There is a way of telling history that focuses on the impact of the few great figures that rise up in any generation. This “great man theory” says that history can best be understood when we focus on the dominant figures of the time. History, it says, turns on the actions, decisions, obsessions, and natural abilities of the few and the extraordinary—the Luthers, the Napoleons, the Lincolns, the Churchills. Understand them, and you understand the world as it was and the world as it has become.