Amelia Earhart was apparently an incompetent pilot and so completely hopeless at navigation that she was almost killed several times before her ill-fated flight. (That “chicks and maps” thing again, I guess. /g)

But the shocking aspect is no George Washington, no Abraham Lincoln. O tempora! O mores!

PS: irony of ironies: the question posed (”Who would you call the 10 most famous Americans?”) is itself agrammatical. Become a journalist, learn to write good!

No Presidents allowed!!

Living:

Oprah Winfrey
Roger Clemens
Obama
John McCain
Fred Thompson

Rush Limbaugh
Tom Cruise
Bill Gates
Warren Buffet
Jerry Seinfeld

Dead

Ben Franklin
Davy Crockett
Daniel Boone
A G Bell
Edison

Lindburgh
J D Rockefeller
McArthur
Babe Ruth
Einstein

I made my own list before scrolling down — and had all your generals. I’d even put Grant in there.

For the others: Alexander Hamilton, to be sure. And Twain or even Whitman before Frost or Disney, imho. Odd that presidents were out-of-bounds, but Washington obviously should be included as a soldier and leader on his own.

http://www.heritage.org/Research/Thought/hl1020.cfm

Evan Sayet really nails it here.

2. Benjamin Franklin: Without whom, there would never have been help from abroad in our fight for independence.

3. General Sherman: Without his recognition that sometimes an ugly thing has to be made to its ugliest before it can be made to end. If not for his insistence in taking war directly to the enemy, that war might never have ended.

4. Lieutenant Colonel Earl “Pete” Ellis (USMC): After Gallipoli in WW1, it was determined by the powers that be in europe that forced amphibious landings against defended beaches was best viewed as a suicidal venture.

If it had not been for the work of Lt. Col. Ellis in 1920, there may well have been no amphibious capability or doctrine developed by the US in time for what had to be done in WW2. Even with that early a start, we didn’t have a functional landing craft adopted until 1940.

5. Henry Ford: Weirdo and a strange duck in lots of ways, but did come up with a functional process to kick the industrial age into the next gear.

6. Susan B. Anthony: As representative of the entire suffrage movement. Without which, I’d have had to deal with strong willed and intelligent mother and sisters who would probably have taken their lack of right to be heard in elections out on me.

7. Martin Luther King: The process had been started by others, but he did valiant work and paid for it. He wasn’t a saint, but no man is.

The rest are just personal favs:

8. Robert E. Howard: I really enjoyed his pulp fiction heroic epic stories as a youngin.

9. Mark Twain: Not the Clemens guy, but his reinvented self.

10. Inventor of milblogs, who ever that was. Without which, we’d have submitted to the will of our domestic cult of cowardice by now.

A strange list I know, but each had a special place in American History.

J.P.

P.S. I can tell u are beautiful in spite of the apple.

Man, you guys are weird.

1. Thomas Edison (Mr. Technology, aka Mr. Self-Promotion)
2. Neil Armstrong (first man to step on the MOON!)
3. Steve Jobs (Edison 2.0)
4. John D. Rockefeller (the ultimate capitalist)
5. Norman Borlaug (back when a Nobel Peace prize meant something)
6. George Marshall (architect of victory in both World War II and the Cold War)
7. Mark Twain (America’s greatest author so far)
8. Benjamin Franklin (architect of liberty)
9. Louis Armstrong (Jazz music was born and died with him)
10. Alexander Hamilton (architect of the nation)

He did his best scientific work while employed in a patent office in Europe. However, his signature was one among the group of signatures on the letter to Pres. Roosevelt that birthed the Manhattan Project.

Anyways, my list of American scientists/inventors who ought to be famous, in roughly chronological order:

Benjamin Franklin
George Washington Carver
Samuel F.B. Morse
Alexander Graham Bell
Thomas Edison
Henry Ford
Claude Shannon
Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce (Integrated circuit chips)

A similar list could probably be constructed for military men (including a few who later became President). Or those who had great cultural/literary/musical achievements.

Franklin and Hamilton get the added benefit of founder effect, directing the young plant in its growth. William Seward talked the government into buying Alaska - that has to count for something.

