They're Dead, Jim (1900-1909) Trivia Quiz

Answer: Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche's writing was bold, brash, and very much meant to poke the establishment. He challenged traditional morality, questioned the foundations of religion and philosophy, and introduced ideas such as the Übermensch (superman), eternal recurrence, and perspectivism. His works were not widely acclaimed during his lifetime, but in the decades after his death they went on to become influential and, alas, often misappropriated by political movements that he would not have endorsed.

Although Friedrich Nietzsche is widely associated with the phrase "God is dead," Nietzsche wasn't making a slogan for hipsters; he was giving his diagnosis of what he saw as the decline of religious and moral certainty in modern Western culture. He believed that the decline of belief in God would unravel the entire moral and metaphysical framework that had structured European civilization for centuries. He died at the age of 55 in Weimar, Germany. His health had been in serious decline since a mental collapse in 1889.

Answer: Queen Victoria

Queen Victoria ruled the UK from 1837 to 1901 (63 years and 216 days) which made her the longest-reigning British monarch until Elizabeth II finally passed her record in 2015 with what was no doubt a polite wave. Her name ended up describing the entire era. The Victorian age was a time of industrial revolution, global empire, stern manners, and furniture strong enough to survive cannon fire. She also picked up the title "Empress of India" in 1876, because being the mere queen of a global empire gets stale after forty years or so.

Victoria is remembered both for her sense of duty and for being, well... a bit odd. After the death of her beloved husband, Prince Albert, in 1861, she went into deep mourning and wore black for the rest of her life. For years she mostly avoided public appearances, which did not thrill her subjects. Her later years were more politically complex. She had nine children (whose marriages connected her to nearly every royal house in Europe), a growing empire she never actually visited, and a close and much-gossiped-about friendship with her Scottish servant, John Brown, and later her Indian attendant, Abdul Karim.

Answer: Levi Strauss

Levi Strauss was born Löb Strauß in Bavaria and moved to the United States as a teenager, where he eventually made his way to San Francisco during the Gold Rush. He wasn't looking to dig for gold, though, at least literally. He was looking to make money by selling to the people digging for gold. At first, he sold dry goods like fabric, tools, and clothing, but soon he partnered with tailor Jacob Davis to patent a pair of work pants with metal rivets. And thus, the blue jean was born, and now teenagers buy pre-ripped jeans that cost more than an actual pickaxe.

Levi Strauss never married and spent much of his later life involved with philanthropy, business management, and making sure his company didn't fall apart after his death. He died peacefully at home in San Francisco at age 73.

Answer: Richard Jordan Gatling

Richard Jordan Gatling was the inventor of the Gatling gun, which was a rapid-fire, crank-operated multi-barrel gun he patented in 1862. It didn't instantly turn the battlefield into a steampunk war zone, but it was one of the first guns capable of sustained fire, using multiple rotating barrels to prevent overheating. Gatling claimed his invention would reduce the size of armies and ultimately save lives, which I would call a rather optimistic appraisal of the device.

Gatling spent his later years continuing to design firearms and improving existing weapons. He died at the home of his daughter in New York, at about 84 years old. His idea would lead to modern "Gatling Type" rotary cannons, which now make his original hand crank look like a kid's toy.

Answer: James Longstreet

James Longstreet was one of the most important Confederate generals of the American Civil War, serving as a trusted corps commander under Robert E. Lee. He fought in numerous major battles, including Second Manassas, Fredericksburg, and Gettysburg, where his tactical disagreements with Lee are still a subject of discussion.

After the war, Longstreet committed an unforgivable sin to his southern brethren. He accepted the results of the war, supported Black suffrage, and even took a federal appointment from his former battlefield opponent and friend, Ulysses S. Grant.

Longstreet has far fewer monuments, memorials, and roads named after him, while Lee, Jackson, and others were elevated into near-mythic status by Lost Cause mythologies. Longstreet was treated as a traitor to the "proper" Southern narrative, punished not for his wartime actions, but for refusing to romanticize the Confederacy afterward. He died of complications from pneumonia.

Answer: Jules Verne

If you've ever read a story where someone straps into a funky contraption, heads somewhere insanely impractical, and somehow survives long enough to wax philosophical about it, well, that's art imitating Jules Verne. Called the "grandfather of science fiction," Verne created a whole new type of adventure story, one where technology, exploration, and imagination worked together to blow the reader's Victorian-era knee-high gartered socks off.

