Your favorite(s) Badass from History.

[uttaku]

James Brooke the White raja, with only a handful of men and an old brig he conquered an ENTIRE country from pirates and then spent most of his life crushing river pirates while ruling as a fair and honest man.

John Nicholson, fought with bravery in the 1st sikh war and the indian munity (he was know as the Hero of Delhi), but most importantly the was so awesome he had a cult worship him!

Frederick Townsend Ward, he founded the ever victorous army, a small band of mechs that defeated the taiping rebellion.

Yes these are all victorian imperial heroes, your point?

 

[DuctTapeJedi]

Harriet Tubman was always my hero as a kid. She saved three hundred people, guiding huge groups (many of which were children) at a time over hundreds of miles while being chased by dogs, slave hunters, and all sorts of other scary things, and never lost a single person.

Also, she did all of this while suffering brain damage. She'd been hit in the head with an iron pan as a kid, and suffered narcolepsy her entire adult life.

...She was a wanted 'criminal' who would pass out at random intervals... And they still never found her...

what... Excluding the last line that is totally awesome.

PS. It's not hard to escape the authorities when that many people owe you their lives.

There was one account I read in a biography of her where she fell asleep in a busy city, under her own wanted poster, and still got away. There were also her crazy backwoods survival skills she learned from her dad. They were apparently so impressive that the Union accepted her as a scout in the Civil War. A female allowed to fight in the Civil War on the basis of sheer badassery.

Damn.

 

[gh0ti]

Tough question. The trouble is when you go back more than a few hundred years it becomes very difficult to distinguish the facts beneath the reputations. For my part, I'm going to go for a typically British kind of badass:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Henry_Cain

This guy won the Victoria Cross for his action at Arnhem. With his unit surrounded by the Germans, he single-handedly fought off multiple tanks using a PIAT gun (as useless a bit of anti-tank equipment ever devised) and when that broke down, he went racing about the battleground armed with a mortar (which he fired from the hip) - despite having been wounded by machine gun fire and temporarily blinded.

After 6 days of intense fighting, Cain was believed to have disabled at least six enemy tanks. When the relief force arrived, allowing a retreat, he was the last to leave and refused medical attention until all of his remaining men had been evacuated.

The thing that really makes him a badass in my eyes though, is that his children had no idea about any of this until after he died. He just didn't think it was important, or noteworthy enough to tell them.

 

[wolfy098]

Harriet Tubman was always my hero as a kid. She saved three hundred people, guiding huge groups (many of which were children) at a time over hundreds of miles while being chased by dogs, slave hunters, and all sorts of other scary things, and never lost a single person.

Also, she did all of this while suffering brain damage. She'd been hit in the head with an iron pan as a kid, and suffered narcolepsy her entire adult life.

...She was a wanted 'criminal' who would pass out at random intervals... And they still never found her...

what... Excluding the last line that is totally awesome.

PS. It's not hard to escape the authorities when that many people owe you their lives.

There was one account I read in a biography of her where she fell asleep in a busy city, under her own wanted poster, and still got away. There were also her crazy backwoods survival skills she learned from her dad. They were apparently so impressive that the Union accepted her as a scout in the Civil War. A female allowed to fight in the Civil War on the basis of sheer badassery.

Damn.

Now you see THAT is awesome, or everyone in that city was blind...

That last line has more impact now.

 

[Aris Khandr]

Grigori Rasputin [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grigori_Rasputin]

From the section about his death.

Three days later, Rasputin's body, poisoned, shot four times, badly beaten, and drowned, was recovered from the river. An autopsy established that the cause of death was drowning.

 

[spartandude]

Sir Isaac Newton - The deadliest son of a ***** in space!

 

[TheRightToArmBears]

Rasputin was rather badass. Anyone who takes that much murdering is pretty awesome in my book.

 

[Irriduccibilli]

Peter Tordenskjold for the win
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Tordenskjold
You cant find any other person who wears the outfit he is wearing in the picture and still look MANLY.

 

[smearyllama]

Real? Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

So awesome, that the media actually handled his death with sensitivity.

