They're Dead, Jim (1880-1889) Trivia Quiz

Answer: George Eliot

Mary Ann Evans, better known by her male pen name George Eliot, was a Victorian novelist who knew a thing or two about people. Her characters came to life on the page with an uncanny depth, and she invented "drama in the English countryside" a century before Netflix. Her hits ("Adam Bede", "Silas Marner", "Middlemarch", etc.) are all classics, beloved for big ideas and big personalities.

When she married John Cross in 1880 (20 years her junior), even that was dramatic. On their honeymoon in Venice, John famously leapt off the balcony into the Grand Canal, either in a failed suicide attempt or a very enthusiastic attempt to feed the fish (maybe both?). Ironically perhaps, she herself died of kidney failure just months later, leaving Cross a widower for the rest of his long, long life. Today George Eliot (or Mary Ann Evans) remains one of the greatest novelists of all time.

Answer: Fyodor Dostoevsky

Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881) is often held up as the patron saint of tortured geniuses. Britannica sums him up as a Russian novelist "whose psychological penetration into the darkest recesses of the human heart", which is to say he basically invented extreme inner monologues. He's famous for "Crime and Punishment", "The Brothers Karamazov", "The Idiot", "Demons", and the proto-existentialist novella "Notes from Underground." His big themes were guilt, redemption, insanity, God versus nihilism, etc. It sounds like Nietzsche and Freud owe him big time.

Dostoevsky's own life was at least as dramatic as his novels. He was caught up with liberal intellectuals (the subversive Petrashevsky Circle) and in 1849 almost got shot by a firing squad for reading and sharing banned writings critical of the Tsar. They marched him to the execution ground, lined up the firing squad, and at the last second, pardoned him. Instead he was shipped off to Siberia for hard labor and exile. (Thanks?) He got to know his fellow prisoners, saw the horrors of punishment, and returned as a very devout Orthodox Christian, a bit battered but also grateful to be alive (which is me after a visit from the in-laws).

Answer: Charles Darwin

Charles Darwin was that bespectacled bearded chap who's been making Sunday dinner table discussions awkward for well over a century. He was an English naturalist whose idea of natural selection became the backbone of biology. After a five-year sail on HMS Beagle, where he collected some finches, he realized nature works kind of like a sorter... traits vary, the most useful ones survive. It's that simple really. In 1859 he unleashed this truth bomb in "On the Origin of Species", saying (in polite Victorian terms) that we all have monkey cousins. He disturbed polite society by suggesting humans share ancestors with apes, but it turned out the rising class of scientists and eventually everyone else found it a golly good idea.

Darwin wasn't always a Godless heathen meant to destroy society with devil-worship disguised as science (to hear my parents tell it). He almost became a parson until he ended up on the Beagle. His first doubts occurred as a result of studying the cruel life cycle of parasitic wasps. The female wasp will typically inject her eggs directly into a host body, such as that of a caterpillar. The hatched larvae then slowly consume the still-living host from the inside out. That was enough to give Darwin pause about that whole benevolent creator thing.

Answer: Sojourner Truth

Sojourner Truth was an African American abolitionist and crusader for women's rights with a commanding presence that matched her reputation. Born Isabella Baumfree into slavery, she escaped in 1826 and, after a religious conversion, traveled across the US preaching equality. She didn't just sing hymns. She fired up crowds with talk of freedom and dignity, despite having "no education except in suffering" (her words).

She's best known for that electrifying 1851 speech at an Ohio women's rights convention. It later became famous under the title 'Ain't I a Woman?', though the phrase itself was added in later retellings. It challenged prevailing ideas of womanhood and racial inequality, pointing out how Black women were often excluded from the conversation. The National Park Service calls it "one of the most famous abolitionist and women's rights speeches in American history". She spoke truth about bearing five children, seeing them sold into slavery, and still being a woman who'd done a man's work ("I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns...no man could head me!"). After the Civil War she even worked with the Freedmen's Bureau, continuing to help freed slaves and freed women get a shot at life.

Answer: Gregor Mendel

Gregor Johann Mendel was an Austrian monk who basically played God with pea plants. Don't laugh! Through careful pea-crossing in the monastery garden he managed to unlock the secret of heredity. This pea-tinkering led to him eventually becoming recognized as "the father of modern genetics". By tracking seven pea traits (stem length, seed color, etc.) across thousands of plants, he uncovered the laws of inheritance: segregation and independent assortment. In practice, he discovered that parents pass discrete "elements" (genes, though he didn't use that word) to offspring in predictable ratios. These "Mendelian inheritance" laws laid the math groundwork for genes, and a century later revolutionized biology. The discovery of DNA sealed the deal on his greatness, proving he was way ahead of his time.

Mendel published his pea-paper in 1866, and everyone yawned, rolled their eyes, or both, something I just now paused to attempt. His monastery pals didn't read it and the scientists thought he was on about gardening trivia. He died in complete obscurity in 1884. It wasn't until 1900 that younger scientists re-discovered his results and declared him a genius. Now every biology student memorizes his ratios and ends up hating peas.

Answer: Louis Riel

Louis Riel was a Métis (mixed Indigenous/French-Canadian) leader who waged two uprisings in Manitoba and Saskatchewan to stand up for his people's rights. If you're thinking Che Guevara with a toque, you're at least on the right track. He was a legend... equal parts politician, self-proclaimed prophet, and rebel.

