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.
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.
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.
Nah, Ulysses Grant is much more influential
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?
GreatWhite Man TheoryMozart 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.
but 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.
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…
/great man theory
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.
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)
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.
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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?
List of “people I remember learning the names of in American high school history class”
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 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.
Besides major discoveries in math, he’s the founder of modern western philosophy. His work laid the foundation not just for calculus, but for systems of physics and metaphysics uncoupled from the Church.
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
)
Trash list
Where’s goku?
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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.
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.
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
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King Arthur, a completely fictional person, #85.
Also I don’t see Confucius on this list. Am I supposed to believe Grover Cleveland was more influential than Confucius?
I have a Snorlax in Pokemon Go named Big Fuck that I caught 8 years ago, which is twice as long as the Confederate States of America even existed
surprised there’s not a word filter to catch that lol
they only implemented it a year or two after the game came out because trading hadn’t been introduced yet, so there was no way to see other people’s pokemon names. You’re grandfathered in if you named them that back before the filter, but if you do trade them now the filter catches the name and resets it once the other person gets the pokemon
Did they seriously not put Mao on there?
I mean I’m sure Joan of Arc was cool, but she didn’t exactly lead the largest successful revolution in world fucking history.
Elvis being ranked a bit higher than Lenin who himself is waaaay down from Stalin is pretty funny
