Which 100 Americans have had the most influence on our country?
That is the question recently tackled by The Atlantic within its December issue. Beginning today, The Atlantic's 100 Most Influential Americans List is available on its website, http://www.theatlantic.com. In its 150th year of publishing, the country's oldest continuously published magazine challenged 10 award winning historians and authors to determine who have been the 100 most influential figures in American history. Following the publication of The Atlantic's 100 Most Influential Americans List, readers can submit their own lists of Influentials at http://www.theatlantic.com, and can cast their votes for figures who were left off the List but should not have been. Results will be published in the January-February issue of The Atlantic.

Written and compiled by associate editor Ross Douthat, The Atlantic's 100 Most Influential Americans List engaged 10 panelists to consider influence based on a person's impact, for good or ill, both on his or her own era and on the way we live now. The balloting was averaged and weighted to emphasize consensus -- and candidates received extra points if they appeared on multiple ballots.

"Our goal in compiling the Atlantic's 100 Most Influential Americans List wasn't to end a debate about historical influence, but to start one," says James Bennet, editor of The Atlantic. "We're not planning to engrave this list on a marble wall somewhere. Instead, we hope it will provoke discussion and even some serious disagreement about who made America and how. Why is Walt Disney ranked ahead of Elizabeth Cady Stanton? How did Woodrow Wilson make the top 10 but not Ronald Reagan? How can Bill Gates be ahead of Elvis Presley, or Presley ahead of Lewis and Clark, or Lewis and Clark ahead of Ralph Nader, or Nader ahead of Richard Nixon? The debates over the rankings in our offices have been fascinating and, at times, feisty. We hope other people have as much fun debating them as we have. But the point of the exercise is a serious one: to help us understand the influences that have shaped modern America, and made us who we are today."

Presidents, Religious Leaders, Inventors and Writers Ruled the List

The Atlantic's 100 Most Influential Americans List begins in ranking order with Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin, and John Marshall. Every panelist cast a vote for these seven figures, proving that a political career was the surest way to a historical legacy.

While we are still a country of immigrants, the native-born comprise the bulk of the list; just seven of the final 100 were born outside the continental United States. Also, the East Coast had a head start; 63 of the 100 were born in the original 13 colonies; and 26 in New England alone. The Atlantic's List of inventors included Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bill and Eli Whitney. Founding and leading a religion landed many on the List including Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, and Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy. And finally, more than 30 of the figures on the List are writers.

Panelists did vote for many 20th century figures -- as well as many athletes, musicians, artists, and entertainers. For every vote for a 'mutton- chopped' Victorian, at least one vote went to a more contemporary cultural figure, such as Marilyn Monroe, Bob Dylan, or Tiger Woods. But the consensus favored Gilded Age industrialists and our Founding Fathers.

One of the panelists, historian and Pulitzer Prize winner Doris Kearns Goodwin, looked "for public figures who changed the daily lives of people, both at the time and afterward. In particular, I looked for great public figures who made it possible for people to lead expanded lives -- materially, psychologically, culturally and spiritually."

To see a complete listing of The Atlantic's 100 Most Influential Americans List and to cast your own vote for the most influential Americans visit http://www.theatlantic.com.

"The Atlantic, founded in 1857, and based in Washington, D.C., is the oldest continuously published magazine in the United States. The Atlantic covers politics, society, foreign affairs, science, literature, history, and more. Its readers are highly educated, with a deep interest and involvement in public affairs. For more information about The Atlantic visit




THE ATLANTIC'S 100 MOST INFLUENTIAL LIST

1 Abraham Lincoln
2 George Washington
3 Thomas Jefferson
4 Franklin D. Roosevelt
5 Alexander Hamilton
6 Benjamin Franklin
7 John Marshall
8 Martin Luther King Jr.
9 Thomas Edison
10 Woodrow Wilson
11 John D. Rockefeller
12 Ulysses Grant
13 James Madison
14 Henry Ford
15 Theodore Roosevelt
16 Mark Twain
17 Ronald Reagan
18 Andrew Jackson
19 Thomas Paine
20 Andrew Carnegie
21 Harry Truman
22 Walt Whitman
23 Wright Brothers
24 Alexander Graham Bell
25 John Adams
26 Walt Disney
27 Eli Whitney
28 Dwight D. Eisenhower
29 Earl Warren
30 Elizabeth Cady Stanton
31 Henry Clay
32 Albert Einstein
33 Ralph Waldo Emerson
34 Jonas Salk
35 Jackie Robinson
36 William Jennings Bryan
37 J.P. Morgan
38 Susan B. Anthony
39 Rachel Carson
40 John Dewey
41 Harriet Beecher Stowe
42 Eleanor Roosevelt
43 W.E.B. DuBois
44 Lyndon Baines Johnson
45 Samuel F.B. Morse
46 William Lloyd Garrison
47 Frederick Douglass
48 Robert Oppenheimer
49 Frederick Law Olmsted
50 James K. Polk
51 Margaret Sanger
52 Joseph Smith
53 Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
54 Bill Gates
55 John Quincy Adams
56 Horace Mann
57 Robert E. Lee
58 John C. Calhoun
59 Louis Sullivan
60 William Faulkner
61 Samuel Gompers
62 William James
63 George Marshall
64 Jane Addams
65 Henry David Thoreau
66 Elvis Presley
67 P.T. Barnum
68 James D. Watson
69 James Gordon Bennett
70 Lewis and Clark
71 Noah Webster
72 Sam Walton
73 Cyrus McCormick
74 Brigham Young
75 George Herman "Babe" Ruth
76 Frank Lloyd Wright
77 Betty Friedan
78 John Brown
79 Louis Armstrong
80 William Randolph Hearst
81 Margaret Mead
82 George Gallup
83 James Fenimore Cooper
84 Thurgood Marshall
85 Ernest Hemingway
86 Mary Baker Eddy
87 Benjamin Spock
88 Enrico Fermi
89 Walter Lippmann
90 Jonathan Edwards
91 Lyman Beecher
92 John Steinbeck
93 Nat Turner
94 George Eastman
95 Sam Goldwyn
96 Ralph Nader
97 Stephen Foster
98 Booker T. Washington
99 Richard Nixon
100 Herman Melville

http://www.theatlantic.com