44 thoughts on “Who Am I – P?”

  13. Janus
    1. Pompey (the Great) (106-48BC) , was a distinguished and ambitious Roman military leader, provincial administrator and politician of the 1st century BC, the period of the Late Republic. Hailing from an Italian provincial background, Pompey first distinguished himself as a talented military leader during the dictatorship of Lucius Cornelius Sulla. For his military exploits against pirates in the Mediterranean Sea and in the lands around the eastern Mediterranean, he earned the cognomen of Magnus or the Great, although, according to Plutarch’s work on the subject, Pompey was awarded this title prior to those campaigns, during some of Sulla’s “mopping-up” operations against the Marians. Pompey later served Rome in putting down the slave rebellion led by the gladiator Spartacus. To promote his own agenda, Pompey aligned himself with Julius Caesar and Marcus Crassus in the First Triumvirate. Sealing the arrangement, Pompey married Caesar’s only daughter, Julia. This agreement, however, was short-lived. After the death of Crassus in 53 BC, Pompey attempted politically to outmanoeuver Caesar, and to dominate personally the affairs of the Roman Republic. These actions sparked a civil war between Pompey’s supporters and those of Caesar. Pompey battled Caesar until their final confrontation at the battle of Pharsalus, ending in his defeat. Pompey fled into Egypt, where he was betrayed and ultimately murdered, by Ptolemy XIII of Egypt.
    Source

  16. FEEG
    10. Rosa Louise McCauley Parks (1913-2005) was an African American civil rights activist whom the U.S. Congress later called the “Mother of the Modern-Day Civil Rights Movement.” On December 1, 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama, Parks, age 42, refused to obey bus driver James Blake’s order that she give up her seat to make room for a white passenger. Her action was not the first of its kind: Irene Morgan, in 1946, and Sarah Louise Keys, in 1955, had won rulings before the U.S. Supreme Court and the Interstate Commerce Commission respectively in the area of interstate bus travel. Nine months before Parks refused to give up her seat, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin refused to move from her seat on the same bus system. But unlike these previous individual actions of civil disobedience, Parks’s action sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Parks’s act of defiance became an important symbol of the modern Civil Rights Movement and Parks became an international icon of resistance to racial segregation. She organized and collaborated with civil rights leaders, including boycott leader Martin Luther King, Jr., helping to launch him to national prominence in the civil rights movement.

  19. Araminta
    5. Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson (1721-1764) marchioness de Pompadour was the mistress of Louis XV. Educated in art and literature, she married Charles-Guillaume Le Normant d’Étoiles in 1741 and became admired by Parisian society and by the king, who installed her at Versailles as his mistress in 1745. She obtained a separation from her husband and was created marchioness de Pompadour. She, the king, and her brother, appointed director of the king’s buildings, planned and built the École Militaire and the Place de la Concorde in Paris, the Petit Trianon Palace at Versailles, and many other buildings. She and Louis also encouraged painters, sculptors, and craftsmen, making her 20 years in power the height of artistic taste. Her political influence was less astute; the alliance with Austria against the German Protestant princes that she urged led to the disastrous Seven Years’ War.

  20. Bilby
    3. Catherine Parr (1512-1548) was born around 1512. She was Henry VIII’s sixth and final wife. Catherine had already been married to a man called Lord Borough. She was in her teens and he was in his sixties when they married. Lord Borough soon died but Catherine soon re-married to a man called Lord Latimer. He was a frequent visitor to the royal court and Henry soon took note of Lady Latimer – Catherine. Latimer died in 1543 and Catherine was widowed for the second time. Henry quickly began courting Catherine. She had fallen in love with a man called Thomas Seymour (Jane Seymour’s brother) but Catherine was not in a position to refuse the attentions of Henry. They were married on July 12th 1543. After Henry’s death in 1547, Catherine married Thomas Howard. She died in childbirth in September 1548.

  21. Janus

    The numbers are there – but WordPress changed them to white and they are difficult to see!

    4. Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), the French scientist was one of the most famous mathematician and physicist of his time. He is credited with inventing an early calculator, amazingly advanced for its time. A genuis from a young age, Blaise Pascal composed a treatise on the communication of sounds at the age of twelve, and at the age of sixteen he composed a treatise on conic sections. The Pascaline – The idea of using machines to solve mathematical problems can be traced at least as far as the early 17th century. In 1642, at the age of eighteen Blaise Pascal invented his numerical wheel calculator called the Pascaline to help his father, a French tax collector, to count taxes. The Pascaline had eight movable dials that added up to eight figured long sums and used base ten. When the first dial (one’s column) moved ten notches – the second dial moved one notch to represent the ten’s column reading of 10 – and when the ten dial moved ten notches the third dial (hundred’s column) moved one notch to represent one hundred and so on.

