CP Historical Figures Draft (Round 14) (pick anytime)

[Montana Moe]

Sorry folks, I've been on vacation for a week with no web access, I'll post some picks shortly!!!

[Displaced Flames fan]

I'll take Benjamin Franklin in the category of Inventor. He is a distant relative.

Ben Franklin invented bifocals, which I think is pretty significant. He started the first newspaper in the US, the first fire department, was a diplomat, involved in the Continental Congress and fathered dozens of illegitimate children.

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

[RougeUnderoos]

Eastern Category -- Ferdinand Marcos of the Phillipines



This guy was a crook, a tyrant and a murderer of thousands of people.

His wife had a lot of shoes.

That's the first thing I think of when I hear his name. Imelda had a lot of shoes. What the hell? I don't think I'm alone in this either. There was some interview in the 80's when he was still in power, I think it was on 60 Minutes, and they mentioned that she had 5000 pairs of shoes, and that was what we in North America took out of it. That was the big story to come out of the interview.

Some Fun Ferdinand Facts:
- He took part in the Bataan Death March (as a marcher, not a marchee)
- the 1970's were basically under martial law, and he killed many of his enemies (the killing wasn't confined to the 70's though)
- He was tight with Reagan, and received asylum in Hawaii when the people of the Philippines grew tired enough of the plundering and killing to chase him out
- He had Lupus, a disease that Canadian synchronized swimming sensation Carolyn Waldo was strongly opposed to
- Imelda was a stone cold fox when she was younger, there is no doubt about it
- Every Filipino guy I know is good with the ladies and I have a theory that it has something to do with Imelda being hot -- the theory goes something like this: Filipino guys grew up knowing that a skinny little weasel named Ferdinand ended up with the hottest girl in town and all the country's money and figure if that guy can do it, so can they. It's a confidence booster, and it's all about confidence.

[Montana Moe]

Um, she's the one on the right...

[Displaced Flames fan]

I have the exact same picture of young Imelda on my clipboard ready to paste! She was indeed a looker.

[octothorp]

In the writer category, Strange Things Afoot at the Circle K selects Durante degli Alighieri, aka Dante.
Details to come later.

[Five-hole]

With my .. uh .. 11th round pick, I think, team Five-hole selects, in the category of Eastern, Ṣalāḥ ad-Dīn Yūsuf ibn Ayyūb, aka Saladin.

I will post a write-up this afternoon.

[Aeneas]

I will stretch another category a little. I will pick for Inventor, Sennacherib of Assyria.




My reason being that I find ancient history fascinating especially the time period when humans moved from hunter gatherers to farmers. As soon as this draft was announced I wanted to pick as a scientist or innovator or whatever category someone ancient from Mesopotamia, the Indus valley, Egypt, or China that made a distinct advancement in agriculture, specifically irrigation.

Sennacherib while also a king, was a very scientific technical person. Of course he also laid waste to the greatest city of the time, Babylon; but did rebuild it later.

While no one person can be credited with a specific advance in agriculture as inventions and improvements were made at the same relative time in the above four areas of the world, I choose Sennacherub for his efforts.

The importance of agriculture is highlited by the fact that mankind since creating tools has spent only 1% of time building a civilization, the rest merely surviving. The advances in farming allow an area of land to support 20 to 200 times the people, and allows for some people to move from hunting/gathering to specialized occupations.

Back to Sennacherib.In Nineveh he created public and private parks watered by irrigation. Ten miles north he dammed a river and had the water arrive in the city at a higher grade than the Tigris. That allowed the people to gather water/irrigate without hoisting.

He built canals, a canebreak, imported cotton trees and a 12 mile irrigation tunnel. His greatest feat, in an effort to bring even more water to Nineveh, was a thirty mile irrigation canal which included an aqueduct. Amazing for the time.

