Through the filtered lens of present day societal norms and culture, as well as historical revisionism, famous people from generations past tend to become romanticized in the public view for better or worse, stripping down all the complexities and nuances about them and the environment they habituated in that made them the people they are known for today. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights movement is a great example of this: the common tale told in textbooks and thus the dominant viewpoint of society strips away everything else outside of him. This entire era of racial justice is truncated down to Rosa Parks refusing her seat on a bus, the Freedom Riders, some peaceful protests and of course, the “I Have a Dream” speech, where MLK states we can live in a world and judge each other by their character, rather than their skin color. I am not trying to discourage MLK and the SCLC/CORE; these were extremely significant events and actions that were an essential step in achieving racial equality. However, this viewpoint completely ignores the decades of violence, lynchings, police brutality and struggles faced by black Americans while trying to gain these goals. Conveniently ignored or shunned as equally terrible as the segregationists themselves included Malcolm X, the Black Panther Party, Fred Hampton, etc.; those that challenged the white supremacist apparatuses of the state and capitalism itself rather than individual racism were either assassinated or blackmailed out of existence. Even MLK himself was blackmailed into killing himself by the government! The reason why this narrow view of history continues to exist? The people running the education system, writing the textbooks and teaching your children are wealthy capitalists, largely white and male, who construct this narrative to hush down talk of class consciousness, community organizing, and an end to discrimination so they can keep their surplus values high. Marie Curie, the famous Polish scientist born over a hundred years ago, might have faced a similar fate of being overshadowed and forgotten due to the external pressures weighing on her, as well as her own personal struggles, being erased from history. However, it was her tenacity and determination she learned from these experiences that shaped her work and made her the person we know today. Curie faced numerous challenges throughout her career; one most notably the fact she was a woman operating in a near universal man led field. Because of this, women were not taken seriously as scientists and their accomplishments were overlooked. Curie also faced oppression from feudal monarchs of Russia governing Poland, who banned women from higher education, forcing her to go underground with other likeminded women for a college education. Curie’s own personal struggles get mixed into this as well, revolving around the sudden and abrupt death of her husband Pierre, to a romantic scandal involving her late husband’s former student that almost jettisoned her chance at earning a second Nobel Prize, the first time anyone man or woman would have achieved. To restate, all these events are crucial to Curie’s development as a scientist and as a person. She blasted away the notion that women don’t have anything to contribute to science through her groundbreaking discoveries on radioactivity, something that had puzzled prior scientists for decades. During the nonautonomous era of Poland under Russian control, Curie secretly attended the Flying University, a place of study outside legal methods for women, which eventually led her to enrolling the University of Paris. Curie was still not taken seriously as a scientist, even after winning her first Nobel Prize in 1903, due to her sex, her dual role as a mother and a scientist, and right-wing tabloids calling her a dirty foreigner. It came to a near breaking point when it turned out she was in a relationship with a married man and former student of her husband, Paul Langevin, which almost destroyed her credibility altogether. After overcoming this opposition to receive a second(!) Nobel Peace prize, she become involved in the war effort starting in 1914, using her knowledge of radiation and science to heal wounded soldiers, build X-ray units, and had trucks outfitted with medical and radioactive machinery known as petite Curies. All this effort and hard work quickly turned the public’s opinion in favor of Marie, who would then go on to meet with esteemed guests such as Warren G. Harding, the president of the United States. Curie’s life proved to be quite difficult and was challenged and put down at every step of the way. Through sheer dedication, Curie proved her critics wrong and that she provided a substantially valuable insight into the world of science that most male scientists have even come close to.