1. Billy Graham
2. Hemingway
3. Steinbeck
3. Jonathan Edwards
4. Albert Einstein
5. Bill Gates
6. Ella Fitzgerald
7. Frank Sinatra
8. John Marshall
9. Ben Franklin
9. Edison

Edwin Armstrong (most of the foundation technologies of analog radio transmission), Claude Shannon (Communication Theory and Information Theory, IMO far more important than the transistor), Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley (invented the transistor, though Shockley later became known for promulgating ’scientific’ racisism; they shared a Nobel Prize for their invention and Bardeen shared a second Physics Nobel for the foundation physics of superconductivity), J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, the development of ENIAC and much of the foundation technology of computing electronics), Winfield Scott (one of history’s great natural generals, also a student of both war and the classics, under whom both Grant and Lee learned war), Williard Gibbs (vector mechanics and thermodynamics in chemical reactions), John Hall (chief armorer at Harper’s Ferry who demonstrated the use of automated machine tools for mass production), Sam Colt (who first made mass production by interchangeable parts profitable), etc., etc., etc.

You really can’t limit it to ten. How about the inventor of the clipper ship? Or John Holland, whose last work bears his name? John and Washington Roebling, who changed the way people look at rivers and chasms? Peter Cooper, whose personal industry created products that became part of the fabric of society and whose thrift and generosity not only endowed a school but inspired Carnegie, Vassar, and Cornell to do the same? How about Orville and Wilbur Wright, visionaries and yet careful and thorough experimenters who created aviation?

Give me a day and I’ll stretch the list into the hundreds.

I believe the names of these individuals will live on long after the names of our contemporaries are no longer even a footnote.

All these figures are iconic.

Andy Warhol
Benjamin Franklin
Bill Gates
Elvis Presley
Humphrey Bogart
Jacqueline Kennedy
Marilyn Monroe
Mark Twain
Martin Luther King
Walt Disney

Abraham Lincoln
Albert Einstein
Bill Gates
Christopher Hitchens
Karl Marx
Martin Luther King, Jr
Pablo Picasso
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Paine
Winston Churchill

The kids’ list was obviously regurgitated pabulum - they were saying what they thought their teachers and society at large would approve of. Good little citizens, every one.

Still, what’s the definition of “famous?” That they got a lot of press coverage? By that standard, Aimee Semple McPherson fills the category rather nicely. As do Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, whose worldwide popularity was second only to Chaplin’s in the ‘teens and early twenties.

My ten famous Americans? Leaving out politicians and actors takes a wide chunk out. But, in no particular order, I’d name:
1. Benjamin Banneker (a sentimental fave)
2. Philip Glass
3. Elvis (for music, not his films)
4. Edison
5. Ford
6. George Gershwin
7. Walt Kelly
8. James McNeill Whistler
9. George Kaufman
10.Bennett Cerf

But that’s just off the top of my head and reflects my own predilections at the moment.

With that observation, you put your finger on what is wrong with this survey. It’s not about great or important people; it’s about celebrities.

So my answer to your question (”Who would be on your list?”) is: no one, because I would never waste my time compiling a list of celebrities. And I’m disgusted that high school students are being asked to waste their time on something as inane as this.

John Moses Browning.
Sam Colt.
Davy Crockett.
Sam Houston.
General MacArthur.
General Winfield Scott.
Gen. Custer.
Gen. Pershing.

Nyomythus, Marx, Picasso, and Churchill were not Americans. Hitchens, just barely.

As an architect, I must toss Frank Lloyd Wright’s name into the ring. It seems most lists do reflect the originators idiosyncracies more than a sense of general fame. Perhaps the kids are more on target in this regard, but I agree, it’s a senseless question.

or Chuck Yeager

I had Al Capone & Chuck Yeager on my original list. I dropped Yeager because he is more a personal hero than a ‘famous” person. I dropped Capone because his fame (infamy) was more national than world-wide.

I dropped them & added Ali & the Wright Brothers. both have huge world wide fame.

1. George Washington
2. Abraham Lincoln

1. George Washington
2. Abraham Lincoln
3. Robert E. Lee
4. Andrew Carnegie
5. Thomas Edison
6. Theodore Roosevelt
7. Dwight Eisenhower
8. Alexander Graham Bell
9. Albert Einstein
10. Ronald Reagan

I decided to do a pre-WWI list since only time gives proper perspective. I also left off Presidents and Generals. Tenth place is a tie if we still consider Henry an American.

No wonder the 7th century savages, those minions of Allah, have been invited in to ravage our civilization. We have no sense of its value anymore. Well, at least some of the Baby Boomers like myself, who recovered from the Left, surely do appreciate its worth and know who those people are who have been the best to contribute to it.

Remember, Oprah Windfrey (Ooops! - a slip) Winfrey introduced and advanced Barack Hussein Obama to her audiences and beyond.