Fiat Lux

This one deals with religion, if you want to create a flamewar of atheist v. Christian, this is not the place to do so and any such comment threads will be frozen when they start.

Now....forward to the post:

I think one of the forgotten goods of history has been the actions of the Pope John XXIII during the Shoah. Pius XII was and is a bit controversial, but John XXIII should be one of the Righteous Among the nations.

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

He was one of those who saved the honor of the Church.

Others who deserve mention are:

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

^This man was one of the leaders of the German resistance to the Nazis.

Then there's ol' Pius XII himself:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Pius_XII#The_Holocaust

He hid Jews in the monasteries of the Church, saving them from Nazi evil.

And last but not least is the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rescue_of_the_Danish_Jews where Denmark deliberately defied the Nazis and saved most of its Jewish population.

Even in the midst of darkness and evil, there was light. And the light was good.

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

^This particular Forgotten Good marks the rare time that a colonial power conquered and ruled another people and then more or less abided by the terms of a treaty it imposed. This treaty also recognized Maori sovereignty (though that's somewhat disputed). Colonialism was more or less an evil in the broader scheme of things, but it did have its redeeming moments. This is one of them.

Now, why does this fellow get to be #1? Because he, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrus_the_Great, King of Kings in Iran, was the first individual in all of history to abolish slavery in his empire. And also the first to rule a truly global empire.

In all the remembrances of modern-day emancipators like Abraham Lincoln, Tsar Alexander II Romanov, and Princess Isabel of Brazil, it should be kept in mind that an Empire traditionally deemed autocratic and despotic was the first in history to abolish slavery altogether, and that the Greeks who we so admire for "freedom" had both a growth of freedom and an expansion of slavery simultaneously with it. History is never so simple as we think it is.