Guest Author - Violette DeSantis

Time Magazine has announced the Times’ Person of the Year for the year 2008 recently. The honor goes to our President-elect Barack Obama. Barack Obama is the first African American president elected in the United States. Previously Barack Obama was a United States Senator in Illinois. He is scheduled to become the 44th U.S. president, serving his first term from 2009 to 2013.

Choosing a Person of the Year must be a huge task. In today’s world with so many contributions people make in the world, narrowing it down can be difficult. Others considered for the honor in the year 2008 were Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, Gov. Sarah Palin and Chinese director Zhang Yimou.

Selecting a Man of the Year began in 1927. The first was American aviator, author, invetor and explorer, Charles Lindbergh. Surprising it wasn’t until 1999 that they changed the title to Person of the Year to sound inclusive. Four women received the title of Man of the Year.

Nearly every modern American president has been a Man or Person of the Year. Three did not make the list, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover and Gerald Ford.
Although we could easily make the assumption that a Person of the Year is an admirable person, the title actually represents who is most newsworthy in the year’s time. That being said, it might seem surprising, but Adolf Hitler was Man of the Year in 1938. Other such men as unsavory as Hitler have also made the list.

The list is filled with a variety of people from presidents and politicians to scientists and others. Individuals can be chosen more than once. More than one individual can be chosen at a time. Some chosen don’t even have to be a named individual. They call these abstract choices.

Abstract choices have included the American Fighting-Man (Korean War troops) in 1950; the Hungarian Freedom Fighter in 1956; Baby Boomers (people 25 years old and under) in 1966; the Middle Americans in 1969; American Soldier in 2003, and You in 2006.

In addition to abstract choices are non-human choices. They have been The Computer, Machine of the Year in 1982 which was the first non-human choice and The Endangered Earth, Planet of the Year in 1988.

Person of the Year is not the only honor that Time is responsible for bringing to us. They have also created the honor of Person of the Century following along the lines of them previously naming Winston Churchill the Man of the Half-Century in 1949 and Mikhail Gorbachev being named Man of the Decade in 1989. In 1999 they named Albert Einstein as the Person of the Century. Albert Einstein was a theoretical physicist (a person who uses math and physics to explain things in the natural world) who was well published in his field.