[troutman]

I select in the Living gategory, DARRYL JOHN SUTTER:



Darryl was a hell of a hockey player. He was a very good coach, and he has become one of the top GMs in the NHL. Under his guidance, the Flames have not missed the playoffs since 2003. He has made the Flames a franchise where free agents want to play, and where core players will take discounts to remain. The Saddledome has been sold out since 2004, so the franchise has become a financial success too.

This year's edition looks like the best Flames team assembled since 1989. I've heard Darryl talk in person a few times, and his hockey intelligence and sense of humor is astounding.

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

Darryl John Sutter (born August 19, 1958 in Viking, Alberta) is a retired Canadian professional ice hockey forward and coach, and current general manager of the Calgary Flames in the National Hockey League. He is one of seven Sutter brothers, six of whom made the NHL (Brent, Brian, Darryl, Duane, Rich and Ron). Darryl Sutter is the current general manager of the Calgary Flames, and was also its head coach before resigning that position on July 12, 2006. Sutter has also coached for the San Jose Sharks and the Chicago Blackhawks, the team with which he spent his entire NHL playing career.

As a player, Darryl spent five years in the minor leagues, including a year in Japan, where he was rookie of the year. He stands 5 foot 11 inches and his playing weight was 176 pounds. Darryl was drafted by the Chicago Blackhawks in 1978 in the 11th round as the 179th pick overall. In his NHL career as a player, he suited up only for the Blackhawks and scored 279 points (161+118) in 406 career regular season games, plus 43 points (24+19) in 51 playoffs games. He was a well-respected, hard working left-winger but was never an all-star and never won the Stanley Cup. His last season as a player was in 1986–87.

[Displaced Flames fan]

In the Subequatorial category, team Historyectomy is proud to select Steve Irwin.

In his 10 short years in the public eye, Steve Irwin brought conservation back to the forefront of charitable causes and helped usher in a new wave of environmental awareness specific to animal species of the world.

I liked him, some thought he was annoying, but I found him to be genuinely excited by his work and an inspiring person to watch and learn from.

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

[Montana Moe]

In the Inventor/Scientist category, Jim Garrison's Briefs selects: John James Audubon

Namesake of one of my favorite places, Audubon Park Golf Course/Zoo/Insectarium/Aquarium/IMAX theatre in New Orleans, LA...
http://www.auduboninstitute.org/




Bio at audubon.org:
http://www.audubon.org/nas/jja.html

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

Audubon was born in Saint Domingue (now Haiti), the illegitimate son of a French sea captain and plantation owner and his French mistress. Early on, he was raised by his stepmother in Nantes, France, and took a lively interest in birds, nature, drawing, and music.

In 1803, at the age of 18, he was sent to America, in part to escape conscription into the Emperor Napoleon’s army. He lived on the family-owned estate at Mill Grove, near Philadelphia, where he hunted, studied and drew birds. While there, he conducted the first known bird-banding experiment in North America, tying strings around the legs of Eastern Phoebes; he learned that the birds returned to the very same nesting sites each year.

Audubon set off on his epic quest to depict America’s avifauna, with nothing but his gun, artist’s materials, and a young assistant. In 1826 he sailed with his partly finished collection to England. "The American Woodsman" was literally an overnight success. His life-size, highly dramatic bird portraits, along with his embellished descriptions of wilderness life, hit just the right note at the height of the Continent’s Romantic era.

Audubon found a printer for the Birds of America, first in Edinburgh, then London, and later collaborated with the Scottish ornithologist William MacGillivray on the Ornithological Biographies – life histories of each of the species in the work.
The last print was issued in 1838, by which time Audubon had achieved fame and a modest degree of comfort, traveled this country several more times in search of birds, and settled in New York City. He made one more trip out West in 1843, the basis for his final work of mammals, the Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America.

Audubon spent his last years in senility and died at age 65. He is buried in the Trinity Cemetery at 155th Street and Broadway in New York City.

