Friday, December 18, 2015

The 100 Most Influential Figures in American History

From The Arlantic magazine (2006)

100: Herman Melville
Moby Dick was a flop at the time, but Melville is remembered as the American Shakespeare.

99: Richard Nixon
He broke the New Deal majority, and then broke his presidency on a scandal that still haunts America.

98: Booker T. Washington
As an educator and a champion of self-help, he tried to lead black America up from slavery.

97: Stephen Foster
America’s first great songwriter, he brought us “O! Susanna” and “My Old Kentucky Home.”

96: Ralph Nader
He made the cars we drive safer; thirty years later, he made George W. Bush the president.

95: Samuel Goldwyn
A producer for forty years, he was the first great Hollywood mogul.

94: George Eastman
The founder of Kodak democratized photography with his handy rolls of film.

93: Nat Turner
He was the most successful rebel slave; his specter would stalk the white South for a century.

92: John Steinbeck
As the creator of Tom Joad, he chronicled Depression-era misery.

91: Lyman Beecher
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s clergyman father earned fame as an abolitionist and an evangelist.

90: Jonathan Edwards
Forget the fire and brimstone: his subtle eloquence made him the country’s most influential theologian.

89: Walter Lippmann
The last man who could swing an election with a newspaper column.

88: Enrico Fermi
A giant of physics, he helped develop quantum theory and was instrumental in building the atomic bomb.

87: Benjamin Spock
With a single book—and a singular approach—he changed American parenting.

86: Mary Baker Eddy
She got off her sickbed and founded Christian Science, which promised spiritual healing to all.

85: Ernest Hemingway
His spare style defined American modernism, and his life made machismo a cliché.

84: Thurgood Marshall
As a lawyer and a Supreme Court justice, he was the legal architect of the civil-rights revolution.

83: James Fenimore Cooper
The novels are unreadable, but he was the first great mythologizer of the frontier.

82: George Gallup
He asked Americans what they thought, and the politicians listened.

81: Margaret Mead
With Coming of Age in Samoa, she made anthropology relevant—and controversial.

80: William Randolph Hearst
The press baron who perfected yellow journalism and helped start the Spanish-American War.

79: Louis Armstrong
His talent and charisma took jazz from the cathouses of Storyville to Broadway, television, and beyond.

78: John Brown
Whether a hero, a fanatic, or both, he provided the spark for the Civil War.

77: Betty Friedan
She spoke to the discontent of housewives everywhere—and inspired a revolution in gender roles.

76: Frank Lloyd Wright
America’s most significant architect, he was the archetype of the visionary artist at odds with capitalism.

75: Babe Ruth
He saved the national pastime in the wake of the Black Sox scandal—and permanently linked sports and celebrity.

74: Brigham Young
What Joseph Smith founded, Young preserved, leading the Mormons to their promised land.

73: Cyrus McCormick
His mechanical reaper spelled the end of traditional farming, and the beginning of industrial agriculture.

72: Sam Walton
He promised us “Every Day Low Prices,” and we took him up on the offer.

71: Noah Webster
He didn’t create American English, but his dictionary defined it.

70: Meriwether Lewis and William Clark
They went west to explore, and millions followed in their wake.

69: James Gordon Bennett
As the founding publisher of The New York Herald, he invented the modern American newspaper.

68: James D. Watson
He co-discovered DNA’s double helix, revealing the code of life to scientists and entrepreneurs alike.

67: P.T. Barnum
The circus impresario’s taste for spectacle paved the way for blockbuster movies and reality TV.

66: Elvis Presley
The king of rock and roll. Enough said.

65: Henry David Thoreau
The original American dropout, he has inspired seekers of authenticity for 150 years.

64: Jane Addams
The founder of Hull House, she became the secular saint of social work.

63: George Marshall
As a general, he organized the American effort in World War II; as a statesman, he rebuilt Western Europe.

62: William James
The mind behind Pragmatism, America’s most important philosophical school.

61: Samuel Gompers
The country’s greatest labor organizer, he made the golden age of unions possible.

60: William Faulkner
The most gifted chronicler of America’s tormented and fascinating South.

59: Louis Sullivan
The father of architectural modernism, he shaped the defining American building: the skyscraper.

58: John C. Calhoun
The voice of the antebellum South, he was slavery’s most ardent defender.

57: Robert E. Lee
He was a good general but a better symbol, embodying conciliation in defeat.

56: Horace Mann
His tireless advocacy of universal public schooling earned him the title “The Father of American Education.”

55: John Quincy Adams
The Monroe Doctrine’s real author, he set nineteenth-century America’s diplomatic course.

54: Bill Gates
The Rockefeller of the Information Age, in business and philanthropy alike.

53: Oliver Wendell Holmes
Known as “The Great Dissenter,” he wrote Supreme Court opinions that continue to shape American jurisprudence.

52: Joseph Smith


51: Margaret Sanger
The ardent champion of birth control—and of the sexual freedom that came with it.

50: James K. Polk
This one-term president’s Mexican War landgrab gave us California, Texas, and the Southwest.
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49: Frederick Law Olmsted
The genius behind New York’s Central Park, he inspired the greening of America’s cities.

48: Robert Oppenheimer
The father of the atomic bomb and the regretful midwife of the nuclear era.

47: Frederick Douglass
After escaping from slavery, he pricked the nation’s conscience with an eloquent accounting of its crimes.

