| 1. | Abraham Lincoln - He saved the Union, freed the slaves, and presided over America’s second founding. |
| 2. | George Washington - He made the United States possible—not only by defeating a king, but by declining to become one himself. |
| 3. | Thomas Jefferson - The author of the five most important words in American history: “All men are created equal.” |
| 4. | Franklin Delano Roosevelt - He said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” and then he proved it. |
| 5. | Alexander Hamilton - Soldier, banker, and political scientist, he set in motion an agrarian nation’s transformation into an industrial power. |
| 6. | Benjamin Franklin - The Founder-of-all-trades— scientist, printer, writer, diplomat, inventor, and more; like his country, he contained multitudes. |
| 7. | John Marshall - The defining chief justice, he established the Supreme Court as the equal of the other two federal branches. |
| 8. | Martin Luther King Jr. - His dream of racial equality is still elusive, but no one did more to make it real. |
| 9. | Thomas Edison - It wasn’t just the lightbulb; the Wizard of Menlo Park was the most prolific inventor in American history. |
| 10. | Woodrow Wilson - He made the world safe for U.S. interventionism, if not for democracy. |
| 11. | John D. Rockefeller - The man behind Standard Oil set the mold for our tycoons—first by making money, then by giving it away. |
| 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. |
| 13. | James Madison - He fathered the Constitution and wrote the Bill of Rights. |
| 14. | Henry Ford - He gave us the assembly line and the Model T, and sparked America’s love affair with the automobile. |
| 15. | Theodore Roosevelt - Whether busting trusts or building canals, he embodied the “strenuous life” and blazed a trail for twentieth-century America. |
| 16. | Mark Twain - Author of our national epic, he was the most unsentimental observer of our national life. |
| 17. | Ronald Reagan - The amiable architect of both the conservative realignment and the Cold War’s end. |
| 18. | Andrew Jackson - The first great populist: he found America a republic and left it a democracy. |
| 19. | Thomas Paine - The voice of the American Revolution, and our first great radical. |
| 20. | Andrew Carnegie - The original self-made man forged America’s industrial might and became one of the nation’s greatest philanthropists. |
| 21. | Harry Truman - An accidental president, this machine politician ushered in the Atomic Age and then the Cold War. |
| 22. | Walt Whitman - He sang of America and shaped the country’s conception of itself. |
| 23. | Wright Brothers - They got us all off the ground. |
| 24. | Alexander Graham Bell - By inventing the telephone, he opened the age of telecommunications and shrank the world. |
| 25. | John Adams - His leadership made the American Revolution possible; his devotion to republicanism made it succeed. |
| 26. | Walt Disney - The quintessential entertainer-entrepreneur, he wielded unmatched influence over our childhood. |
| 27. | Eli Whitney - His gin made cotton king and sustained an empire for slavery. |
| 28. | Dwight Eisenhower - He won a war and two elections, and made everybody like Ike. |
| 29. | Earl Warren - His Supreme Court transformed American society and bequeathed to us the culture wars. |
| 30. | Elizabeth Cady Stanton - One of the first great American feminists, she fought for social reform and women’s right to vote. |
| 31. | Henry Clay - One of America’s greatest legislators and orators, he forged compromises that held off civil war for decades. |
| 32. | Albert Einstein - His greatest scientific work was done in Europe, but his humanity earned him undying fame in America. |
| 33. | Ralph Waldo Emerson - The bard of individualism, he relied on himself—and told us all to do the same. |
| 34. | Jonas Salk - His vaccine for polio eradicated one of the world’s worst plagues. |
| 35. | Jackie Robinson - He broke baseball’s color barrier and embodied integration’s promise. |
| 36. | William Jennings Bryan - “The Great Commoner” lost three presidential elections, but his populism transformed the country. |
| 37. | J. P. Morgan - The great financier and banker was the prototype for all the Wall Street barons who followed. |
| 38. | Susan B. Anthony - She was the country’s most eloquent voice for women’s equality under the law. |
| 39. | Rachel Carson - The author of Silent Spring was godmother to the environmental movement. |
| 40. | John Dewey - He sought to make the public school a training ground for democratic life. |
| 41. | Harriet Beecher Stowe - Her Uncle Tom’s Cabin inspired a generation of abolitionists and set the stage for civil war. |
| 42. | Eleanor Roosevelt - She used the first lady’s office and the mass media to become “first lady of the world.” |
| 43. | W. E. B. DuBois - One of America’s great intellectuals, he made the “problem of the color line” his life’s work. |
| 44. | Lyndon Baines Johnson - His brilliance gave us civil-rights laws; his stubbornness gave us Vietnam. |
| 45. | Samuel F. B. Morse - Before the Internet, there was Morse code. |
| 46. | William Lloyd Garrison - Through his newspaper, The Liberator, he became the voice of abolition. |
| 47. | Frederick Douglass - After escaping from slavery, he pricked the nation’s conscience with an eloquent accounting of its crimes. |
| 48. | Robert Oppenheimer - The father of the atomic bomb and the regretful midwife of the nuclear era. |
| 49. | Frederick Law Olmsted - The genius behind New York’s Central Park, he inspired the greening of America’s cities. |
| 50. | James K. Polk - This one-term president’s Mexican War landgrab gave us California, Texas, and the Southwest. |
