Name that Historical Figure #2

Hmmm... the fact that so many more people knew Robert E Lee than Ho Chi Minh reinforces the stereotype of what "world history" means in the US

Nowhere in this quiz does it say "world history." This is a US website. Most of the people on here are American. We're going to recognize American Historical figures.

Exactly. We not only learn World History in the US, but also US History. So why wouldn't we be more familiar with figures from the US?

This is an open website on the WWW - don't think you can call it "American". And where do you get these statistics?

drunken gandalf, your comments are highly ironic considering your comments are anything but fair, and you don't seem to have a solid grasp of history yourself. At least you put "fair" in quotation marks.

To (actually) be fair, the United States is a part of the world, and in the same way that events in Pharaonic Egypt, Classical Greece, Imperial Rome and Victorian England are a vital part of world history, events in the USA and American colonies over the past four centuries are also a vital part of world history. Since the decline of the European empires and the rise of American industrial might in the 1800s, to a large extent, world history IS American history. To be fair.

"Joined the timeline"? That makes it sound as if Americans just appeared on the continent across the pond. Most of them were British once. They had a history before America. If that makes sense.

Getting back to the original point, you'd expect Americans to know about Ho Chi Minh because he was the leader of the only country that ever beat the US in a war.

Ah, kalbaham-sandwich-ut, making fun of people's names, that's very professional. I know whose side I'm on.

Quizmaster: first of all... China has only been a country since 1949 and never once since 1949 has it been the most powerful country in the world. You are succumbing to the nationalist fallacy that current nation-states have a history that extends back to all the people that that nation state claims to be directly descended from. There have been a wide variety of different states in the area that the country of China now occupies. The vast and overwhelming majority of which were also never the most powerful countries in the world.
2nd, if you're going to rope in every entity that ever existed in this territory under the all-encompassing umbrella of "China" as if they were the same thing... then... I think you're still wrong. Check out this graph for a start (from a good book worth reading).

It's hard to see from the scale of that graph, but, according to the metrics the book used China's social development lagged behind that of the West's for thousands of years. Civilization began in the West much earlier and got a head start. People in Mesopotamia started cultivating plants 2000 years before anyone along the Yellow River did the same. When Ancient Egypt was building the great pyramids of Giza and erecting great carved stele full of hieroglyphs, the people who lived in the land that would become China were still in the stone age. When Alexander conquered most of the known world "China" was divided into many different warring states; the Qin would not (mostly) unify these states until over 100 years later. At the height of its power the Roman Empire was certainly much more powerful than China was at the same time. It wasn't until after the collapse of Rome when Europe entered the Dark Ages that China took the lead.

...and that lead only lasted until about 1800 when the West (first the British Empire, then the United States) first eclipsed and then rocketed past China. The USA has maintained the lead since then even if it's likely that China will overtake them at some point in the not too distant future.

Anyway... point taken about entertainment > fairness. And I appreciate your occasional efforts to make the quizzes more international or teach us something about China. :) But, to be fair, there *is* a reason why modern history texts focus more on Western civilization than Eastern and it's not just cultural chauvinism.

by the way I found the text of that book in pdf form in its entirety if anyone wants to read. Though I recommend buying a copy.

a) no, it wasn't. The People's Republic of China (China) was founded in 1949.
b) depends. United States (American) history could be said to have begun in 1776 when the country was founded. But of course the people and lands eventually incorporated in to that country have histories that extend back much farther than that.
c) If half the people on this quiz were Italian that would indeed be odd. Sort of like if half the people on the quiz were from Texas. On the other hand, if half of them were European (and they are), it wouldn't be any more strange than if fewer than half of them were American.

That book focused mostly on Eastern and Western civilization as defined in the book, with Eastern civilization being all the civilizations that descended from the earliest civilizations around the Yellow and Yangtze river valleys and Western civilization being all the civilizations that descended from those of Mesopotamia. The latter includes the Levant, Egypt, Arabia, Greece, Rome, Europe, and the lands colonized by Europeans, but since the most popular theory about civilization in India is that it sprung up independently along the Indus river valley, it is not counted as part of either East or West. In the book. If it were it wouldn't make any difference most likely as they always lagged behind the far eastern and western cores.

and.. don't see how this is important but I can read (and by read I mean sound out) Cyrillic, Arabic, and Korean. I know words in phrases in lots of languages but I can only carry on a conversation in English, Spanish, or Pig Latin.

Kalbahamut, what's the name of that book? The link you gave doesn't work.

Why the West Rules for Now, by Ian Morris. Here's the link on Amazon. Unfortunately the pdf I found before seems to be missing.

I disagree, it's not that Ho Chi Minh isn't known, it's that THAT photo of him isn't known. I got quite a lot of these simply because a) it's a famous picture of them, or b) from their clothes/ethnicity/gender (sorry Marie Curie, but you were distinguished from Joan of Arc only due to the fact that one was a photo and the other was a painting). I did not know what their face looked like but that doesn't mean I didn't know who they were or what they did.

Lee is at least as important a figure of world history as Ho Chi Minh and probably moreso. The margin of difference isn't very big, either.

Yeah HighFidelity, you are wrong. So wrong.