46: William Lloyd Garrison
Through his newspaper, The Liberator, he became the voice of abolition.

45: Samuel F. B. Morse
Before the Internet, there was Morse code.

44: Lyndon B. Johnson
His brilliance gave us civil-rights laws; his stubbornness gave us Vietnam.

43: W.E.B. Du Bois
One of America’s great intellectuals, he made the “problem of the color line” his life’s work.

42: Eleanor Roosevelt
She used the first lady’s office and the mass media to become “first lady of the world.”

41: Harriet Beecher Stowe
Her Uncle Tom’s Cabin inspired a generation of abolitionists and set the stage for civil war.

40: John Dewey
He sought to make the public school a training ground for democratic life.

39: Rachel Carson
The author of Silent Spring was godmother to the environmental movement.

38: Susan B. Anthony
She was the country’s most eloquent voice for women’s equality under the law.

37: J. P. Morgan
The great financier and banker was the prototype for all the Wall Street barons who followed.

36: William Jennings Bryan
“The Great Commoner” lost three presidential elections, but his populism transformed the country.

35: Jackie Robinson
He broke baseball’s color barrier and embodied integration’s promise.

34: Jonas Salk
His vaccine for polio eradicated one of the world’s worst plagues.

33: Ralph Waldo Emerson
The bard of individualism, he relied on himself—and told us all to do the same.

32: Albert Einstein
His greatest scientific work was done in Europe, but his humanity earned him undying fame in America.

31: Henry Clay
One of America’s greatest legislators and orators, he forged compromises that held off civil war for decades.

30: Elizabeth Cady Stanton
One of the first great American feminists, she fought for social reform and women’s right to vote.

29: Earl Warren
His Supreme Court transformed American society and bequeathed to us the culture wars.

28: Dwight D. Eisenhower
He won a war and two elections, and made everybody like Ike.

27: Eli Whitney
His gin made cotton king and sustained an empire for slavery.

26: Walt Disney
The quintessential entertainer-entrepreneur, he wielded unmatched influence over our childhood.

25: John Adams
His leadership made the American Revolution possible; his devotion to republicanism made it succeed.

24: Alexander Graham Bell
By inventing the telephone, he opened the age of telecommunications and shrank the world.

23: Orville and Wilbur Wright
They got us all off the ground.

22: Walt Whitman
He sang of America and shaped the country’s conception of itself.

21: Harry S. Truman
An accidental president, this machine politician ushered in the Atomic Age and then the Cold War.

20: Andrew Carnegie
The original self-made man forged America’s industrial might and became one of the nation’s greatest philanthropists.

19: Thomas Paine
The voice of the American Revolution, and our first great radical.

18: Andrew Jackson
The first great populist: he found America a republic and left it a democracy.

17: Ronald Reagan
The amiable architect of both the conservative realignment and the Cold War’s end.

16: Mark Twain
Author of our national epic, he was the most unsentimental observer of our national life.

15: Theodore Roosevelt
Whether busting trusts or building canals, he embodied the “strenuous life” and blazed a trail for twentieth-century America.

14: Henry Ford
He gave us the assembly line and the Model T, and sparked America’s love affair with the automobile.

13: James Madison
He fathered the Constitution and wrote the Bill of Rights.

12: Ulysses S. Grant
He was a poor president, but he was the general Lincoln needed; he also wrote the greatest political memoir in American history.

11: John D. Rockefeller
The man behind Standard Oil set the mold for our tycoons—first by making money, then by giving it away.

10: Woodrow Wilson
He made the world safe for U.S. interventionism, if not for democracy.

09: Thomas Edison
It wasn’t just the light bulb; the Wizard of Menlo Park was the most prolific inventor in American history.

08: Martin Luther King
His dream of racial equality is still elusive, but no one did more to make it real.

07: John Marshall
The defining chief justice, he established the Supreme Court as the equal of the other two federal branches.

06: Benjamin Franklin
The Founder-of-all-trades— scientist, printer, writer, diplomat, inventor, and more; like his country, he contained multitudes.

05: Alexander Hamilton
Soldier, banker, and political scientist, he set in motion an agrarian nation’s transformation into an industrial power.

04: Franklin D. Roosevelt
He said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” and then he proved it.

03: Thomas Jefferson
The author of the five most important words in American history: “All men are created equal.”

02: George Washington
He made the United States possible—not only by defeating a king, but by declining to become one himself.

01: Abraham Lincoln
He saved the Union, freed the slaves, and presided over America’s second founding.

Wednesday, November 25, 2015

Billboard Top 100 Chart for the week of December 5, 2015


1Last Week: 1


Hello

Adele

  








18Last Week: 18


Watch Me

Silento

  




New
30Last Week: --


Great Is Thy Faithfulness

Jordan Smith





44Last Week: 43


Break Up In A Small Town

Sam Hunt

  


47Last Week: 34


Cheerleader

OMI

  
52Last Week: 50


No Role Modelz

J. Cole

  


59Last Week: 61


Bet You Can't Do It Like Me

DLOW

60Last Week: 62


Nothin' Like You

Dan + Shay

  


68Last Week: 56


Back To Back

Drake

  


72Last Week: 55


Adventure Of A Lifetime

Coldplay

  









91Last Week: 78


Right Hand

Drake

  
92Last Week: 90


I Love This Life

LoCash

  
93Last Week: 86


Cake By The Ocean

DNCE

  


99Last Week: 96


My House

Flo Rida