From USA Today in 2008:

Asked to name the most famous Americans in history, high school students put 20th-century black Americans in the top three slots. Here are the top 10, with the percentage who chose each: 1. Martin Luther King Jr.: 67% 2. Rosa Parks: 60% 3. Harriet Tubman: 44% 4. Susan B. Anthony: 34% 5. Benjamin Franklin: 29% 6. Amelia Earhart: 25% 7. Oprah Winfrey: 22% 8. Marilyn Monroe: 19% 9. Thomas Edison: 18% 10. Albert Einstein: 16%

A couple of methodology notes:

– These are the most famous non-Presidents.

– More subtly, I think students were asked to name equal numbers of women and men. There are more famous men than women, so the women drift toward the top of the combined list. It’s possible that if the methodology didn’t inflate the apparent fame of women that, say, Alexander Hamilton would have made the top 10.

Back in the 1980s, William F. Buckley said he was shocked that E.D. Hirsch had found that half of American high school students didn’t know who Stalin or Churchill were.

Meanwhile, Buckley pointed out, they seemed extremely well versed on somebody named Harriet Tubman But how important could she be if he’d never heard of her?

But that just shows how old you were, WFB. Harriet Tubman’s Underground Railroad comprised a chapter in my reader at St. Francis De Sales elementary school in the late 1960s.

I was really looking forward to that chapter. Did she build her locomotive underground or lower it into the giant tunnel she had dug?

But then it turned out that “Underground Railroad” was just a metaphor.