Although Audubon had no role in the organization that bears his name, there is a connection: George Bird Grinnell, one of the founders of the early Audubon Society in the late 1800s, was tutored by Lucy Audubon, John James’s widow.

Knowing Audubon’s reputation, Grinnell chose his name as the inspiration for the organization’s earliest work to protect birds and their habitats. Today, the name Audubon remains synonymous with birds and bird conservation the world over.

Link to Audubon's book, Birds of America:
http://www.audubon.org/bird/BoA/BOA_index.html

[Itse]

About one thousand apologies for my absence, it seems the CPDL stole all the mental energy I had left.

For our 10th round pick, team HeroQuest would like to pick William Gibson, but inconveniently the bugger is not dead.

So we pick John Ronald Reuel Tolkien in the Writer category.Tolkien is one of those characters, whose significance and brilliance is diluted by mountains of publicity and hordes of buffoons like Steve Jackson, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, drooling fans seemingly incapable of even the most elementary interpretations beyond "dwarves are funny", "elves are cool" and "Sauron is hard to get".

In any case, the man basicly redefined what the fantasy fiction could be, something I much appreciate.

EDIT: Oh, a picture.

[Itse]

In the 11th round, team HeroQuest picks one of history's most significant criminals, Charles "Lucky" Luciano, obviously in the Outlaw category.



To quote from WikiPedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucky_Luciano)

Born Salvatore Lucania, Luciano is considered the father of modern organized crime and the mastermind of the massive postwar expansion of the international heroin trade. He was the first official boss of the modern Genovese crime family. He was, along with his associate Meyer Lansky, instrumental in the development of the "National Crime Syndicate" in the United States.

Luciano organized the Commission with the Mafia's top men, and was its undisputed leader. The Commission was the gangster equivalent of the Supreme Court, and settled all gangland disputes. It has been called Luciano's most important innovation.[3] The Commission decided who received what rackets and which territories. If an individual was to be a "made man," their Don had to go before The Commission and clear their sponsorship into the honored society.
The Commission was originally composed of representatives of the Five Families of New York City, the Buffalo crime family, and the Chicago Outfit of Al Capone; later, the Detroit crime family, the Los Angeles crime family and the Kansas City crime family were added. All bosses who sat in the Commission were supposed to retain the same power and had one vote, but in reality Luciano was the first among equals.[3]

[Itse]

To add to the company of Napoleon and Einstein, historical figures who's names have become cultural references quite unattached to their origins, team HeroQuest picks Florence Nightingale in the Women category. That would be our 12th round pick.



She is unfortunately mostly remembered as a saint-like caring figure, which is a ridiculous understatement of the historical significance of this brilliant person. Not only a nurse, a teacher and a statistician (not to mention a significant feminist), she was a medical and social visionary, who's work has affected modern healthcare so profoundly it's become impossible to separate and identify her influence and significance.

Here's a mix of quotes from various sources, which mentions only a portion of her achievements.

She first became famous during the Crimean war, where she led a group of nurses (most of whom she had trained herself) running the Selimiye barrack hospital.

Nightingale kept meticulous records regarding the running of the Barrack Hospital, causes of illness and death, the efficiency of the nursing and medical staffs, and difficulties in purveyance, the results and the general ideas of record keeping significantly affected the running and organization of field hospitals and hospitals in general.

It is directly through her thorough observations that the association linking sanitary conditions and healing became recognized and established. Within 6 months of her arrival in Scutari, the mortality rate dropped from 42 percent to 2.2 percent. Florence insisted on adequate lighting, diet, hygiene, and activity. She understood even then that the mind and body worked together, that cleanliness, the predecessor to our clean and sterile techniques of today, was a major barrier to infection, and that it promoted healing.

After the war, she established The Nightingale Training School at St. Thomas' Hospital on 9 July 1860. Her school formalized secular nursing education, making nursing a viable and respectable option for women who desired employment outside of the home. Without it, there might not even be a concept of modern professional nursing, one of the building blocks of modern healthcare. She also advocated the role of nurses as healthcare teachers (so we can pretty much thank her for the existence of school nurses).

