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Who’s your favorite historical figure? (lemmy.world)

submitted 16 hours ago by venusianmage@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

39 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Hürrem Sultan (Roxelana). She was born a Ruthenian (modern-day Ukrainian) commoner, captured by Crimean Tatars in a slave raid as a teenager, and taken to Constantinople, where she entered the imperial harem. She eventually became Sultan Suleiman’s favorite concubine. In a complete break with Ottoman tradition, Suleiman freed and married her, making her his legal wife. Until then, sultans generally married freeborn foreign noblewomen, if they married at all, and had children with slave concubines instead. Hürrem went on to become one of the most powerful and influential women in Ottoman history and the first of the prominent women of the Sultanate of Women. She’s widely considered the first, and perhaps the most powerful, Haseki Sultan. It’s probably the most fairy tale-like rags-to-riches story I’ve ever come across.

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[–] Nemo@slrpnk.net 1 points 8 hours ago

George Washington Carver. Born enslaved, became a chemist, and proceeded to look around his community and ask, "What do we need? What do we have?" Most famously, what they needed was crop rotation. What they had to rotate in was peanuts, so they needed a market for peanuts, so GWC set out to create a bunch of peanut- and peanut-oil-based products. That's just the most famous example out of many; he spent his whole adult life doing this over and over.