The Britannica Guide to the 100 Most Influential Americans

Here the reader will find the stories of one hundred people who have played crucial roles in the march of American civilization, from the colonial period to the present. In fact, there are 106 individuals discussed in this book, since the contribution of some of them is difficult to separate from that of another person (as in the case of Wilbur and Orville Wright, who, in the volume that follows, constitute a single entry). These biographies form an impressive and in many ways an incongruous group, spanning the ages, from the stern eighteenth-century Puritan Jonathan Edwards to the jaunty and dynamic duo of Larry Page and Sergey Brin, founders of Google, who may have only begun to leave their mark on America and the world.