I knew it, I just always misspell and misplace his name <_>

It's only barely, though not sure of what the percentage was then.

Maybe some people tried typing in merely "Ho"

More people knew Gandhi than Franklin, what's your point?

Just because you don't know any heroes of Nauru, tshalla, that doesn't mean the Nauruans don't as well. Chauvinist. :P

Em many I think if not most. Especially if your own country is rather uneventfull. You might learn some names once in primary school and never hear about them again, while other stuff "gets shoved in your face" (I mean you get repeatedly exposed to it without actively looking for it). I definitely know more about the us and the uk than I do about my own country. (and the amount I know about us or uk isnt even that big since Im not a history buff,)

In my AP world history class Ho Chi Minh was not mentioned once... it was pathetic

It's true. Attaching names to faces means nothing if you don't know anything about who the people actually are. To the quizmaster: I think Mark Twain's real name, Samuel Clemens, should also be accepted.

jromance- fair point, and coming from Australia I imagine more people would recognise Captain Cook than Ho Chi Minh also. I was probably overreacting to seeing comments like "pretty sad if you don't know all the US states". ctleng- you're comments are the sort that made me overreact in the first place. Note that the particular foreigner I was talking about caused America to enter the most controversial war in their history- I'm pretty sure that makes them as important as any American historical figure.

Van Rijn should also be accepted for Rembrandt. Rembrandt is actually his first name

I didn't get Geronimo and I'm American. But I also did not get Rembrandt or Tolstoy.

I was taught a lot of American history, but the facts weren't always accompanied by photos. There is a difference between knowing the historical significance of these people and knowing what they looked like.

@High fildelity: the quiz said historical figures, not necessarily WORLD history figures. The Civil War is the greatest challenge in the history of the USA, it was the country tearing itself apart and in MANY cases, brother literally fighting against brother. Why should it be a shock that Americans (and not in such large numbers, seeing by the fact that 63% of takers got Lee wrong) might be able to recognize the chief military figure of the Confederacy? JRomance is 100% right...it is one thing to be completely ignorant of history, but if one is not and merely knows more about the history of their home country than they do of general world and foreign history, then they should not be called ignorant.

Also without Lee the war may well have ended differently, and a divided USA would have had a much greater impact on the rest of the world and the course of world history than if Vietnam had remained divided or had become a French or American territory- or a democratic country in the US sphere of influence. Pretty minor event in world history compared to the American Civil War.

and you are giving Ho way too much credit for that while simultaneously farcically minimizing the impact of the American Civil War.

Washington, Jefferson, Bolivar, Hirohito, Sukarno, Gandhi, Selassie, Nasser and many others all came before Điện Biên Phủ, and the majority of them were vastly more important to the ultimate end of European colonialism than late-to-the-party footnote Ho.

My point stands.

Haha. Yes. and you'd have to be some kind of illiterate moron to think that it was "eviscerated," so, if those are the two options, what I said.

You do understand how the word "and" works, right?
and the difference between the words "attempted" and "succeeded?"
Do you perhaps need help judging which number between 1919 and 1865 is larger?

The comment above that I was responding to and has gone missing now was trying to say that ending European colonial empires (as if Ho Chi Minh should get credit for doing that) was more significant than a scuffle between American states.

It's Martin Luther King JR. Without that, you mean his father.

Does anybody else find that Beethoven picture really creepy? I feel like he wants to murder me through my screen...

I thought Louis XIV was Louis XVI and thought Wilhelm was Otto von Bismark

I got Harry Truman confused for Woodrow Wilson.

I feel a little better knowing I'm not the only one.

I thought it was Warren G. Harding. Yeah, I'm silly like that.

I thought Mark Twain was Jed Clampett from the Beverly Hillbillies!

I was trying Joan of Ark. As a mispell maybe this could be ok?!

Noah's wife?

Exactly, but when King James of England made his Bible he left her out of it because she was French and Catholic.

He said Joan of Ark.

I thought Tolstoy was Moses Lol

The two monarchs I missed. I thought that it was Louis 16th instead of 14th.

15/20. But surprised that only 10% got Tolstoy.

One thing is for certain, Americans can't take a bit of criticism, sob sob. It's funny, I managed to create a general knowledge quiz which wasn't biased towards my home country. It's really not that hard.

a bit? Try constant and neverending. Every day multiple times a day some idiot (actually legion of them) mouthing off in comments here or on CNN or wherever. Most Americans take it in stride extremely well considering. In fact Americans frequently criticize themselves, or accept the criticism of others and in some cases agree, or just laugh it off. There are tons of examples of American art and culture that contain pointed criticism of Americans themselves, and American humor is very self-deprecating. On the other hand say one negative thing about Canada or England or Australia or Saudi Arabia etc.. somebody reading the comment is going to lose their mind.

That's your personal experience, kalbahamut. It probably has something to with the way you're constantly spouting off highly opinionated and offensive tirades against nationalities and religions.

No, it doesn't. I'm more often responding to the people I'm referring to than I am inspiring responses by them.