In 1869, when Canada bought Rupert's Land from Hudson's Bay Co., Riel organized the Red River Resistance. He stopped surveyors and even blocked incoming governor McDougall, then took over Fort Garry (modern Winnipeg) and set up a provisional government with himself as president. That may sound drastic, but Riel was trying to negotiate fair terms for the Métis (like land rights and cultural protections) before English settlers flooded in.

Riel's provisional court executed Thomas Scott, a hostile settler who violently opposed Métis actions. This turned Riel into a folk hero in Manitoba but a villain in English Canada (Scott's execution whipped up anti-Métis anger in Ontario). Riel was a bit of a religious zealot too. In 1875 he claimed a divine vision and called himself a prophet for the Métis. His followers got spooked and briefly jailed him in a Quebec asylum. Yup, he was committed in a Quebec asylum for over a year

After his release, Riel faded into the US, got married, and had kids, but trouble found him again. In 1885 Métis and some Indigenous groups in the Canadian West (Saskatchewan area) begged Riel to come back. He obeyed the call and led the North-West Rebellion in 1885, again forming a provisional government. Canada's army swiftly crushed it, and Riel was captured, tried for treason, and hanged in Regina. His execution was extremely controversial. It outraged French Canadians and helped spark Quebec nationalism.

(On a personal note--and I'm not proud of this--I actually had to google, "What's the difference between Manitoba and Saskatchewan?" while researching and composing this one.)

Answer: Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson was a New England poet who wrote nearly 1,800 poems, although only 10 were published (anonymously) in her lifetime. She lived most of her adult life in almost total seclusion in Amherst, Massachusetts, writing on little scraps of paper and sending poems to friends in cute little packets. Her verse is famous for its brevity (short, haunting lines often using hymnlike meters and irregular rhythms, unusual punctuation, etc.) and gorgeous metaphors. Along with Walt Whitman, she stands out as one of America's two leading 19th-century poets.

Emily Dickinson certainly didn't seek fame, but she was crowned by history nonetheless. She helped reinvent modern poetry by twisting syntax, using slant rhymes, and smushing big emotions into tight quatrains. After she died, her sister discovered dozens of little hand-stitched booklets of poems, one of the biggest literary treasures ever. The first published collection was released posthumously and became a massive hit, quickly being reprinted in multiple editions.

Answer: Dorothea Dix

Dorothea Dix was born in 1802, started teaching as a teenager and ran a successful girls' school. However, recurring poor health and family troubles pushed her down a different path, and that path involved travel abroad and reform work. While traveling in England she formed ties with prison and asylum reformers and secured financial support that let her pursue investigations back home. That mix of personal resilience, a teaching background, and exposure to European reform networks set the stage for the methodical investigations she would later carry out back home.

What makes Dix fascinating is how she turned moral outrage into actual paperwork that legislators couldn't ignore. After seeing mentally ill women jailed in appalling conditions while teaching Sunday classes at a local prison, she spent years touring institutions, documenting abuses, and submitting detailed petitions to state legislatures. Her 1843 petition to Massachusetts and subsequent campaigns helped create dozens of dedicated mental hospitals and persuaded multiple states to fund better care rather than leaving the poor mentally ill in jails or almshouses. She wasn't a clinician focused on medical treatments so much as a relentless advocate for infrastructure (places, funding, and trained staff) so that people who couldn't afford care would at least have humane facilities.

Later in life she was appointed Superintendent of Army Nurses during the Civil War, a role that let her push for women's participation in wartime nursing even as her strict management style earned her the nickname "Dragon Dix."

Answer: John Pemberton

Meet John Stith Pemberton, the Confederate vet-turned-pharmacist who accidentally invented one of the world's most famous beverages: Coca-Cola. In 1886, Atlanta pharmacist Pemberton mixed up a syrup of coca leaf and kola nut (and a dash of caramel for color) to sell at soda fountains. He originally pitched it as a medicinal tonic for headaches and nervous disorders, because why not? It contained cocaine from the "coca" plant and caffeine-rich kola, so yeah, it had a kick.

He sold the very first glass of Coca-Cola at Jacob's Pharmacy in Atlanta that year. He trademarked the name and sold it soda-fountain style. He didn't live long afterwards. He sold the business to Asa Candler in 1888 for just $2,300 (a bargain even then) and died that same year. Coca-Cola is still around today, and from what I've heard, does a decent business.

Answer: James Prescott Joule

James Prescott Joule was an English physicist who literally gave us the unit named after him. He provided a major cornerstone of the idea of the conservation of energy, by providing decisive evidence for the equivalence of work and heat. No matter what form energy takes (heat, work, electricity), it's all the same stuff, laying the basis for the first law of thermodynamics. Put another way: energy cannot be created or destroyed, only shuffled around.

Let's look at a hamster in a hamster wheel for a moment, because I'm bored.

-o- A hamster consumes food, which is chemical potential energy.
-o- When the little guy is in the wheel, that chemical potential energy is metabolized into the mechanical work of running (much more has already been converted to heat to keep up his core body temperature).
-o- As the hamster runs, the friction in the wheel device, the hamster's own body heat, and the air resistance he creates all conspire to convert that mechanical energy into thermal energy, heating up the hamster cage by a tiny amount (more if you've been giving him Pemberton's original-formula Coca-Cola... our fuzzy friend might never stop running!).