You may nominate up to five noteworthy Americans, from any walk of life, describing each in no more than three words. Naturalized (but not honorary) U.S. citizens are eligible for nomination, even if they were more famous for things done as citizens of another country. To avoid contemporary political disputes, your nominees must have been dead at least ten years, consistent with the U.S. Postal Service’s rule in issuing commemorative stamps.
Nominations will close at noon EST a week from today, Sun. Feb. 7. After the deadline, I’ll arrange the nominees alphabetically and we’ll vote them out much as we did in the President Elimination game.
My nominees:
George Washington: president, statesman, general.
Abraham Lincoln: president, emancipator, writer.
Martin Luther King Jr.: preacher, orator, humanitarian.
Eleanor Roosevelt: Reformer, writer, advocate.
Alexander Hamilton: Financier, economist, statesman.
Abraham Lincoln: Statesman
Albert Einstein: Scientist, Activist
Jackie Robinson: Athlete, Activist
Roger Williams: Stateman, Religious Figure
Susan B. Anthony: Activist
LOL–thanks. Too bad about the “recently deceased” thing. My original draft included anthropologist Clifford Geertz, who I’d wager is the most influential American figure in the humanities and the “softer”/more rhetorical social sciences over the last 40 years. It would be interesting to see how long he lasted.
ETA: I’ll have a hard enough time defending Roger Williams.
Einstein’s already been nominated, and I’m not sure I’d say any of these are greater than him, but for the sake of getting more scientists out there:
Richard Feynman: Physicist, Renaissance man
George Washington Carver: Agricultural botanist
Benjamin Franklin: Scientist, statesman, inventor
Kurt Gödel: Mathematician-- Incompleteness theorem
Carl Sagan: Astronomer, popularizer
Actually, come to think of it, if it comes down to Einstein vs. Franklin, I’d be hard-pressed to choose between them.
John von Neumann - Mathematician and scientist, known for work in logic/set theory, quantum mechanics, economics/game theory, the Manhattan Project, and computer science
Theodore Roosevelt, the man that put the US on the World Stage and lived life like no other.
As so many I would pick were already nominated I will add:
John Adams: Not a great president but up there with Ben Franklin and George Washington as one of the most important fathers of the country and a better man that either of them. Anti-slavery from the word go and even in favor of women suffrage when nearly no one else was. A real driver for the revolution and the man who maneuvered congress to pick George Washington as our leading General.
Rosa Parks as she prove that one person can change the world.
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J.P. Morgan**: Once the most powerful man in America and used his vast power and wealth to help the country and stop multiple panics. Nowhere near the negatives that most of those early fortune builders had and not a Robber Baron.
Robert Heinlein as our greatest Science Fiction Writer and the man credited with really pushing the space program the most.