Magazine content is available exclusively for TIME subscribers.Who Mattered And Why
What an amazing cast of characters! What a wealth of heroes and villains to choose from!
Some shook the world by arriving: Gandhi at the sea to make salt, Lenin at the Finland Station. Others by refusing to depart: Rosa Parks from her seat on the bus, that kid from the path of the tank near Tiananmen Square. There were magical folks who could make freedom radiate through the walls of a Birmingham jail, a South African prison or a Gdansk shipyard.
Others made machines that could fly and machines that could think, discovered a mold that conquered infections...
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President BARACK OBAMA, at NATO talks involving over 50 world leaders, describing the withdrawal of 130,000 combat troops from Afghanistan, planned for the end of 2014
