few physicists to excel both theoretically and experimentally.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enrico_Fermi

Mabel FitzRobert, Countess of Gloucester: 1090 – 29 September 1157

She was an Anglo-Norman noblewoman, and a wealthy heiress who brought the lordship of Gloucester, among other prestigious honours to her husband, Robert, 1st Earl of Gloucester upon their marriage. He was the illegitimate son of King Henry I of England.

Her father was Robert Fitzhamon, Lord of Gloucester and Glamorgan. As she was the eldest daughter of four, and her younger sisters had become nuns, Mabel inherited all of his honours and properties upon his death in 1107.

As Countess of Gloucester, Mabel was significant politically and she exercised an important administrative role in the lordship.

I assume her birthday was estimated.

From the so-called Dark Ages. The age of knights and romance. I dare say rolling around with her in a four poster bed all night is worth being dead for.

Giotto

Giotto di Bondone (1266/7 – January 8, 1337), known as Giotto, was an Italian painter and architect from Florence in the late Middle Ages. He is generally considered the first in a line of great artists who contributed to the Italian Renaissance.

Giotto's contemporary, the banker and chronicler Giovanni Villani, wrote that Giotto was "the most sovereign master of painting in his time, who drew all his figures and their postures according to nature. And he was given a salary by the Comune of Florence in virtue of his talent and excellence."

The late-16th century biographer Giorgio Vasari describes Giotto as making a decisive break with the prevalent Byzantine style and as initiating "the great art of painting as we know it today, introducing the technique of drawing accurately from life, which had been neglected for more than two hundred years."

Giotto's masterwork is the decoration of the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, also known as the Arena Chapel, completed around 1305. This fresco cycle depicts the life of the Virgin and the life of Christ. It is regarded as one of the supreme masterpieces of the Early Renaissance. That Giotto painted the Arena Chapel and that he was chosen by the Comune of Florence in 1334 to design the new campanile (bell tower) of the Florence Cathedral are among the few certainties of his biography. Almost every other aspect of it is subject to controversy: his birthdate, his birthplace, his appearance, his apprenticeship, the order in which he created his works, whether or not he painted the famous frescoes at Assisi, and his burial place.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giotto


Expulsion of the Money-Changers from the Temple

Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler, 20 April 1889 – 30 April 1945) was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the Nazi Party (German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP); National Socialist German Workers Party). He was chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945 and dictator of Nazi Germany (as Führer und Reichskanzler) from 1934 to 1945. Hitler was at the centre of Nazi Germany, World War II in Europe, and the Holocaust.

Hitler was a decorated veteran of World War I. He joined the German Workers' Party (precursor of the NSDAP) in 1919, and became leader of the NSDAP in 1921. In 1923, he attempted a coup d'état in Munich, known as the Beer Hall Putsch. The failed coup resulted in Hitler's imprisonment, during which time he wrote his memoir, Mein Kampf (My Struggle). After his release in 1924, Hitler gained popular support by attacking the Treaty of Versailles and promoting Pan-Germanism, antisemitism, and anti-communism with charismatic oratory and Nazi propaganda. After his appointment as chancellor in 1933, he transformed the Weimar Republic into the Third Reich, a single-party dictatorship based on the totalitarian and autocratic ideology of Nazism.

Hitler's aim was to establish a New Order of absolute Nazi German hegemony in continental Europe. To this end, his foreign and domestic policies had the aim of seizing Lebensraum ("living space") for the Germanic people. He directed the rearmament of Germany and the invasion of Poland by the Wehrmacht in September 1939, resulting in the outbreak of World War II in Europe. Under Hitler's rule, in 1941 German forces and their European allies occupied most of Europe and North Africa. In 1943, Germany was forced onto the defensive and suffered a series of escalating defeats. In the final days of the war, during the Battle of Berlin in 1945, Hitler married his long-time partner, Eva Braun. On 30 April 1945, less than two days later, the two committed suicide to avoid capture by the Red Army, and their corpses were burned.

Hitler's aggressive foreign policy is considered to be the primary cause of the outbreak of World War II in Europe. His antisemitic policies and racially motivated ideology resulted in the deaths of at least 5.5 million Jews, and millions of other people whom he and his followers deemed racially inferior.

Tokugawa Ieyasu

Tokugawa Ieyasu (January 31, 1543 – June 1, 1616) was the founder and first shogun of the Tokugawa shogunate of Japan, which ruled from the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600 until the Meiji Restoration in 1868. Ieyasu seized power in 1600, received appointment as shogun in 1603, abdicated from office in 1605, but remained in power until his death in 1616.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokugawa_Ieyasu

E. Morton Jellinek

Elvin Morton "Bunky" Jellinek (1890–1963), E. Morton Jellinek, or most often, E. M. Jellinek, was a biostatistician, physiologist, and an alcoholism researcher. He was born in New York City and died at the desk of his study at Stanford University on 22 October 1963. He was fluent in nine languages and could communicate in four others. Addiction researcher Griffith Edwards holds that, in his opinion, Jellinek's The Disease Concept of Alcoholism was a work of outstanding scholarship based on a careful consideration of the available evidence.

Jellinek coined the expression "the disease concept of alcoholism", and significantly accelerated the movement towards the medicalization of drunkenness and alcohol habituation.

In post-war 1946, pharmaceutical chemicals were in short supply. A headache remedy manufacturer found that supplies of one of its remedy’s three constituent chemicals was running out.

They asked Jellinek, then at Yale, to test whether the absence of that particular chemical would affect the drug’s efficacy in any way. Jellinek set up a complex trial – with 199 subjects, divided randomly into four test groups – involving various permutations of the three drug constituents, with a placebo as a scientific control. Each group took a test remedy for two weeks. The trial lasted eight weeks, by the end of which each group had taken each test drugs, albeit in a different sequence. Over the entire population of 199 subjects, 120 of the subjects responded to the placebo, and 79 did not. The trial demonstrated that the chemical in question significantly contributed to the remedy's efficacy.

In the process of examining the data produced by his trial, Jellinek discovered that there was a significant difference in responses to the active chemicals between the 120 who had responded to the placebo and the 79 who did not. He described the former group as being "reactors to placebo", and this seems to be the first time that anyone had spoken of either "placebo reactions" or "placebo responses".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._Morton_Jellinek

Genghis Kahn. Expert insurgent and efficient practitioner of wholesale massacres.

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, Russian: 1870 – 21 January 1924) was a Russian communist revolutionary, politician and political theorist. He served as the leader of the Russian SFSR from 1917, and then concurrently as Premier of the Soviet Union from 1922, until his death. Politically a Marxist, his theoretical contributions to Marxist thought are known as Leninism, which coupled with Marxian economic theory have collectively come to be known as Marxism–Leninism.