November 2006 Unbound Atlantic Monthly

Influentials Contest Winners

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Thank you to everyone who participated in the Atlantic's Top 10 most influential Americans contest. No one guessed more than eight of the top ten names correctly, but several contestants got eight out of ten right. From among those entrants, we selected Gerald Zubkoff of Rydal Pennsylviania as our winner because John D. Rockefeller and Mark Twain—his two guesses who were not among our historians' top ten—were very close; our historians had picked Rockefeller as #11 and Twain as #16.

The winning entry:
George Washington (#2)
Abraham Lincoln (#1)
Franklin Delano Roosevelt (#4)
Thomas Jefferson (#3)
John D. Rockefeller (#11)
Samual Clemens (Mark Twain) (#16)
Thomas Edison (#9)
John Marshall (#7)
Martin Luther King, Jr. (#8)
Benjamin Franklin (#6)
[The two names he missed from the historians' top ten were: Alexander Hamilton (#5) and Woodrow Wilson (#10)]

As the winner, Mr. Zubkoff will receive three Pulitzer Prize-winning books by our panel of historians: The Heavens and the Earth by Walter McDougall, Freedom from Fear by David Kennedy, and The Radicalism of the American Revolution by Gordon Wood.

Others contestants who got 8 out of 10 guesses correct are:

Mark Guszak
Lampasas, TX

Peter High
Chevy Chase, MD

Dax McMenamin
Tuscon, AZ

Mike Monje
Portland, OR

Joshua Rosenthal
Providence, RI

David Trilling
Los Angeles, CA

Terry D. Wright
Piqua, OH

Weigh in—who should have been on the historians' Top 100 list that wasn't? Who shouldn't have been on this list that was? Give us your feedback here.

A collective readers' Top 10 list will be published in the January/February Atlantic.