Intellect PlusRebels, revolutionaries and activists
345 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 6 of 6.
Did the Dreyfus affair really make Theodor Herzl a Zionist?Herzl said the crowds he heard in Paris during the Dreyfus trial converted him. Some historians now doubt it. His early accounts barely mention the case, he may at first have thou…
Thomas Müntzer went from Luther's protégé to leader of a peasant revoltLuther once recommended Thomas Müntzer for a pulpit. Within a few years the two men were bitter enemies. Convinced the world was about to end, Müntzer preached that believers must…
Two sisters took sixty-five towns from the Han Empire in AD 40In AD 40 the aristocratic sisters Trưng Trắc and Trưng Nhị led a revolt against Han Chinese rule in what is now northern Vietnam. They seized some sixty-five settlements, and Trưn…
W. E. B. Du Bois used door-to-door fieldwork to demolish racial stereotypesIn 1896 a young sociologist walked Philadelphia's Black neighbourhoods, mapping who lived where, how they worked and how they died. The Philadelphia Negro, published in 1899, beca…
Rosa Luxemburg cheered the Russian Revolution, then warned against its authoritarianismA Marxist who defended democracy against fellow revolutionaries, Rosa Luxemburg argued with reformists, nationalists and Bolsheviks alike. She coined the slogan socialism or barba…
Malcolm X's dishwashing friend in Harlem became the comedian Redd FoxxBefore he was Malcolm X, he was Detroit Red, a Harlem hustler whose red-haired pal from Chicago later found fame as Redd Foxx. A burglary sentence in 1946 changed everything. In p…
Marcus Garvey called himself Provisional President of Africa but never set foot thereMarcus Garvey built a mass movement urging people of African descent to unite, take pride in themselves and, for some, return to Africa. He launched a shipping line to carry them.…
Margaret Sanger coined a campaign around two words: birth controlIn 1914 it was a federal offence in the United States even to mail information about contraception. Margaret Sanger broke that law on purpose, was arrested eight times, and popula…
Martin Luther King Jr. was born Michael, renamed after his father's trip to GermanyThe boy born in Atlanta in 1929 was Michael King Jr. In 1934 his father, a Baptist pastor, travelled to a church congress in Berlin, toured sites linked to the reformer Martin Lut…
Robespierre quit as a judge because he opposed the death penaltyAs a young magistrate in Arras, Maximilien Robespierre resigned rather than rule in capital cases, and in 1791 he urged the French Assembly to abolish execution altogether. Within…
Mexico's founding father was a rule-breaking priest who taught villagers to farm silkwormsMiguel Hidalgo was a priest who read banned French philosophy, questioned papal power and clerical celibacy, and fathered several children. In Dolores he set up brickworks and vin…
Pancho Villa learned to read in prison and starred as himself in Hollywood filmsBorn José Doroteo Arango, the bandit who became Pancho Villa had barely basic literacy until a Zapatista tutored him in a Mexico City jail. He escaped on Christmas Day 1912, rode …- India's warrior queen of 1857 first fought the British with lawyers and lettersRani Lakshmibai of Jhansi is remembered as a sword-wielding rebel who died in battle in 1858. Before any fighting, she spent years challenging Britain on paper, hiring an Australi…
Louis Riel founded a Canadian province and was hanged for treasonLouis Riel led the Métis of the Red River in a resistance that forced Ottawa to negotiate the birth of Manitoba. Fifteen years later he led a second, armed uprising, lost at Batoc…
The man who faced down an empire was once too shy to speakAs a schoolboy in Rajkot, Mohandas Gandhi was tongue-tied, avoided games and kept company mainly with books. In London he had to join a public-speaking group just to manage a cour…
The Red Cross founder went looking for an emperor to fix a business dealIn 1859 Henry Dunant travelled to northern Italy hoping Napoleon III would sort out water rights for his Algerian mill company. He arrived at Solferino on the evening of a battle …
A failed exam candidate decided he was Jesus's younger brother and shook ChinaHong Xiuquan failed China's imperial examinations four times, in a system passing fewer than one candidate in a hundred. After a breakdown he dreamed of a heavenly father and elde…
A salt smuggler who failed his exams crowned himself emperor in Chang'anHuang Chao came from a family grown rich smuggling salt past a state monopoly. After repeatedly failing the imperial examinations he turned rebel, and in 881 his army took the Tan…
Jane Addams dropped out of medical school and invented American social workJane Addams wanted to be a doctor so she could live among the poor. Illness and a breakdown ended that plan after one year. Instead, after visiting a London settlement house, she …
Before the Revolution, Jean-Paul Marat was a physicist who challenged NewtonJean-Paul Marat is remembered as the firebrand journalist of the French Revolution, killed in his bath in 1793. Years earlier he was a London doctor, a court physician and an expe…
An eye injury in a wheel factory turned John Muir toward the wildernessIn March 1867 a file slipped in an Indianapolis wagon-wheel factory and pierced John Muir's eye. He spent six weeks in a darkened room fearing blindness. When his sight returned h…
José Rizal trained as an eye doctor because his mother was going blindJosé Rizal switched from philosophy to medicine when he learned his mother was losing her sight, and became an ophthalmologist. He also wrote two novels that inspired a revolution…
