John Hawkins links to the lame list of Greatest Americans from the Discovery Channel. In addition to the usual candidates, they have included Oprah Winfrey, Lance Armstrong, and Elvis Presley. Sorry, they don't belong on the same list with Lincoln, Washington, and FDR. It just goes to show how people today don't have enough historical knowledge to evaluate who the greatest Americans might be. I mean, Lance Armstrong? Give me a break. I admire him tremendously, but how is the country better because of him? In the grand span of events, Oprah, Lance, and Elvis are not the greatest Americans.

John Hawkins challenges other bloggers to come up with their own list of top 20 Americans. Off the top of my head, here is my unranked list

Henry Clay
Frederick Douglass
Thomas Edison
Henry Ford
Benjamin Franklin
Ulysses Grant
Alexander Hamilton
Thomas Jefferson
Martin Luther King
Abraham Lincoln
James Madison
George Marshall
John Marshall
Ronald Reagan
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Teddy Roosevelt
Harry Truman
Mark Twain
George Washington
Wright Brothers

I'm sure I've forgotten some people and there are some people on the list that I'm a bit ambivalent about. For example, I'm putting Jefferson on for the Declaration of Independence. I think he's vastly overrated as a president and is partially responsible for the vicious partisan atmosphere of the 1790s. A lot of his political instincts were so wacky that my students just giggle reading his paeans of praise to the agrarian yeoman farmer and his deep suspicions of the federal government until he became president. However, the Declaration of Independence with the Louisiana Purchase thrown in elevate him to my list. Henry Ford was an SOB personally and a vicious anti-Semite and didn't invent the car, but popularized it. He's there, as are the Wright Brothers, as symbols of the impact that the inventions associated with them had on the country.

Anyways, check out the two polls John Hawkins did of the greatest Americans according to bloggers of the left and the right.

UPDATE: John in Carolina analyzes the differences between the Right's and Left's lists at RWN.