Preface

History as a succession of events is at most only half-history. The rest is all about the people behind the events. The English essayist and historian Thomas Carlyle understood this, writing back in 1840. “For, as I take it,” he declared, “…History…is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here.”

Change “men” to “men and women,” and we’ve almost got it right. But that still leaves the troublesome word great.

There are a handful of American men and women just about everyone would agree deserve to be called great—but probably not a thousand, let alone a thousand and one. Among the people who made America, some were great, some were good, others just lucky, and some downright bad, mistaken, unfortunate, and even evil. But they all merit inclusion in this book because what th Amey did, what they made, what they thought—and what they caused others to do, make, or think—shaped our nation and who we are today.

The makers of America include the roster of notables any schoolteacher would recognize—Jefferson, Lincoln, and the like—but they also take in figures from our cultural and pop-cultural life, from the underworld of crime, from the struggle for civil and minority rights, from politics, business, sports, entertainment, literature, and art. They range from Jesse James to Al Capone, Harriet Beecher Stowe to Betty Friedan, Harriet Tubman to Martin Luther King, Jr., George Washington to George W., John Jacob Astor to Bill Gates, John L. Sullivan to Muhammad Ali, Stephen Foster to Elvis Presley, Edwin Booth to Marlon Brando, Washington Irving to Thomas Pynchon, Gilbert Stuart to Andy Warhol. Also among those nominated are the land’s most consequential record breakers, including the best, the worst, the greatest, and even the meanest.

This book is arranged alphabetically rather than chronologically, but, in terms of chronology, you should know that we begin long before there was a United States or even a place called America. The first figure on our time line is Bjarni Herjulfsson, the first European to lay eyes on the New World, back in 986. He was not an American—How could he have been?—but, because he was the first to see America, he had had an impact on our part of the world, so he deserves a place in these pages. And that brings us to another criterion for inclusion. You don’t have to be an American to have had a hand in making America. So readers will find a good many outsiders here—explorers, mostly—whose doings were somehow very important to who we are. And being dead is not necessary for inclusion, either. Readers will find in this book plenty of people who, as of 2007, were very much with us.

Yet I still haven’t really answered a question readers have a right to ask. How did I happen to choose each of the 1,001 people in this book?

First, by reading a lot of history. That has given me a good idea of who’s who and who was who in the American story. The majority of people in this book are the people a majority of historians think should be in such a book as this. That is, they are here by consensus.

Now, consensus is a valuable tool of knowledge, but, taken alone, it is pretty dull. So I have also looked beyond it to include some people who speak directly to me, who seem to me—as an American—important to America. My hunch is that a lot of readers will agree with my choices, but, even if they don’t, they’ll find value in arguing with me about them.

So much for content. Here are two points concerning form.

First: 1,001 people in a book the size of your hand leaves precious little space to spend much time with any one person. For each figure profiled, I’ve tried to nail the essence in under a hundred words: who, what, when, and how—then on to the next.

Second: The alphabet can be an awful tyrant. A to Z, after all, is always A to Z. But that doesn’t mean the reader has to knuckle under, starting with A and not stopping till Z. Go backwards or sideways, if you like. You cannot lose your way. This book is the collective biography of America. It’s meant to be stimulating, entertaining, and revealing from all points of view and at any angle. Dig in where you will.