He actually died at his mistress' house.

They said he died at his "Summer Home".

Fake? Rooster Cogburn.

Blind in one eye, overweight, getting on his years, and still an active US Marshall.

I love True Grit so much.

 

[Redlin5_v1legacy]

This guy. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manfred_von_Richthofen]

Died in battle the best of the best.

 

[Samwise137]

Fridtjof Nansen. Who can deny a mustache like that:

And he won the Nobel Peace Prize. I have to wonder: did he glare at a group on indigenous people and make them stop quarreling?[/QUOTE]

Haha, someone's been on badassoftheweek.[/quote]

Actually, no. One of my top students discovered him while she was doing a project on Norway. He's been a bit of a meme around our school ever since. His book "Farthest North" is also quite good. It's about the discovery of Greenland.

 

[EcHoFiiVe]

Simo Häyhä- Best sniper of all time. Over 600 confirmed kills.
Grigori Rasputin- Impossible to kill. IMPOSSIBLE
Julii Borisovich Khariton, Andrei Sakharov, Victor Adamsky, Yuri Babayev, Yuri Smirnov, and Yuri Trutnev- The designers of the Tsar Bomba. The single stupidest yet somehow necessary demonstration of enormous balls in the history of mankind.
Ernest Hemingway-His books have Michael Bay explosions coming out of them because of the amount of testicles this guy had.

 

[almostgold]

Me.

 

[Carlston]

Blackjack Pershing

 

[OptimisticPessimist]

Muthahfuckin' Mad Jack Churchill.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Churchill

How can you not love this guy?

Also, Gotz Von Berlechingen, 'cause he had a fucking metal hand.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6tz_von_Berlichingen

Oh, and Wolf the Quarrelsome. 'Cause he has the sweetest fucking name ever.

http://www.badassoftheweek.com/quarrelsome.html

 

[Goofguy]

Genghis Khan. The man was responsible (albeit not single-handedly) for creating the largest contiguous empire ever known as well as his effective (and horrendous) use of psychological warfare to demoralize his enemies.

I hear he is supposed to be in one of the showdowns in the upcoming season 3 of Deadliest Warrior. Can't wait.

 

[crudus]

Well, there's <a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patton>General George S. Patton, Jr., Jack Churchill, Teddy Roosevelt, and <a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_jackson>Andrew Jackson. They are all awesome in their own rights.

Myn are Jack Churchill - as some have introduced to me in another topic:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Churchill

Also the only person to have a recorded kill of a German using a longbow during WWII.

 

[Gladiateher]

Teddy Roosevelt.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teddy_Roosevelt

Death took Roosevelt in his sleep. If it had tried to take him at any other time, there would have been a fight (one which Death would have likely lost, Dante's Inferno style)

---

Ramses II
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramses_II
An early troll, Ramses II would go to temples constructed by earlier Pharaohs, scratch out their names and carve in his own. He also commissioned hundreds of busts and statues of himself. He built large walls around the borders of his empire, many of which went unscaled for centuries as well. There were also rumors about Ramses cutting off the right hands and penises of the people warriors whom he defeated in combat, massing them in town centers and setting them ablaze.

Andrew Jackson
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Jackson
Andrew Jackson was the first President to have been targeted by an Assassin. The attempt went poorly for Richard Lawrence who had the jump on Jackson. Both of his pistols misfired (after being inspected, the pistols were shown to be in perfect working order). Jackson beat Lawrence with his cane nearly to death.

Awhhhh Yeah! Andrew Jackson was a badass ************.
Also James Bowie, Themistocles, and Patton.

-edit-
damnit I forgot to mention Chesty Puller

 

[Cogwheel]

Since Rasputin's already been mentioned, Joshua Norton I, emperor of the United States, protector of Mexico. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Norton] Bonus points for being hilarious.

 

[Toaster Hunter]

Theodore Roosevelt, because this image isn't photoshopped

Spoiler

Also: Simo Hayha, the White Death, so badass, Sabaton wrote a song about him