OP I see this is from Reddit. Post the link or you are a lib.
List of people that definitely shouldn’t be there, what the fuck:
- Aristotle
- Jefferson (Influential in the US? yeah. Globally? Nah.)
- Mozart
- Beethoven
- Ulysses Grant (how American to have him on the list)
- Da Vinci
- Carl Linnaeus
- Charles Dickens (so many authors. Yeah they were inspirational and influential within the literature scene of their area, so was Katy Perry and the British twink I can’t remember the name of anymore. If that’s your criteria you gotta expand your cultural horizon beyond Europe and the US. Unironically, if this is your criteria, you gotta put in Akira Toriyama.)
- Paul the apostle (why not have every pope then?)
- Benjamin Franklin
- Thomas Edison (You could make an argument about shaping IP law or whatever, but I won’t)
- so many more. This entire list is a joke.
This entire list is so fucking American as well. Yeah dude every guy who shaped your civic religion is super duper globally influential. Fuck off.
What no materialism does to an mf
Paul the apostle (why not have every pope then?)
They did include The One True Pope Who Destroyed Communism though.
haha, robert e lee, man famous mainly for losing. oh yes, he sure had a great effect.
the people who torpedoed reconstruction and created jim crow had a much greater effect, ffs.
Funny he is considered more influential than his counterpart and I don’t mean any generals in the union. By counterpart, of course, I mean none other than the brother of Jesus Christ himself, Hong Xiquan, leader of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom.
You see, while we were having our quaint little civil war over here in the “new world” back in China they were having their own. Our boy Hong here claimed himself to be the younger brother of Christ and formed his own little Kingdom under the noses of the Qing dynasty. While we were suffering casualties in the mere 100s of thousands, they were dying by the millions. Wikipedia lists the total KILLED (not even wounded, mind you) as 20-30 million people and I’ve seen sources that estimate it as high as 50 million. Oh, and this rebellion lasted twice as long as the American Civil War and was happening as the American Civil War was also happening.
I’ve never met a fellow American who knew about this, either. We literally stroke ourselves off like we are the center of everything when something 30-50 times as wild is happening on the other side of the world.
wasnt it this rebellion that broke the qing so badly (even though they managed to put it down) that it became possible to overthrow them and start on the road to mao?
I guess you could look at it this way. Though, this was happening exactly during the Second Opium War. Basically, exactly during the period in which the west was trying to destroy China through opium import. Which broke which?
Nah, Ulysses Grant is much more influential
Sure, but did any of those people have a Dodge Charger named after them in a TV show?dammit, i was coming here to make some kinda joke about it.
Roscoe P. Coltrane would definitely rate the 4 wheeled general as highly influential on his car naps.
List of “people I remember learning the names of in American high school history class”
GreatWhite Man Theorybut two of the top 3 weren’t white, and i’m not too sure about Napoleon either if we asked Ben Franklin the on true arbiter of european whiteness.
ok that’s probably white jesus, not itinerant rabbi yeshua, but i haven’t heard of any white muhammad conspiracies before.
Mozart ahead of Genghis Khan
That’s nuts. What would the world even look like if Genghis Khan didn’t exist?
Far less different than the world if Mozart never existed apparently.
No Mao? I thought he killed a 100 billion people?
Yeah I’ve been told he was worse than Hitler, so he should be above Hitler on this list right?
Deeply unserious list. Johannes Guteburg and Eli Whitney were more influential than everyone else on here combined. And they’re only notable because we don’t know the exact people who invented movable type in China/Korea or interchangeable parts in ancient Carthage.
Inventors had more impact on history than any politician or philosopher. Antibiotics, the internet, refrigeration, the scientific method, gunpowder, fermentation, and nuclear bombs…the list goes on of things that changed the world more than George Washington.
The zipper has more impact on the modern world than George Washington
There comes a point where who made the thing doesn’t even matter. It’s just that it was made. There’s a reason so many inventions have multiple originators. They always come from what came before. No one person is uniquely amazing, there’s just occasionally people with the correct drive, skill, and opportunity to connect the dots and come up with the thing.
Look up the number of inventors who died destitute trying to sell their invention that later went on to change the world. How many of them do we just not know about because Edison et al didn’t find a way to exploit their work or know they existed?
…which is why this list is deeply unserious. The Great Man of History isn’t real because history is driven by systems, people within those systems, and through advancement in how humans perform labor.
