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There are those who started a movement or hitched their wagon to an idea that never quite panned out. Or the idea succeeded, but it's one that makes us uncomfortable. Chiang Kai-shek was a contender for a billion people's loyalty but played his cards wrong. Marcus Garvey preached racial separatism and opposed interracial marriage; his ideas seem almost quaint now. Whether Hugh Hefner was a pioneer of the sexual revolution or just piggybacked on it is impossible to know, but in the age of AIDS and poverty caused by out-of-wedlock births, his hedonism-without-tears philosophy makes him look like Austin Powers with better teeth. Timothy Leary preached the liberating power of psychedelic drugs, but aside from Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, the legacy of LSD seems to be a lot of boring baby-boomer anecdotes and some black-light posters in the attic. But who knows: Is Leary's time past, or is it yet to come? The great caveat of historians is "It's too soon to tell."
Then there are those folks who altered history but in ways that make us a little bit squeamish. They launched notions that we're not all that proud of and that may have engendered consequences we regret. Edward Bernays, the father of public relations (what we now blithely call spin), figured out how to get people to buy things they did not really want and feel things they did not really believe in. His legacy may be political campaigns without content, women who thought Virginia Slims were liberating, and an epidemic of credit-card debt.
History looks backward, not forward, so there are those for whom the jury is still out. Legions of computer whizzes in Silicon Valley are certain that they're remaking history even as we speak. Maybe they are. Patrick Steptoe, the British doctor who created the first test-tube baby in 1978, has certainly changed the history of thousands of families. And who is to say that one of those test-tube babies will not change history? What new Gavrilo Princip is yet to be born?
It's too soon to tell.
Richard Stengel is a senior editor at TIME