Sites Holmquist trys, and often fails, to go no more than a couple of days without visiting (some of which Holmquist regularly swipes links from without attribution)
Last week John Hawkins asked a select group of liberal and lefty bloggers to select the "The Greatest Figures Of The 20th Century" by listing up to, in their opinion, the 20 greatest figures. They were not to be ranked by those who responded as the tally was only to be of the number of bloggers who listed an individual as one of the 20 greatest. 23 bloggers responded and the results are in with the number after the name reflecting the vote tally:
18) Lech Walesa (3) 18) Alan Turing (3) 18) Harry Truman (3) 18) Eleanor Roosevelt (3) 18) Pablo Picasso (3)
18) Thurgood Marshall (3) 18) Lyndon Johnson (3) 18) Henry Ford (3) 18) Thomas Edison (3) 18) Marie Curie (3) 18) Jimmy Carter (3) 15) The Wright Brothers (4) 15) George Orwell (4) 15) Vaclav Havel (4) 12) Teddy Roosevelt (5) 12) Bill Clinton (5) 12) Louis Armstrong (5) 9) George C. Marshall (7) 9) John F. Kennedy (7) 9) Dwight Eisenhower (7) 8) Crick & Watson (8) 7) Mahatma Gandhi (10) 6) Jonas Salk (11) 5) Winston Churchill (13) 4) Nelson Mandela (14) 3) Albert Einstein (15) 1) Franklin Roosevelt (20) 1) Martin Luther King Jr. (20)
I could critique this list but the truth is that I couldn't up with a serious list of my own. There are just too many people who played a very positive role in the 20th century for me to come up with a list of 20, a conclusion reinforced today when, via Petrified Truth, I read about the late anti-Nazi fighter Jannie Brandes-Brilleslijper. I tried limiting my list to the arts, politics or science and couldn't do it. In the end I turned in this list:
These were the first 20 people that came to my mind when I decided to list people whose work had made me laugh through their intentional work in 20th century. After turning in the list, I realized that Rees actually hadn't done that through 20th century work. posted by micah holmquist at 8/20/2003 03:36:00 PM
