Roosevelt. FDR did some fundamental changes to America that took the Repubs a long time to undo.
Bush started 2 wars and bankrupted America. His inroads into the middle east are going to hurt our country and change the world order for generations.
Is it possible to do one of those Time Magazine cop-outs and have a biography of the Personal Computer as one of those included? It was the Person of the Year in 1982, after all…
I’d probably say Churchill, Hitler, Stalin, Gorbachev, and Deng Xiaoping if I had to limit it to five actual people.
My case for Deng over Mao is that Deng has all the insight into the Chinese Revolution, but also is much more responsible for the rise of China from the 1980s to today than anyone else.
Also, I think adding more than five biographies to the list makes it less challenging of an exercise.
I agree. The Falklands War was about as inconsequential a conflict as the 20th century has produced. This business about Maggie and Ronnie bringing down the USSR is just right wing fantasy.
I’d take Roosevelt over Hitler; there may be a better idea for an American than Roosevelt (Richard Nixon perhaps, or Lyndon Johnson, or maybe Robert McNamara). World War II is adequately covered by Churchill and Stalin, and leaving America out entirely except as covered in others’ biographies seems wrong.
Other than the obvious WW2 personalities, I’d add William Randolph Hearst (though his early importance was in the 1890s) as a man who drove and defined the role of infotainment reporting and the merging of newspapers and film to change opinions (both right and wrong).
Rosa Parks is a fascinating bio since she lived as a working class black woman for almost the entire century and thus encompasses Jim Crow, the Civil Rights movement, religion, the role of women (which she had strong opinions about- she felt she’d been largely pushed aside and used as an icon but figurehead due to her gender), the black diaspora to Detroit and other points north, and many other defining facets of 20th century black life.
No love for Nehru as a covering the move from Empire to Independence as being a central part of the 20th century?
Yeah, I really wanted to have FDR in there… in fact, didn’t even realize I left all Americans out until after I hit submit. If forced, I might trade Churchill for FDR.
I wouldn’t count Lenin out, as he was the start of the USSR. No, he wasn’t in power long enough, but would there have been a Stalin had there not been a Lenin first?
Stravinsky was certainly a representative and significant composer of 20th century music, but in the realm of music, I’d have to go with the Beatles (or, if we need a lone representative, John Lennon), since they not only influenced the much wider world of popular music, but also influenced a cultural paradigm shift with regard to the youth in Western Civilization.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Adolf Hitler
Joseph Stalin
Muhamed Ali
Audie Murphy
Mohandas Gandhi
Martin Luther King Jr.
Queen Elizabeth II
Yasser Arafat/Golda Meir
Fidel Castro/Che Guevera
Ronald Reagan/Mikhail Gorbachev
Truman
Pope John Paul
John Lennon
Michael Jackson
Mao Tse Tung
Oppenheimer
Robert Jackson
Elvis Presley
Michael Milliken
Alan Greenspan
Bill Gates/Steve Jobs
The OP doesn’t make the precise qualifications clear, but logically, if you need someone who covers Margaret Thatcher’s years, why not replace her with Ronald Reagan? He covers essentially the same time period, has, frankly, a more interesting biography, and led a more important country.
Thatcher continues to be influential; Reagan doesn’t. Thatcher was on the world stage considerably longer than Reagan too.
Ooh! That’s a very good oint.
I beg to differ on both counts.
Isn’t the Right’s lionization of Ronnie a marketing gimmick? They need someone to hold up to unrealistic standards (standards that Ron himself mostly doesn’t meet) and pretend that nostalgia for the perfect eighties is something more than political maneuvering.
He had a hand in, but is far removed from the end of the Soviet Union. Giving him credit is like giving the key grip credit for Star Wars. Necessary, helpful, but responsible?
Time’s man of the century was Albert Einstein. followed by FDR. FDR, and you know who I’m talking about.
Put it this way. Plug Einstein into google and you get way more hits than any other person of the 20th century.
The man’s legacy is enormous.
Prove me wrong.
It’s all relative.
Michael Jackson gets about 179 million references.
Albert Einstein gets 11.9 million
The results will vary by location, and past search history ( if you use a google account) . Try it.
On Google, Erwin Schrödinger may be just as influential. Or he may not be. I haven’t checked.
Elvis Presley and John Lennon also comfortably beat Albert Einstein.
Don’t use google search results to try and win an argument, I guess.
He was a profilgarte, corrupt, and only supported civil rights because it was politically expedient.