So when Eli Whitney rediscovered interchangeable parts (they were discovered much, much earlier by Carthage, then lost), it allowed for rapid industrialization. And Whitney was only one of a handful of people making the same discovery, but the first to present it to people with the power to implement it. Putting Woodrow Wilson in the same category, however, is complete nonsense.
Vulcanization is another good one. Exploitation of a natural resource in South America. It was kinda useless, then vulcanization was “discovered” when they literally could have just spoken to the tribes they enslaved to harvest rubber for 3 seconds and seen that they had been vulcanizing for a thousand years…
I can accept both Washington and Lincoln being on the list due to their personalities being very influential in shaping the US. While the country would probably be the great satan with or without them, they have left clear marks on it, and it is the world empire right now.
Sort of like how Churchill is probably fine to keep in. Pivotal for the immediate post WWII events.But like all of the British monarchs?? Louis 14 AND 16? Get outta here. Add in Gustav Vasa if you’re gonna do this dumb shit anyway.
/great man theory
Do you mean Gutenberg, or are you a really big fan of that one swedish city?
I gotta be honest and say most of the inventors and scientists on the list are a joke too. I’m not a determinist, nothing is ensured to happen, but all of the people in the list weren’t unique in their reasearch or area of focus for their time. Like yeah Edison invented the lightbulb, but it’s not like he were the only guy at the time working on that. Carl Linnaeus made the classification system because a bunch of people wanted one and were working on one.
And Gutenberg couldn’t have done his thing without the Chinese dude who invented paper
i mean there are theories he encountered also muslim prints, his invention is movable type and alloy for it basically (and combining the stuff together, which is important)
Agreed but my point was that the press needed a medium to imprint characters onto(not that other required things didn’t come from elsewhere than China), its true vellum or something else could probably have been used, but paper it was
But yeah all science and technology is iterative, which is why the westoid mantra of ‘China stole X technology’ is so stupid, especially when so many technologies rely on base components(paper, gunpowder etc) that were invented/discovered in China(and of course those things themselves also iteratively built upon prior things some discovered elsewhere)
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TIme to play “Is it
or 
?”No Simón Bolívar lol
But 6 different British monarchs and also Churchill.
Trash list
Where’s goku?
Why is Charles Darwin not at the top? If he had not invented evolution we’d still be monkeys.
15
presidents on this list lol. Including Nixon and 
for some reason. Burgerlanders really think they are the center of the universe.The amount of British monarchs is also weird. Why on Earth is Charles II on this list?
I think it’s Poppy Bush that’s on the list, which I gotta agree with tbh. Dubya did 9/11 and oversaw the expansion of militarism and all that, I wouldn’t be mad at him being on the list (in the #90’s) either. There’s others I would probably have in their place, but it’s not the worst
The rest are absolute jokes though. Hamilton lol. Goethe lmao. Dante rofl. Beethoven. Aristotle (wow you are so cultured
)I cant even concieve of the type of shit someone must be getting up to to find themselves writing this list with Richard Nixon above René Descarte, John Locke, Joan of Arc, and King Fucking Arthur. Even putting Nixon above fellow US President, Truman, who authorized two nuclear attacks on another country, is beyond wild to me.
You’d keep Descartes on the list?
Probably not, but if the list were infinite, Descartes would go above Nixon, mainly for Cartesian coordinate geometry which isn’t even really the thing he’s known for.
King Arthur, a completely fictional person, #85.
Looks like Kissinger couldn’t even make it into stormfront’s great man theory list. Already forgotten lmao rip bozo
Shakespeare at #4 is wild.
Napoleon more influential than the prophet (PBUH). James Cook is on the list at all??? Nixon, Louis 16, KING ARTHUR, Michelangelo all on the list.
Dante is on the list lol. Wtf. This is such an “look at how cultured I am! Isn’t it crazy I’m only 15 years old?” List.
Willy is one of the only authors on the list I could accept being on the list, but at number 4??? Absolute insanity.
What are the units for historical impact?
Fukuyamas
His Fukuyama levels are ober 9000!
Inverse melanin scale
It searches through wikipedia checking how much each page was accessed and then use algorithms to try to eliminate bias. The book’s Wikipedia page explains it.
I thought it was an academic paper but it may just be a book with fun facts.
Incredibly US-centric lol. Not looking at stuff like “how many languages is this article in?” if that’s your method is just so silly. Even then it’d be very flawed, but at least marginally better than what is essentially an AP History Heatmap of people
Bit idea: start a Wikipedia edit war on Charlie XCX’s page to trick their algorithm into thinking Brat Summer was the most important event in human history.
This is an incredibly dumb way to determine historical impact.
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