Whom is the most interesting person in American history?

Question

(Which is famous/infamous

Answer 1

Simon Bolivar ( no comentaries about chavez ) and Carlos Juan Finlay

Answer 2

Very subjective, but I might go for Teddy Roosevelt. He is so complex, sometimes very radical and sometimes very conservative. In some ways very unconventional and in others a perfect Victorian American. Popularly, most Americans wonder why he rates being on Mount Rushmore with the other three, but historians always rate him among the most important US presidents.

Answer 3

Abraham Lincoln - he faced and perservered through the greatest crisis of the nation. He started out ridiculed on both sides, stretched the Constitution in order to save it, had incredible political savvy while forcing his opponents to continually underestimate him, and ended up becoming a martyr and near mythical figure in American history.

Answer 4

Benjamin Franklin

Answer 5

Hmm...that's tough. Hard to decide on just one.

But I think George Mason was really interesting...George Washington was quite interesting too.

Hellen Keller
M. Sanger
Patrick Henry

I could go on and on.

Answer 6

1. Thomas Jefferson. From writing the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, coining the term "wall of separation between church and state" and re-editing the four Gospels into his own Jeffersonian Bible, to his controversial relationship with slave Sally Hemings, Jefferson was clearly a passionate man who argued for protection of minority interests against oppression by the majority, and for a gradual abolition of slavery. His defense of the "consent of the governed," in trusting the people to govern themselves and to revolutionize government every 20 years even if it meant bloodshed, got him labeled an anarchist. But today Republicans and Democrats claim Jefferson as their own, respected and quoted by Deists, Christians, Unitarians, and Constitutionalists of various faiths or none. Jefferson resurfaces again today, as his copy of the Koran was used to swear in the first Muslim elected to Congress.

2. Victoria Woodhull. The first woman to run for President, at a time when women could not even vote, she chose Frederick Douglass as her running mate to make a statement about suffrage for blacks and for women as an issue of equal rights.
Woodhull's radical views of liberating women from Victorian age conditions on marriage, and the scandals that followed her in the press, got her chased out of the country. Considered 100 years ahead of her time, she was written out of history by Susan B. Anthony and other competing feminists who saw her as a threat to the women's movement.

3. R. Buckminster Fuller. Major contributor to science and architecture as well as philosophy and education. Ironically, his ingenious visions that changed the world came to him when he was about to end his life. He was in such despair, he walked into the ocean waters by his home, planning to drown himself when he looked up and saw the moon. He had a sudden ephiphany that the purpose of life was to help people. So he decided to take on the challenge of finding out how much one person could contribute to help the world. In the brainstorm that followed, which kept him writing nonstop where his wife had to bring food to his room since he would not leave, he came up with the root of his most innovative ideas. He is most famous for the "geodesic dome" (which revolutionized architecture, and influenced other fields of science, such as the Nobel prizewinning concept of "Buckyballs" or "buckminsterfullerenes").
His philosophy "Think globally; Act locally" became the trademark of the modern trend in politics toward direct action by individuals, by which he lived as an inspiring example.

Answer 7

me