<In your younger manhood, you were not much interested in causes. You came in touch with the heroes of history and they began their socializing influence on your life by interpreting you to yourself.

You were led by these subtle spiritual forces to a finer heroic selfhood.

For example, you got in touch with the Norseman and he was idealized before you. You saw yourself adventurous, fearless, wild. You heart would pour out sagas to the undying ages. You looked upon the mound builders, you became a toiler. But when Columbus came on the scene your courage arose, your perseverance and industry increased. You became willing to risk for the faith you held.

Perhaps you read of Buddha and the genuine peace he offers to one third of humanity. You learned, as others have done certain stock things about Socrates. But upon closer relation with this greatest of Sophists, you began to catch the scholar's enthusiasm.

You learned of Charlemagne, and let the soldier rise in you, the thirst for power.
You may have sat at the feet of Francis, the sweet saint of Assisi and felt you soul warmed at the heart.

You may have contemplated Da Vinci, and become lost in wonder before this greatest mind of all minds.

You learned about Darwin. You learned that Darwin has rarely been highly thought of by the ministers. But the more you learned of the man the more you were able to rise above suffering, the more you sat in his study and learned the value of little things.

Perhaps finally you came to Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American Plato, and beheld how he supplemented Buddha's asceticism in you.

…Abridged
Arthur C. Call form Educational Foundations Magazine 1909

The heroes of any given time tell a lot about that society. The Nicholsons were descended from Isle of Lewis Scots, who are descended in part from Norsemen. In short: these upstanding citizens were the issue of some the most ruthless and violent people to ever  tread on Earth.  The Viking Museum in Roskilde Denmark, which both my sons have visited, has a lifesize wax figure of a Viking raping a woman while chowing down on an ox thigh, or something. My sons don't idolize Norsemen. They don't skate, for one. In grade 4, my eldest son's class had to write up a bio: ALL the boys, save for one, chose Wayne Gretzky. Today, this son, now 21,  admires Trudeau and Che Guevara and certain soccer players from what I see. My 18 year old admires (judging by posters in his room)  Bob Marley - and, ah, Lara Croft, or is it Angelina Jolie for her social conscience?  My heroine as a  young girl was Emma Peel. Click for story.  Role models were hard to come by for young girls in the sixties: We were always being told to look up to Indira Gandhi or Golda Meir, but they were "exceptions, not the rule" and we knew it. Had there been 60 female leaders, we could have chosen the best from the bunch to idolize.  Emma, now she was special: the best TV character from among dozens of usually dipsy domestic ones. She was strong, fearless, brainy and beautiful--and independent.

If history is about truth and not myths, then how can we idolize, say, Columbus, who so remorselessly killed off the gentle and beautiful people of Hispanola (and contributed to the genocide of 180 million native people in the Americas) because his faith gave him permission to do so. Maybe it is better our heroes today are sports stars and celebrities, your generic strong (virile?) man and beautiful (fertile?) woman (that's what the term 'model' means, doesn't it: cookie-cutter beauty?) whose all too human failings are written up every chance the press can get.

Heroines.ca is a wonderful site about Canadian women of note. The Tighsolas women are written up there. Our Canadian Girl (ourcanadiangirl.ca) is a site with stories about girls in history.

Einstein was voted Man of Century (by Time and lots of others, I guess). I happen to have a picture of Einstein taken by my mother in law in 1936 in Saranac Lake.  Could it have been that his first wife helped him develop the Theory of Relativity?