Give Peace a Prize Trivia Quiz

Answer:

>> Teddy Roosevelt
became the first American to win a Nobel Prize, and the first sitting head of state to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, in 1906. He earned it for brokering the treaty that brought an end to the Russo-Japanese War. Controversially, this was the same guy who'd just helped the U.S. take the Philippines by force.
>> Woodrow Wilson
picked up the 1919 prize for dreaming up the League of Nations. There's some irony baked into this one, too. The U.S. Senate refused to let America join the very organization Wilson was being honored for creating.
>> Austen Chamberlain
shared half of the 1925 Nobel Peace Prize with American Vice President Charles G. Dawes. Chamberlain was honored for his important role in bringing about the Locarno Treaty. The Locarno settlement was a series of treaties and agreements designed to stabilize relations between Germany and its former enemies after World War I.

Your FunTrivia bonus nugget: Chamberlain's half-brother was Neville Chamberlain, the British PM remembered for trying to appease Hitler.

>> Carlos Saavedra Lamas,
Argentina's foreign minister, became the first Latin American ever to win a Nobel Prize of any kind when he won the Peace Prize in 1936. His claim to fame was masterminding the South American Antiwar Pact and mediating a ceasefire in the Chaco War between Bolivia and Paraguay.
>> Albert Schweitzer
was your typical theologian, philosopher, organist and pastor who then went off and became a physician. He built and ran a hospital in the jungle at Lambaréné, in modern Gabon. He got the prize in 1952 for his humanitarian work, then poured all the prize money into building a leprosy treatment center at his hospital.
>> Martin Luther King Jr.,
at just 35, became the youngest person to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 for leading the American civil rights movement through nonviolent resistance. Every dollar from the prize went straight back into funding the movement.
>> Mother Theresa
Recognized for decades of work with Calcutta's poorest and dying through her Missionaries of Charity, Mother Teresa flatly refused the traditional Nobel banquet in 1979 and asked that the money set aside for it be redirected to feed the hungry instead. It was enough to feed a few hundred poor people for a year.
>> Mikhail Gorbachev,
the last leader of the USSR, won the 1990 prize for the part he played in easing Cold War tensions. His role included glasnost and perestroika and his approach to the political changes sweeping Eastern Europe, including the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. It was a major shift in East-West relations.
>> Lech Walesa
was an electrician by trade. He rose from those roots to lead Solidarity, the Soviet bloc's first independent trade union, which was the result of the 1980 Gdańsk shipyard strikes. Fearing he wouldn't be allowed back into the country, Wałęsa asked his wife Danuta to make the trip instead and read his speech on his behalf. It earned a rare standing ovation.

1994 featured an interesting trio of winners. Yasser Arafat shared the prize with Israeli leaders Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres for negotiating the Oslo Accords. This was the first direct agreement ever struck between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization.