41 Harriet Beecher Stowe
Her Uncle Tom’s Cabin inspired a generation of abolitionists and set the stage for civil war.
42 Eleanor Roosevelt
She used the first lady’s office and the mass media to become “first lady of the world.”
43 W. E. B. DuBois
One of America’s great intellectuals, he made the “problem of the color line” his life’s work.
44 Lyndon Baines Johnson
His brilliance gave us civil-rights laws; his stubbornness gave us Vietnam.
45 Samuel F. B. Morse
Before the Internet, there was Morse code.
46 William Lloyd Garrison
Through his newspaper, The Liberator, he became the voice of abolition.
47 Frederick Douglass
After escaping from slavery, he pricked the nation’s conscience with an eloquent accounting of its crimes.
48 Robert Oppenheimer
The father of the atomic bomb and the regretful midwife of the nuclear era.
49 Frederick Law Olmsted
The genius behind New York’s Central Park, he inspired the greening of America’s cities.
50 James K. Polk
This one-term president’s Mexican War landgrab gave us California, Texas, and the Southwest.
51 Margaret Sanger