Positive roll models found in history? ?

Question

Do you have any ideas about any positive roll models found in history?

Answer 1

I have no ideas about any "roll models" -  but I can tell you about some famous role models found in history.

Herodotus

Thucydides

Livy

Ammianus Marcellinus

Francis Parkman

Answer 2

There's many, many, too many to count.

How about the thousands of people who refused to stand idly by while Hitler murdered millions of Jews? The stories of those who "did something about it"  are truly inspirational stories. They put themselves at risk to help their fellow human beings, many times strangers.

My favorite is a lesser-known one. Stefania Podgorska was a 16 year old Polish girl living in Przemysyl during WW2.  Long story short, she found herself at that young age faced with surviving alone without parents or guardians. What's more, she had a 6 year old sister to take care of.  But she still didn't make any excuses for not helping, when she realized the Jews were starving in teh Ghetto. When they started being shipped away to death camps, Stefania started hiding them. She hid 13 Jews during the entire war, at the risk of her and her sister's life. She even managed to keep them hidden when some nurses from the n**i army moved in with her!   Her, her sister, and all 13 Jews survived the war because one 16 year old girl decided that she couldn't stand by and do nothing while her "neighbors" were being taken away and killed.  

Answer 3

Mahatma Ghandi. Brought ideas from Thoreau and Tolstoy (I think) and developed the practice of non-violent civil resistance (satyagraha) that freed India from British colonial rule.

Answer 4

I could fill a book with them and not run out.  Just a few in the last couple hundred years:

George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Abraham Lincoln, Dolly Madison, Lewis and Clark, Clara Barton, Florence Nightingale, Madame Curie, Elizabeth Pankhurst, Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Shirley Chisholm, Bela Abzug, John F. Kennedy, Jane Goodall, Katherine Hepburn, Hubert H. Humphrey, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Bobby Kennedy...

There are many, many more.  There are plenty today.  Look around you.  Who do you admire.  Who's life seems exemplery.  Who has the ethics and ideals that make you respect them... there's your role model.

Answer 5

They are throughout the ages and certainly abound in modern times.  One in particular I'll mention, Lou Henry Hoover.

Lou Henry Hoover

Admirably equipped to preside at the White House, Lou Henry Hoover brought to it long experience as wife of a man eminent in public affairs at home and abroad. She had shared his interests since they met in a geology lab at Leland Stanford University. She was a freshman, he a senior, and he was fascinated, as he declared later, "by her whimsical mind, her blue eyes and a broad grinnish smile."

She was born in Waterloo, Iowa, in 1874  She was an outdoors person went on camping trips in the hills (in California after she moved there in her early teens) Lou became a fine horsewoman; she hunted, and preserved specimens with the skill of a taxidermist; she developed an enthusiasm for rocks, minerals, and mining. She was a gun enthusiast and was often armed.  She entered Stanford in 1894 where she graduated as the first woman with a mining and metallurgical degree.  

She subsequently married a classmate Herbert Hoover and the newlyweds left at once for China, where he won quick recognition as a mining engineer. His career took them about the globe--Ceylon, Burma, Siberia, Australia, Egypt, Japan, Europe--while her talent for homemaking eased their time in a dozen foreign lands. Two sons, Herbert and Allan, were born during this adventurous life, which made their father a youthful millionaire.

During World War I, while Herbert Hoover earned world fame administering emergency relief programs, she was often with him but spent some time with the boys in California. In 1919 she oversaw construction begin for a long-planned home in Palo Alto. In 1921, however, his appointment as Secretary of Commerce took the family to Washington. There she spent eight years busy with the social duties of a Cabinet wife and an active participation in the Girl Scout movement, including service as its president.

The Hoovers moved into the White House in 1929, and Lou as First Lady welcomed visitors with poise and dignity throughout the administration. She was the one who first desegregated the White House by inviting the wives of black congressmen to White House events.  She also was the originator of radio fireside chats when she used the radio to speak to the girl scouts.

Mrs. Hoover paid with her own money the cost of reproducing furniture owned by Monroe for a period sitting room in the White House. She also restored Lincoln's study for her husband's use.. The Hoovers entertained elegantly, using their own private funds for social events.  While in the White House she designed and had built with her own money the first presidential retreat, Camp Rapidan, and then gave it to the country when they left the White House.

In 1933 they retired to Palo Alto, but maintained an apartment in New York. Mr. Hoover learned the full lavishness of his wife's charities only after her death there on January 7, 1944; she had helped the education, he said, "of a multitude of boys and girls." In retrospect he stated her ideal for the position she had held: "a symbol of everything wholesome in American life."

This women is a role model better than one that you could construct from whole cloth.  He life contains far more than the little listed here and following the listed sites will supply far more information which are only a few of the nearly 200,000 google pages on this individual:.