Historical Facts & FiguresA look at major events that happened a long time ago and the people who played the biggest roles in shaping the world as we know it.
Updated September 27, 2018 2.9K votes 538 voters 33.8K views
Voting Rules
Vote up the figures who most leveraged their outgoing personalities for historical change.
Psychologist Carl Jung first came up with the idea of introverts and extroverts in the 1920s. Introverts, he concluded, find social interactions taxing, while extroverts are energized by other people. Extroverts are naturally drawn into the world, so it's no surprise that a number of famous historical extroverts have shaped history.
Presidents like Andrew Jackson and Lyndon B. Johnson rank as famous ESTJs — Extroverted Sensing Thinking Judging, as determined by the Myers Briggs Type Indicator — alongside cultural influencers like Martha Stewart and Ivanka Trump. There are hundreds of famous extroverted actors (since most extroverts love the spotlight) and famous extroverts in business (since they're great at persuasion). But who are the extroverts responsible for truly changing history because of their gregarious personalities?
Don't forget that no one is completely one or the other — even Jung admitted that. "There is no such thing as a pure introvert or extrovert," Jung said. "Such a person would be in the lunatic asylum." Here's your chance to vote for the famous extroverts who had the biggest impact on history.
Leonardo da Vinci was more than an artist — he was an inventor and innovator who shaped the Renaissance. As the purported extrovert once said, "People of accomplishment rarely sit back and let things happen to them. They go out in the world and happen to things."
His famous paintings like the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper speak to da Vinci's artistic abilities, but he also revolutionized science, engineering, and anatomy. He even invented a flying machine based on his study of bats.
The oldest American Founding Father, Benjamin Franklin, was an inventor, scientist, and author in addition to his role helping write the Declaration of Independence. Franklin invented bifocals, discovered the Gulf Stream, and proposed eliminating the letters C, J, Q, W, X, and Y from the alphabet for being redundant. He was also believed to be an extrovert.
Franklin played a central role not just in the American Revolution, but also in the creation of the US Constitution. He had boundless energy to invent, debate, and challenge traditions. Oh, and he was also a big hit with the ladies.
Rosa Parks stated Martin Luther King, Jr. was "the type of person that people really gravitated towards and they seemed to like him personally, as well as his leadership." King had an enormous impact on civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s; his efforts earned him a Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.
King attracted followers in part because he was a reported extrovert who used his charisma to challenge racism. On August 28, 1963, King made his famous "I Have a Dream" speech to hundreds of thousands in the historic March on Washington.
An entire era is named after Queen Elizabeth I, who held the British throne from 1558-1603. The famous "Virgin Queen" was also allegedly an extrovert, using her power to defeat the Spanish Armada and transform England's religious divides. She also served as a patron to the arts, funding artists like William Shakespeare.
Elizabeth strategically refused to marry in order to hold power, reportedly saying, "If I follow the inclination of my nature, it is this: beggar-woman and single, far rather than queen and married."
Catherine the Great became empress of Russia in 1762, and during more than three decades of rule, she expanded her country and modernized it on a Western model. She also plotted with her lover to force her husband to resign so she could seize power, and her husband mysteriously died while Catherine's co-conspirators were watching him. Catherine corresponded with leading Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire and Diderot as well.
Catherine was undoubtedly an extrovert who described herself as "horribly curious," and claimed that, as a child, "There was no boy more daring than I."
Winston Churchill led Britain through the darkest days of World War II, including September 7, 1940, the day the Nazis dropped 337 tons of bombs on London. His tenure as prime minister notably included plenty of speeches and some pretty scathing burns — both characteristics of someone who doesn't shy away from the public eye nor from speaking his mind. He even won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953.
Time magazine listed Churchill as one of the greatest extroverts of our time, noting that he "had a limitless supply of energy — and a limitless taste for drink."