Verne's books became international hits with the young and old alike, translated all around the world and making every kid bemoan their boring lives which were tragically bereft of volcano tubes and giant squids.

Some of his imaginings bordered on prophetic. He wrote about electric submarines, rocket launches from Florida, and video calls long before those things existed. In his later years, Verne struggled with health problems, including diabetes and vision loss, but he kept writing. He died in Amiens, France, leaving behind more than 60 novels.

Answer: Paul Cezanne

Paul Cézanne is cited as "the father of modern art," mostly because every major 20th-century painter--Cubists, Fauvists, abstractionists, pretty much everyone-all pointed back to him and said, "Yeah, that guy changed everything." Cézanne didn't paint shimmering water lilies or starry nights full of emotional turbulence. Instead, he painted apples, mountains, bathers, and still lifes in a way that nobody had before, breaking them down into planes of color and geometric shapes. If you've ever looked at a painting and thought, "Why does everything look like it's made of blocks, but in kind of a good way", well, that's Cézanne's influence on display.

During his lifetime, Cézanne wasn't exactly a fan favorite. Critics considered his work unfinished, awkward, and oddly obsessed with fruit. Even the Impressionists, the rebels of the art world, thought he was a bit too out there. But younger artists, especially Picasso and Matisse, studied him like a manual. Picasso later declared, "Cézanne is the father of us all".

In October 1906, Cézanne was out painting during a thunderstorm (because of course he was) when he collapsed on the road. A passerby carried him home in a cart, but he developed pneumonia and died a few days later at age 67. Perhaps you've seen this movie before, but his reputation sky-rocketed after his death.

Answer: Dmitri Mendeleev

Dmitri Mendeleev is best known for formulating the periodic law and creating a version of the periodic table of chemical elements, predicting several elements that were at the time undiscovered. In so doing, he pretty much laid the foundation for modern chemistry. So, now you know the man to admire or curse, depending on your personal history with science.

In his later years he remained active in research, teaching, and advising until he fell ill during an influenza epidemic. He died in Saint Petersburg six days before his 73rd birthday, from complications of influenza (and pneumonia) during the epidemic. His name lives on though, as some of you may know. The element with atomic number 101 was named mendelevium in his honor, and of course the periodic table remains the backdrop of any chemistry classroom.

Answer: Empress Dowager Cixi

Empress Dowager Cixi was born on 29 November 1835 and rose from being a low-ranked concubine of the Xianfeng Emperor to become the most powerful figure in the late Qing court. After Xianfeng died in 1861 she and Empress Dowager Ci'an acted as regents for the young Tongzhi Emperor. Cixi consolidated power after the "Xinyou coup" and for decades ruled China as the de facto sovereign, often through puppet emperors.

Cixi died in Beijing at about age 72, shortly after a period of declining health and just one day after the death of the Guangxu Emperor (who died on 14 November 1908). Her long rule is still debated today by those who debate things like that. She supported some modernization efforts like new arsenals and even some limited reforms, but she is also held responsible by many historians for blocking deeper, earlier reforms that might have strengthened the Qing state.

Answer: Geronimo

Geronimo (born Goyaałé, meaning "the one who yawns") was a Bedonkohe Apache leader remembered for refusing to live on a reservation and for leading repeated breakouts, raids, and resistance against U.S. and Mexican military forces. He wasn't considered a chief in the traditional Apache sense, but he became the most famous Apache of his era thanks to his reputation, his survival skills, and the fact that newspapers in the 1880s loved turning him into a legend, even while wildly exaggerating the details.

He spent years avoiding capture in the Southwest, often with just a small band of followers, and he was so good at disappearing into the landscape that U.S. troops once used 5,000 soldiers to hunt down a group of fewer than 40 people, a fact which alone puts him in contention for the most annoying person to try to catch in the desert. When Geronimo finally surrendered for the last time in 1886, he was promised he could eventually return to his homeland, but that didn't happen. Instead, he was sent east as a prisoner of war, moved from fort to fort, and eventually ended up at Fort Sill in Oklahoma.

In his later years, Geronimo became sort of a reluctant celebrity. He was exhibited at world fairs, met President Theodore Roosevelt, and even signed autographs. He died of pneumonia after falling from his horse and being unable to get help in the cold. He was around 79 or 80 years old.