Biography of the millennium part 184907

Exciting but not perfect project

At the turn of the millennium Biography tried the difficult and exciting project of attempting to rank the 100 most important people who lived between 1000 and 2000 CE.

Any such list comparing the importance of people from different fields- Louis Armstrong versus Einstein versus Simon Bolivar- will be conceptually difficult, subjective and won't be seen as very scholarly, though scholars were consulted.

The end result has a lot of great choices, particularly in the top 25, but it's America-centric- Ronald Reagan made the list but Otto von Bismarck doesn't? Why are there so few Asians?

Biography of the millennium part 184907

(Mao Zedong and Genghis Khan make the list though). And why does Susan B. Anthony make the list but people in other countries who won women the vote don't? (Mary Wollstonecraft, who comes in at #48, is a better, more international symbol of feminism, and perhaps should have ranked even