  26. Araminta
    2. Francisco Pizarro (1475-1541) was a Conquistador who seized the Inca empire for Spain. In 1510 he enrolled in an expedition of exploration in the New World, and three years later he joined Vasco Núñez de Balboa on the expedition that discovered the Pacific. He made two voyages of discovery down the Colombian coast (1524 – 25, 1526 – 28) and continued his explorations southward, naming the new territory Peru. In 1531 he set sail for Peru with his 4 brothers, 180 men, and 37 horses. He soon encountered emissaries of the Inca emperor, Atahuallpa, and arranged a meeting. There his men slaughtered the emperor’s unarmed retainers and took him hostage. After accepting a rich ransom for Atahuallpa’s release, Pizarro had him garroted. He spent the rest of his life consolidating Spain’s hold on Peru. He founded Lima (1535), where he was killed by fellow Spaniards he had betrayed.

  29. Whoops. I meant 10, and no, I did not use Google this time. I have been to been to Memphis where she has pride of place along with Martin Luther King in the Civil Rights Museum

  37. Pseu
    9. Beatrix Potter (1866-1943) was the author and illustrator of a popular series of children’s books that includes ‘The Tale of Peter Rabbit’, ‘The Tailor of Gloucester’ and ‘The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies’. Illustrated with watercolors, her simple and unsentimental stories for children involved the adventures of Peter Rabbit, Benjamin Bunny, the hedgehog Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle and others. Between the 1890s and 1920s she published more than a dozen books that sold millions of copies. She bought farmland and cared for her aging parents until she was in her late 40s, then she married and devoted her time to breeding sheep and fighting for land conservation.

  38. Is 8 Louis Pasteur? i was watching a program on TVa few weeks ago about bacteriology and there was obviously something about him on that

  39. FEEG
    8. Louis Pasteur (1822-1895) was born in Dole, in the region of Jura, France. His discovery that most infectious diseases are caused by germs, known as the “germ theory of disease”, is one of the most important in medical history. His work became the foundation for the science of microbiology, and a cornerstone of modern medicine. Pasteur’s phenomenal contributions to microbiology and medicine can be summarized as follows. First, he championed changes in hospital practices to minimize the spread of disease by microbes. Second, he discovered that weakened forms of a microbe could be used as an immunization against more virulent forms of the microbe. Third, Pasteur found that rabies was transmitted by agents so small they could not be seen under a microscope, thus revealing the world of viruses. As a result he developed techniques to vaccinate dogs against rabies, and to treat humans bitten by rabid dogs. And fourth, Pasteur developed “pasteurization”, a process by which harmful microbes in perishable food products are destroyed using heat, without destroying the food. Each discovery in the body of Pasteur’s work represents a link in an uninterrupted chain, beginning with molecular asymmetry and ending with his rabies prophylaxis, by way of his research in fermentation, silkworm, wine and beer diseases, asepsis and vaccines.

  41. Araminta
    It is indeed!
    6. Thomas Paine (1737-1809), intellectual, scholar, revolutionary, and idealist, is widely recognized as one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. A radical pamphleteer, Paine anticipated and helped foment the American Revolution through his powerful writings, most notably ‘Common Sense’, an incendiary tract advocating independence from Great Britain. An advocate for political liberalism and constitutional republican government, he outlined his political philosophy in ‘The Rights of Man’, written both as a reply to Edmund Burke’s view of the French Revolution and as a general political philosophy treatise. Paine was also noteworthy for his support of deism, taking its form in his treatise on religion ‘The Age of Reason’, as well as for his eye-witness accounts of both the French and American Revolutions.

  44. Christopher

    7. Aisin-Gioro Puyi was the Xuantong Emperor of China between 1908 and 1924 (ruling emperor between 1908 and 1912, and non-ruling emperor between 1912 and 1924), the tenth (and last) emperor of the Manchu Qing Dynasty to rule over China. Later between 1934 and 1945 he was the Kangde Emperor of the Japanese-controlled state of Manchukuo. In the People’s Republic of China he was a member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference from 1964 until his death in 1967 under the Chinese name Aixinjueluo Puyi.
    He is more simply known in English as Puyi, which is in accordance with the Manchu tradition of never joining clan’s name and given name together, but is in complete contravention with the old Chinese and Manchu rule whereby the private given name of an emperor is taboo and ineffable. The use of the given name Puyi after the overthrow of the empire was thus a political claim, a way to desecrate the old order. Indeed, after Puyi lost his imperial title in 1924 he was officially styled “Mr. Puyi” in China. His clan’s name Aisin-Gioro was seldom used. Puyi is also widely known as the Last Emperor. He is also known to have used the name “Henry”, a name allegedly chosen with his English language teacher, Scotsman Reginald Johnston, in reference to King Henry VIII of England. However, the name Henry was merely used for intercourse with Westerners between around 1920 and 1932, and is never used in China.

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