The podcast debunks “Great Person Theory”, and Hayter’s article is an example of grassroots action taken by an entire community in order to restore voting rights. Great Person Theory is intuitive to many people because we want to simplify the narrative. The truth is, almost every significant action taken throughout history is a result of the collective agency of a group of people. However, it is easier to tell and understand a story that centers on the a single person, action, or event, rather than trying to account for the countless small factors that made the flashier, defining actions of leaders possible. I think that Great Person Theory applies to situations outside the realm of the study of history. For example, many people idolize athletes or artists. When a person is famous for something they’ve done or produced, it can be very hard to separate the person from their product. In fact, celebrities often seem like superhuman figures. We don’t think of them as people, but rather as the embodiment of their work. This perspective allows us to perceive celebrities as larger than life, and as somehow above normal people. We forget that they possess the same flaws as anyone else.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The podcast debunks “Great Person Theory”, and Hayter’s article is an example of grassroots action taken by an entire community in order to restore voting rights. Great Person Theory is intuitive to many people because we want to simplify the narrative. The truth is, almost every significant action taken throughout history is a result of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4477,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7132","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reading-responses"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7132","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4477"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7132"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7132\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7134,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7132\/revisions\/7134"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7132"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7132"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7132"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}