I have to agree with kal. The criticisms are constant, unoriginal, and largely inaccurate. Yes, there is a (too large) group of Americans who think the US reigns supreme over everything, and yes, they're annoying. But. The truth, like it or not, is that the US plays an outsized role in world affairs. Our political, economic, and cultural influence dominates all but a small few other countries. The Dutch know more about Americans than vice versa because America is more significant on the world stage. There's also a weird hypocrisy to people constantly trashing Americans for their arrogance...while those same people feel entitled to tell Americans why we are so inferior. And if an American dares to push back, it's somehow a marker of our ignorance or entitlement or whatever else. It's easy to take shots at the US for its "evil empire" tendencies, but compared to the other preeminent powers throughout history, the US is damn near benign.

If it is accurate and not hypocritical, I have no problem at all with criticisms of the United States or any other country. I'm not a patriot and don't believe in nationalism. I am generally opposed to bigotry and tribalism and always opposed to false beliefs.

The first historical mugshot quiz wouldn't accept "che" without the last name but this quiz accepts "elvis" without the last name.

You should accept "Maria Sklodowska-Curie" in "Marie Curie" as she was Polish and took her husband's surname only as a second one. Therefore officially she was known 'till the end of her life as Maria Sklodowska-Curie

I hate these quizzes. If you think not being able to remember names is embarrassing, try not being able to remember faces.

Maybe you have prosopagnosia.

Anyone who didn't get Churchill apparently has never taken a World War II test on this site...he's the picture for almost every one.

I'm bound to remark that the German emperor's answer should not be filled in when you type "Kaiser". That is simply the name of his rank. I will admit to never having heard reference to any previous or succeeding Kaiser, nevertheless you should get the point for putting his actual name.

Same problem with 'Caesar' in other quizzes, though not, oddly, with 'czar' or 'tzar'.

It is not the same at all.. Kaiser really is just a title like emperor. While caesar really was his family name. It was only after him that variations of his name became titles (kaiser, keizer, tzar etc).

robert e lee looks like victor hugo to me for some reason

You should accept Ho not minh as the answer. As far as I know, Ho is the surname.

Could you add Skłodowska to Curie, after all that's how she was known Maria Curie Skłodowska.

Wonderful quiz - 100% here!

i got 35%-geography is my thing

I typed "joan or arc" and it wouldn't take it :(

She's both.

I'd say the South's greatest asset after the Revolution was cotton, thanks to Mr. Whitney. Slavery was the horrible means by which they obtained it, and the North was only too happy to use that cotton in their textile mills. Northerners loaned money to southern slaveholders, they insured slaves, they sold goods to southerners and they used slaves in northern cities, too. Even though the slave trade from Africa was abolished in 1808, domestic trading was still allowed. Slavery didn't really end in the north until the Civil War due to "gradual emancipation" in many states. In 1840 there were slaves counted in sixteen northern states, and in the 1860 census there were still over 250,000 slaves counted from northern states. The northern states benefited from slavery, too, they just don't like to admit it.

I thought the picture of Mark Twain was Jed Clampett from the Beverley Hill Billies at first

Marie SKŁODOWSKA-Curie, that's full name of this polish scientist.

Make your own quiz.

"Imaginatively she [the woman] is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant. She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history." - Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

Americans should definitely know that portion of World History that is American History better than other parts of world history, just like someone from Russia should know that portion of World History that is Russian History better than history from other parts of the world. This is a common sense.

I'm willing to wager that many people got Ho Chi Minh trying to guess Hoover for Woodrow Wilson. I always confuse Wilson, Hoover, and Harding. I hadn't even seen Ho yet when I noticed it was already filled in...

I could have sworn that was the guy from Rush.

I think Elvis just doesn't sit right in this company. He will slowly fade into obscurity generation by generation, much like Rudolph Valentino or Al Jolson, not really historical figures.

Hm. I don't know. The classical composers are still well-known. One is even in this quiz. And no, I'm not suggesting Elvis is on par with Beethoven or Bach, but there is no guarantee he will fade from memory any time soon. You do raise an interesting point though. I think he'll be remembered a lot longer than Chaplin will.

Maybe not historical but I dont think he well be faded into obscurity very soon. I think similar shelvelife as famous old actors. I dont think I agree with the fact that chaplin will be forgotten sooner though.

*every* historical figure is doomed to eventually fade into obscurity, and eventually into complete oblivion, on a long enough time line. Even Jesus and Muhammad and Alexander. Eventually. Elvis will, too.

Hard to say if, 500 years from now, he'll be as well remembered as Beethoven. Probably not. But maybe. If humans even still exist then. I think Malbaby is probably right.

Please accept Chi Minh, I wrote it, but it does not work.

rembrandt was

Accept "Asian Colonel Sanders" for Ho Chi Minh? ;)

I read "Rembrand" with a French pronounciation.

That is cause ho is the last name. (and not missing any letters from it)

You dont get % per answer... You either scored 67% on the whole quiz. Or if it was behind the answer you took the quiz 3 times and only guessed it right two of the times..

Some low scores on this test. Only about 4 are more obscure though.

Elvis look like he is gonna sneeze, I thought kfc when seeing twain.. and mcarthur looks like bruce willis.

18/20 :)