| 51. | Margaret Sanger - The ardent champion of birth control—and of the sexual freedom that came with it. |
| 52. | Joseph Smith - The founder of Mormonism, America’s most famous homegrown faith. |
| 53. | Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. - Known as “The Great Dissenter,” he wrote Supreme Court opinions that continue to shape American jurisprudence. |
| 54. | Bill Gates - the Rockefeller of the Information Age, in business and philanthropy alike. |
| 55. | John Quincy Adams - The Monroe Doctrine’s real author, he set nineteenth-century America’s diplomatic course. |
| 56. | Horace Mann - His tireless advocacy of universal public schooling earned him the title “The Father of American Education.” |
| 57. | Robert E. Lee - He was a good general but a better symbol, embodying conciliation in defeat. |
| 58. | John C. Calhoun - The voice of the antebellum South, he was slavery’s most ardent defender. |
| 59. | Louis Sullivan - The father of architectural modernism, he shaped the defining American building: the skyscraper. |
| 60. | William Faulkner - The most gifted chronicler of America’s tormented and fascinating South. |
| 61. | Samuel Gompers - The country’s greatest labor organizer, he made the golden age of unions possible. |
| 62. | William James - The mind behind Pragmatism, America’s most important philosophical school. |
| 63. | George Marshall - As a general, he organized the American effort in World War II; as a statesman, he rebuilt Western Europe. |
| 64. | Jane Addams - The founder of Hull House, she became the secular saint of social work. |
| 65. | Henry David Thoreau - The original American dropout, he has inspired seekers of authenticity for 150 years. |
| 66. | Elvis Presley - The king of rock and roll. Enough said. |
| 67. | P. T. Barnum - The circus impresario’s taste for spectacle paved the way for blockbuster movies and reality TV. |
| 68. | James D. Watson - He codiscovered DNA’s double helix, revealing the code of life to scientists and entrepreneurs alike. |
| 69. | James Gordon Bennett - As the founding publisher of The New York Herald, he invented the modern American newspaper. |
| 70. | Lewis and Clark - they went west to explore, and millions followed in their wake. |
| 71. | Noah Webster - He didn’t create American English, but his dictionary defined it. |
| 72. | Sam Walton - He promised us “Every Day Low Prices,” and we took him up on the offer. |
| 73. | Cyrus McCormick - His mechanical reaper spelled the end of traditional farming, and the beginning of industrial agriculture. |
| 74. | Brigham Young - What Joseph Smith founded, Young preserved, leading the Mormons to their promised land. |
| 75. | George Herman “Babe” Ruth - He saved the national pastime in the wake of the Black Sox scandal—and permanently linked sports and celebrity. |
| 76. | Frank Lloyd Wright - America’s most significant architect, he was the archetype of the visionary artist at odds with capitalism. |
| 77. | Betty Friedan - She spoke to the discontent of housewives everywhere—and inspired a revolution in gender roles. |
| 78. | John Brown - Whether a hero, a fanatic, or both, he provided the spark for the Civil War. |
| 79. | Louis Armstrong - His talent and charisma took jazz from the cathouses of Storyville to Broadway, television, and beyond. |
| 80. | William Randolph Hearst - The press baron who perfected yellow journalism and helped start the Spanish-American War. |
| 81. | Margaret Mead - With Coming of Age in Samoa, she made anthropology relevant—and controversial. |
| 82. | George Gallup - He asked Americans what they thought, and the politicians listened. |
| 83. | James Fenimore Cooper - The novels are unreadable, but he was the first great mythologizer of the frontier. |
| 84. | Thurgood Marshall - As a lawyer and a Supreme Court justice, he was the legal architect of the civil-rights revolution. |
| 85. | Ernest Hemingway - His spare style defined American modernism, and his life made machismo a cliché. |
| 86. | Mary Baker Eddy - She got off her sickbed and founded Christian Science, which promised spiritual healing to all. |
| 87. | Benjamin Spock - With a single book—and a singular approach—he changed American parenting. |
| 88. | Enrico Fermi - A giant of physics, he helped develop quantum theory and was instrumental in building the atomic bomb. |
| 89. | Walter Lippmann - The last man who could swing an election with a newspaper column. |
| 90. | Jonathan Edwards - Forget the fire and brimstone: his subtle eloquence made him the country’s most influential theologian. |
| 91. | Lyman Beecher - Harriet Beecher Stowe’s clergyman father earned fame as an abolitionist and an evangelist. |
| 92. | John Steinbeck - As the creator of Tom Joad, he chronicled Depression-era misery. |
| 93. | Nat Turner - He was the most successful rebel slave; his specter would stalk the white South for a century. |
| 94. | George Eastman - The founder of Kodak democratized photography with his handy rolls of film. |
| 95. | Sam Goldwyn - A producer for forty years, he was the first great Hollywood mogul. |
| 96. | Ralph Nader - He made the cars we drive safer; thirty years later, he made George W. Bush the president. |
| 97. | Stephen Foster - America’s first great songwriter, he brought us “O! Susanna” and “My Old Kentucky Home.” |
| 98. | Booker T. Washington - As an educator and a champion of self-help, he tried to lead black America up from slavery. |
| 99. | Richard Nixon - He broke the New Deal majority, and then broke his presidency on a scandal that still haunts America. |
| 100. | Herman Melville - Moby Dick was a flop at the time, but Melville is remembered as the American Shakespeare. |