Meet 12 Great Americans Who Never Made the History Books

From "America's Government Teacher" comes her first ever book on history-makers, people you should know but don't.

Twelve-year-old Sharon McMahon was delivering newspapers in the early morning hours of her northern Minnesota neighborhood, when she received the inspiration for her life’s work and, ultimately, this book. Beyond the trees, she saw the dancing pinks and purples of the northern lights, the fleeting colorful show of the auroras.

In her new release, “The Small and the Mighty: Twelve Unsung Americans Who Changed the Course of History, From the Founding to the Civil Rights Movement,” she returns to that memory to bring attention to the auroras of history, men and women whose contributions to America are eclipsed by the widely known icons of our nation’s past, the ones who drew the most attention and became regulars in history books.

Now, McMahon is shining a light on those who’ve made an impact in our country’s early days but whose names are unfamiliar. They are, she writes, “the doers”—people who “went for broke when everyone else yelled to turn back” and who became great because of “who they lift[ed] up, not who they put down.”

The Founding Father and Author of the Famous Preamble

We’ve heard about Alexander Hamilton’s death at the hands of Aaron Burr in the infamous duel. What was hardly, if ever, mentioned was the man at Hamilton’s bedside, Gouverneur Morris, friend and fellow Founding Father. The two, McMahon writes, “were intellectual equals. Morris matched Hamilton’s wit and his skill in the law, and the two bonded over their loyalty to George Washington during the revolution.” While Hamilton was responsible for creating the financial systems, Morris helped set up the grid system for Manhattan streets.

A portrait of Gouverneur Morris (1752–1816), 1817. Avery Library, New York Public Domain

What makes Morris one of McMahon’s auroras was his contribution to the writing of the United States Constitution, “as much or more than people like Ben Franklin or John Adams.” It was Morris who penned the Preamble, “We the People, in Order to form a more perfect Union … ” something that McMahon says, are “some of the most consequential words in world history”—words that “conceived America’s great statement of purpose.” James Madison said that no one could have done a better job than Morris in “writing the Preamble and forming the final Constitution.”

America’s Government Teacher

First-time author Sharon McMahon. Becca Johnson

It’s with this first story that McMahon takes readers on this historical journey to new places, to meet heroes and heroines that shone brightly at the time, but whose light has faded from view. With her skills in teaching and love of government and law, McMahon is best known as “America’s Government Teacher” and, just like a successful instructor, tells these stories with wit, rich detail, and suspense. These 12 ordinary people, she says, pursued ideals greater than themselves, put themselves at great risk, and who made the world, “more just, peaceful, good and free.”

Clara Brown watched as her daughter was sold on the slave auction block; her family, once together on the same farm, was now displaced. While she was able to keep tabs on other family members, it was her daughter Eliza, who disappeared. When Brown was freed by her slave owner, she never losing sight of tracking down her daughter. Brown was strong, forward-thinking, and determined.

Working off a rumor that Eliza may have headed west, Brown was hired by a wagon master who was headed that way. She cooked three meals a day for a caravan of men and walked the 700 miles from the Kansas-Missouri border to Colorado to become, what one Tennessee newspaper said, “the first woman to cross the ‘Great American desert.’”

There, she started a business, encouraging others to come West, and became a favorite of the area for her “kindness and her tenacity.” She purchased real estate using the earnings from her laundry business, opened her home to those who were sick, was a midwife when called on, and helped fund the first churches in the area. Disaster struck, and Brown experienced a run of bad luck but never lost her faith or the hope of seeing her daughter again.

At her death, her funeral was “packed,” we read, and attended by government officials; a stained-glass portrait of her hangs in the Old Supreme Court Chambers in Denver, and she is mentioned in the Smithsonian.

In writing why Brown is featured in this book, McMahon writes that she was “a woman with a kindly face, tall and strong, who lived out the American virtues better than any president or founding father.”

More Americans to Discover

Chapter after chapter, the reader comes away wondering who else might have made it into this book, deserving recognition for the good they did, and is left wanting more. Norman Mineta was the son of a Japanese immigrant placed in a Japanese internment camp, after the attack on Pearl Harbor. We follow Mineta to the camp, his eventual release, stint in the army and interest in politics, becoming a member of the House of Representatives for 20 years and the longest-serving secretary for the Department of Transportation.

On Sept. 11, 2001, while in the Washington bunker with Vice President Dick Cheney, it is Mineta who forced the Federal Aviation Administration to ground all planes and later instructed U.S. airlines not to use racial profiling on the Muslim community.

Hello Girls operating switchboards at general headquarters in Chaumont, France, on Nov. 5, 1918. Public Domain

We also hear of  the women who worked in the Army Signal Corps of World War I, the “Hello Girls” who operated the switchboards across Europe. Their job was “connecting the calls to win the war.” The women’s right to vote was time and time again denied by President Woodrow Wilson, but the work of these service women became an important factor in eventually changing his mind. And while we know of Rosa Parks and her well-known arrest for not giving up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus, we learn of a host of other women who, during this time in the Civil Rights movement, “refused to stand up so the rest of us could rise.”

McMahon hosts the podcast “Here’s Where It Gets Interesting,” and is the founder of “The Preamble,” a newsletter that provides stories from history and the reason that they matter.

‘The Small and the Mighty: Twelve Unsung Americans Who Changed the Course of History, from the Founding to the Civil Rights Movement’ By Sharon McMahon Thesis, Sept. 24, 2024 Hardcover: 320 pages

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