Quick: Name four Nobel Peace Prize winners from the last 35 years. Easy! (Sanchez, Esquivel, Corrigan and Sato.) Now name some from before 1970. Um .. Gandhi? Close, but not quite. Forgotten Peace Prize winners is a leading cause of being beaten in trivia games, and they can be useful for our historical perspective as well. So come join us on a journey to the days before PowerPoint laureates, back when World Peace was a dream for crazy utopians rather than a media event for the humanitarian jetset. Here are some of the Nobel Peace Prize winners you've forgotten.

1901: Jean-Henri Dunant, and Frederic Passy. The 19th century was not as brutal as the 20th, (yes, someone is counting), but it was pretty brutal. The main difference was that in the 20th, victims of war had at least the false hope of medical aid and fair treatment to cling to. They had people like Jean-Henri Dunant to thank for this. After witnessing soldiers die needlessly by the thousands at the Battle of Solferino in 1859, Dunant created first the Red Cross, and then went to work on the first Geneva Convention. His efforts were later counterbalanced by wondrous technological and ideological innovations, and all in all a soldier might still prefer Solferino over Stalingrad, but it was a deserved award, more than most.

1906: Theodore Roosevelt. The tradition of ironic Nobel decisions did not begin with Yassir Arafat or Henry Kissinger. Roosevelt rose to fame with the ascendancy of American imperialism, back when imperialism still meant something, namely going out to conquer brown people for their own good. Elected by an anarchist's bullet, (back when anarchism still meant something), President Roosevelt believed in the doctrine of "speak softly, carry a big stick, and once in a while slap someone's fingers with it to remind them who's in charge". And then he brought Russia and Japan together to end their 1904-1905 war. For that, Roosevelt got the Nobel Peace Prize. (Russia got shame and revolution. Japan got a lock of Lord Nelson's hair.)

1911: Alfred Hermann Fried. Nobel Peace laureates before World War 1 were often pacifists and leaders in the international peace movement. Alfred Hermann Fried wrote and spoke and organized for peace in Germany. Other Peace Prize winners of the period did the same in other countries. You haven't heard of any of them, and I bring up this "Alfred Hermann Fried" character simply to give you an idea of what a typical forgotten pacifist's name might sound like. We know today that a pacifist is a silly thing to be. We know this because nobody listened to them, and it's a good thing that they didn't, what with all the crazy warmongers running about.

1925: Austen Chamberlain and Charles Gates Dawes. 1926: Aristide Briand and Gustav Stresemann. 1929: Frank B. Kellogg. Chamberlain, Briand, Stresemann and Kellogg, representing the governments of Great Britain, France, Germany and the US respectively, were rewarded for their work with two of the major European peace treaties of the 1920's: The Pact of Locarno of 1925, and the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928. The Locarno treaties secured the borders of Europe. The Kellogg-Briand Pact outlawed offensive war alltogether. Don't laugh, it is impolite. The efforts of these people failed disastrously, but hindsight is a spoiled child. The Kellogg-Briand Pact did nothing to prevent wars, but it made wars of expansion slightly less glorious: Gradually, in part because of Kellogg-Briand, wars came to be fought in "self-defence". (Yes, even the German invasion of Poland. Then again, so was World War I. Something tells me I might be missing something here.)

Aristide Briand was incidentally the first major politician to propose a European federation. The League of Nations - world peace - European unity: these were ambitious people. After World War 2, Winston Churchill credited their vision, saying that the League of Nations "did not fail because of its principles or conceptions. It failed because these principles were deserted by those States who had brought it into being." In his view even a recreated League of Nations did not go far enough: only a "kind of United States of Europe" could secure peace in Europe. This federation would start with a close partnership between France and Germany, and would expand to include all of the continent. (Great Britain would have to stay out, because it was too un-European and had the commonwealth to think of. Fair enough.) Today we have a United States of Europe, and war between Germany and France is unimaginable. Perhaps the diplomatic architects of the 20's were not fools, just ahead of their time?

1914, 1915, 1916, 1918, 1923, 1924, 1928, 1932, 1939, 1940, 1941, 1942, 1943, 1948, 1955, 1956, 1966, 1967, and 1972: Nobody. Nobody was a great champion of peace throughout the 20th century. Nobody prevented the first World War. Nobody stood in the way of fascism and communism. Nobody stopped Hitler from invading Poland. And Nobody talked the superpowers out of fighting proxy wars in third world countries. In honor of this achievement, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has awarded the peace prize to Nobody an amazing 19 number of times, most recently in 1972. Even this is something of a snub: Nobody continued to play a major role in preventing wars throughout the 1980's and 90's, and up until our own day, and there's little reason to think this will end any time soon. My own proposal is to give the Peace Prize to Nobody every time Nobody prevents another genocide.

1948: Mahatma Gandhi (almost). Gandhi never won the Nobel Peace Prize, but he was nominated throughout the 1930's and 40's, and he came closer to winning in 1948 than at any other time. He might have received the prize if he hadn't been assasinated in January that year, (bullets often have that effect). The Norwegian Nobel Committee thought about giving Gandhi the award posthumously, but decided to withhold it instead, stating that they'd found "no suitable living candidate". They have regretted this decision ever since, and dedicated the 1989 Peace Prize for the Dalai Lama "to the memory of Mahatma Gandhi."

Another non-winner of 1948 was Josef Stalin, who was nominated along with Molotov, and genuinely believed he had a chance. To Stalin's disappointment, the Committee was short on pro-Soviet leanings. Stalin may have been offended by the "no suitable living candidate" remark in particular. So he did what any crazy dictator would, he created a competing peace prize of his own: The International Stalin Peace Prize. (Don't look so astonished, why wouldn't Stalin have a peace prize?) The Stalin Peace Prize was given to armchair totalitarians from all over the world, and some good guys too. If Stalin intended to steal Nobel's glory, he made two mistakes: He reduced the value of his prize by handing it out to tens of people at a time. And he was a crazy dictator. Khrushchev later renamed the prize the International Lenin Peace Prize, figuring (correctly) that it takes some decades in the grave (or mausoleum) before a crazy dictator can be passed off as an eccentric visionary. The last person to receive the International Lenin Peace Prize was Nelson Mandela in 1992. In his acceptance speech ten years later, Mandela said that although people all over the world had supported his cause, "within that international support for our struggle the Soviet Union and other socialist countries stood out". The socialist bloc "gave material, moral and political support to our struggle in a manner and on a scale that we will never be able to repay." I think it was nice of him to say that.

1970: Norman Borlaug. Borlaug is the best-known of the lesser known Peace Prize laureates. He's the one your pro-genetic manipulation libertarian friend is always yammering about. Borlaug was the father of the Green Revolution. He developed new, high-yield strains of wheat, thus saving vast number of lives throughout the developing world. A billion? Who knows? Something on that scale anyway. Your pro-GM libertarian friend is absolutely right.