Believing that the most important location for the care of the sick was in the home, Nightingale improved the health of households through her most famous publication, Notes on Nursing: What It Is and What It Is Not, which provided direction on how to manage the sick. This volume has been in continuous publication worldwide since 1859, and it has (directly and through the general spreading of ideas and concepts) significantly increased the general populations understanding and knowledge in the general principles of healthcare.

Nightingale's statistical models—such as the Coxcomb chart, which she developed to assess mortality—and her basic concepts regarding nursing remain applicable today.

A school for the education of midwives was established at King's College Hospital in 1862 by Nightingale. In 1869, Nightingale and Dr Elizabeth Blackwell opened the Women's Medical College. In the 1870s, Nightingale mentored Linda Richards, "America's first trained nurse", and enabled her to return to the USA with adequate training and knowledge to establish high-quality nursing schools. Linda Richards went on to become a great nursing pioneer in the USA and Japan. (Quoted just for the NA connection, she tutored many women who later became significant contributors in nursing.)

By 1896, Florence Nightingale was bedridden. She may have had what is now known as chronic fatigue syndrome. During her bedridden years, she also did pioneering work in the field of hospital planning, and her work propagated quickly across Britain and the world.

[octothorp]

Holy crap, I haven't even got my description up for my last pick and it's my turn again already. Some awesome picks in the last few. I really like the Audobon one, he was somebody I seriously considered in the explorer/discoverer category. I'm gonna take an asskick and post mine when I get a bit more time to think about it.

[Five-hole]

In the 12th round, in the category of writer, team Five-hole selects Aldous Huxley.

[Montana Moe]

In the Writer category, Jim Garrison's Briefs selects: Stephen Edward Ambrose, Ph.D. (1936-2002)



While he's been called a plagiarist, his writings as well as his influence in other media/historical projects has drawn attention to historical moments in American history that needed to be illuminated.

Ambrose's works serve as fertile ground for cultivating another generation of history buffs such as myself.

Biographies:
http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/amb0bio-1 (Great interview with Ambrose on this site as well)

A chance visit to New Orleans during spring break further determined the course of his life. He "fell in love with that old bag of bones of a city," he says, and after completing a doctorate in history, he began a30-year teaching career at the University of New Orleans. His first book Halleck, was published in 1962. It sold under 1,000 copies in its first printing, but caught the eye of one of Ambrose's heroes. The 28 year-old professor was amazed to receive a phone call from former President Dwight Eisenhower, who invited him to write his authorized biography.

For five years, Ambrose met regularly with the former President at Eisenhower's farm in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. He enjoyed the cooperation of Eisenhower's friends and associates, and full access to his presidential papers. The two-volume biography that resulted remains the definitive work on the 34th President, and established Stephen Ambrose as one of America's foremost historians.

Ambrose served as historical consultant for Steven Spielberg's film about D-Day, Saving Private Ryan. Spielberg and Tom Hanks later produced a television miniseries based on Ambrose's Band of Brothers.

After retiring from his chair as Boyd Professor of History at the University of New Orleans, Dr. Ambrose served as the Director Emeritus of the Eisenhower Center, and the founder and President of the National D-Day Museum in New Orleans.(http://www.ddaymuseum.org)

He was a contributing editor for the Quarterly Journal of Military History, a member of the board of directors for American Rivers, and a member of the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial Council Board. Stephen Ambrose and his wife Moira made their homes in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi and Helena, Montana.

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

Re: Plagiarism

In 2002, Ambrose was found to have plagiarized several passages in his book The Wild Blue by Sally Richardson and others. Fred Barnes in The Weekly Standard reported that Ambrose had taken passages from Wings of Morning: The Story of the Last American Bomber Shot Down over Germany in World War II by Thomas Childers (a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania).

