{"id":2710,"date":"2012-04-20T22:55:50","date_gmt":"2012-04-21T03:55:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=2710"},"modified":"2012-04-20T22:58:11","modified_gmt":"2012-04-21T03:58:11","slug":"names-that-change-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=2710","title":{"rendered":"Names That Change History"},"content":{"rendered":"

Many people have pondered the question of whether their lives are shaped by their names. Obviously, movie stars and popular performers believe this, given all the name changes they go through in search of fame. Here’s a list of some real names of famous people<\/a>. Yea, I probably wouldn’t think the same way about Tom Cruise had he kept his birth name, Tom Mapother IV. And John Denver as John Deutschendorf Jr.? Would anyone care if a Mr. Deutschendorf sang of his Rocky Mountain High? <\/p>\n

But one of the most ironic name changes<\/a> probably occurred in Germany around the turn of the century (the turn of the 20th Century, that is). The father of the man we knew as Adoph Hitler was an illegitimate child; his father did not know his own father’s last name, so he used his mothers’, i.e. “Schicklgruber”. Before the future Nazi tyrant was born, his father’s mother married a man named Heidler. His father did not at first want to adopt that name, but after his mother died he went to live with her brother, who convinced Hitler’s father to take on the family name. But in the process of registering his name change with the officials, an accumulation of bureaucratic errors transmuted Heidler into Hitler. Sometime after that, Hitler’s father married several times; the fourth child of his third wife was Adolph. <\/p>\n

Had Hitler’s father decided not to change his name, Germany would have had an Adolph Schicklgruber to deal with. Somehow I don’t think he would have been taken very seriously with that name. And even Heidler doesn’t have the “mental impact” that Hitler does. This was a perfect storm of circumstances, one that helped to propel an angry WW1 corporal into the forefront of a powerful and deadly political movement. <\/p>\n

It’s amazing how a series of innocent and unmemorable little events sometimes conspire to shape the historical currents that change our world. Unfortunately for the worse, in this instance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Many people have pondered the question of whether their lives are shaped by their names. Obviously, movie stars and popular performers believe this, given all the name changes they go through in search of fame. Here’s a list of some real names of famous people. Yea, I probably wouldn’t think the same way about Tom […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2710"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2710"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2710\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2712,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2710\/revisions\/2712"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2710"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2710"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2710"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}