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In most of the narratives of the past that were exposed to, powerful individuals serve as the driving force.

It's their actions that push the flow of history forward toward the seemingly inevitable conclusions that we know what eventually happened.

World War II? Hitler, Stalin, Churchill, FDR, Mussolini, Tojo.

The American Revolution, Washington, Jefferson, and the rest of the founding fathers.

The printing press, Gutenberg, exploration, Columbus.

The stories we tell about what happened end up focusing on these people, whether they really deserve the credit or not.

This, in a nutshell, is what is usually called the Great Man Theory of History.

Some people, the reasoning goes, are indispensable.

What they do inexorably pulls the rest of their

societies forward through sheer force of will and genius. Human history is therefore mostly the

stories of these powerful individuals, their interactions with one another, and the consequences

their actions wrought on the broader world. When we put it in such straightforward terms, the great-man

approach to history is pretty obviously a flawed way of understanding the past. Tens of millions

of people fought in World War II. The American Revolution was about a lot of things, only some

of which had to do with the people we know as the founders. Gutenberg's press was repossessed

by his creditors. Columbus, well, Columbus

was a lot of things, but historically indispensable is not one of them. Yet I would argue that the

great man approach to history, and a few carefully selected great women, is still the default mode

through which the vast majority of people engage with the past. Biographies, popular histories

in all media, and even Wikipedia summaries use the actions of famous individuals as shorthand

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