Ambrose and his publisher, Simon and Schuster, released an apology as a result. Ambrose had only footnoted sources and did not enclose in direct quotes significant passages taken from Childers' book.
While Ambrose downplayed the incident, stating that only a few sentences in all of his numerous books were the work of other authors, Forbes's investigation of his work found similar cases of plagiarism involving entire passages in at least six books and found a similar pattern of plagiarism going all the way back to his doctoral thesis.
He offered this defense to the New York Times:
"I tell stories. I don't discuss my documents. I discuss the story. It almost gets to the point where, how much is the reader going to take? I am not writing a Ph.D. dissertation." "I wish I had put the quotation marks in, but I didn't. I am not out there stealing other people's writings. If I am writing up a passage and it is a story I want to tell and this story fits and a part of it is from other people's writing, I just type it up that way and put it in a footnote. I just want to know where the hell it came from."

The "History News Network" web site of George Mason University, however, in a web article entitled "How the Ambrose story developed", detailed seven of Ambrose's works that had plagiarized at least 12 authors.

Published Works
Duty, Honor, Country: A History of West Point
Eisenhower and Berlin, 1945: The Decision to Halt at the Elbe
The Supreme Commander: the War Years of General Dwight D. Eisenhower
Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors
Ike's Spies: Eisenhower and the Espionage Establishment
Eisenhower
Pegasus Bridge: June 6, 1944
Eisenhower: Soldier and President
Nixon
Band of Brothers, E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne: From Normandy to Hitler's Eagle's Nest
Upton and the Army
D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II
Halleck: Lincoln's Chief of Staff
Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West
Citizen Soldiers: The U.S. Army from the Normandy Beaches to the Bulge to the Surrender of Germany, June 7, 1944 - May 7, 1945
Rise to Globalism: American Foreign Policy since 1938
Americans at War
The Victors: Eisenhower and his Boys - The Men of World War II
An epic American exploration: the friendship of Lewis and Clark
Comrades: Brothers, Fathers, Heroes, Sons, Pals
Nothing Like it in the World: The Men who Built the Transcontinental Railroad, 1863-1869
The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys who Flew the B-24s over Germany
To America: Personal Reflections of an Historian

[Displaced Flames fan]

Outstanding pick MM. I had forgotten that he recently passed.

[Montana Moe]

In my attempt to get current with my picks, Jim Garrison's Briefs selects: John Locke in the Thinker/Philosopher category.



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

John Locke (29 August 1632 – 28 October 1704) was an English philosopher. Locke is considered the first of the British empiricists, but is equally important to social contract theory. His ideas had enormous influence on the development of epistemology and political philosophy, and he is widely regarded as one of the most influential Enlightenment thinkers, classical republicans, and contributors to liberal theory. His writings influenced Voltaire and Rousseau, many Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, as well as the American revolutionaries. This influence is reflected in the American Declaration of Independence.

Locke's theory of mind is often cited as the origin for modern conceptions of identity and "the self", figuring prominently in the later works of philosophers such as David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant. Locke was the first philosopher to define the self through a continuity of "consciousness". He also postulated that the mind was a "blank slate" or "tabula rasa"; that is, contrary to Cartesian or Christian philosophy, Locke maintained that people are born without innate ideas, and that knowledge is instead determined only by experience derived by sense perception.

Locke's influence on the American and French Revolutions, the great minds involved in those movements, and enlightenment philosophy in general were the motivations for the pick.

[Aeneas]

For once I do not have much time to elaborate, and in taking someone well known, perhaps do not need to.

As my favorite writer is long gone, I shall take Chaucer.



Well remembered for Canterbury Tales, but also for one of the first to write in English. At the time most writing was done in French in England.

Chaucer stayed close to the seats of power throughout his life. He had contacts with John of Gaunt, and kings related to the eminent afore mentioned John.

Heavily influenced by the Italians Dante and Petrarch, etc.

Have to go.