Nigeria's favourite sitcom writer became the voice of the oil-polluted OgoniKen Saro-Wiwa wrote a television comedy watched by an estimated 30 million Nigerians and a war novel in what he called Rotten English. Then he devoted himself to the Ogoni people,…
Harriet Tubman led a Civil War raid that freed more than 700 peopleAfter escaping slavery in 1849, Harriet Tubman went back south about 13 times and guided roughly 70 people to freedom, later boasting she never lost a passenger. In the Civil War …
Harvey Milk worked on Barry Goldwater's campaign before becoming a gay iconHarvey Milk spent his thirties as a buttoned-up Wall Street researcher who kept his private life hidden and even recruited volunteers for conservative Barry Goldwater. A decade la…
Helen Keller was a socialist, suffragist and ACLU co-founder, not just a miracleMost people remember Helen Keller at a water pump, learning her first word. Fewer know the adult: a Radcliffe graduate who wrote 14 books, joined the Socialist Party in 1909, help…
Booker T. Washington chose his own surname on his first school dayBorn enslaved in Virginia and known only as Booker, he was freed at nine and taught himself to read. Asked for a surname at school, he picked Washington. By 1881 he was leading th…
Before Che Guevara was a revolutionary, he was an asthmatic rugby-playing medical studentErnesto Guevara battled acute asthma all his life yet swam, cycled tirelessly and played rugby for several Argentine clubs. As a medical student he crossed South America and retur…
A Javanese prince passed over twice for the throne led a five-year warDiponegoro, eldest son of a Yogyakarta sultan, was twice denied the crown with Dutch backing. Many Javanese came to see him as the just ruler foretold in prophecy, and from 1825 h…
Elizabeth Cady Stanton opposed the Fifteenth Amendment because it left women outElizabeth Cady Stanton drove the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, the first gathering called solely to discuss women's rights. With Susan B. Anthony she ran a record-breaking petitio…- Emiliano Zapata was no poor peasant, and his village trusted him anywayLegend casts Zapata as a landless farmhand, but his family was well known and reasonably comfortable in Anenecuilco. In 1909 the village elders handed him leadership of their cent…
- Emma Goldman's father burned her French book; she became a famous lecturerAs a teenager in Saint Petersburg, Emma Goldman begged to go back to school, and her father threw her French textbook into the fire. She educated herself anyway, emigrated to Amer…
Emmeline Pankhurst insisted she was born on Bastille Day. She wasn'tHer birth certificate says 15 July 1858, but Emmeline Pankhurst claimed the day before, Bastille Day, feeling kinship with revolutionary women. She went on to found the Women's So…
Frederick Douglass learned to read after his enslaver forbade itWhen Sophia Auld began teaching twelve-year-old Frederick the alphabet, her husband stopped her, warning that literacy would make an enslaved boy want freedom. Douglass later call…
Georges Danton, the Thunderer, went from unknown lawyer to revolutionary giantOn the eve of 1789 Georges Danton was an obscure lawyer with a face scarred by smallpox. His booming speeches to crowds at the Palais Royal soon earned him the nickname the Thunde…
The man who chaired India's constitution drafting was once barred from sitting inside classAs a Mahar child, B. R. Ambedkar had to sit apart from classmates and wait for someone of higher caste to pour him water. He went on to earn doctorates from Columbia and the Londo…- Betty Friedan's revolution began with a survey for her college reunionPreparing for her fifteenth Smith College reunion in 1957, Betty Friedan quizzed fellow graduates about their lives. Their quiet discontent became the problem that has no name, in…
Jinnah was the lawyer who defended India's fiery nationalist TilakBefore Gandhi, the best-known Indian politician was a mathematics teacher from Ratnagiri whose slogan declared self-rule his birthright. The British tried Bal Gangadhar Tilak for …
A slave-owning Spanish colonist became the Indies' fiercest defenderBartolomé de las Casas arrived in Hispaniola in 1502 as a settler, joined raids and held Indigenous labourers. In 1514, while preparing a Pentecost sermon on a passage from Eccles…
An enslaved saddler from Kufa helped topple an Islamic dynastyAs a young man, the Persian later known as Abu Muslim worked as an enslaved saddler in the Iraqi city of Kufa. Within a few years he had launched the revolt that overthrew the Uma…
Burma's independence hero set out for China and ended up in TokyoIn 1940, with a price of 500 rupees on his head, Aung San slipped out of Burma on a Norwegian cargo ship under a false name, hoping to reach communist contacts in China. He drifte…
A former cowherd defied the Abbasid caliphs from a mountain fortressBabak began as a village cowherd who played the lute. A snowstorm changed his life: a rich rebel leader named Javidhan sheltered in his mother's poor house, admired the boy's shre…- Nothing written about Spartacus comes from anyone who saw his revoltSpartacus is one of antiquity's most famous rebels, yet every surviving account was written a century or more after his death, by authors who never met him and never spoke for the…
A church floor at a student conference turned Steve Biko against liberal nonracialismAt a 1967 student conference, white and Indian delegates were given dormitory beds while black Africans were told to sleep in a church. Steve Biko walked out, and the insult convi…- Subhas Chandra Bose passed the elite civil service exam, then refused the jobSubhas Chandra Bose sailed to England at his father's urging and did brilliantly in the crucial first Indian Civil Service exam. He then declined the routine final test, calling n…