Sharon McMahon, >The Small and the Mighty: Twelve Unsung Americans Who Changed the Course of History, from the Founding to the Civil Rights Movement< (New York: Thesis/Random House, 2024)

Sharon McMahon, The Small and the Mighty:  Twelve Unsung Americans Who Changed the Course of History, from the Founding to the Civil Rights Movement (New York:  Thesis/Random House, 2024)

 

Sharon McMahon has gained podcast fame as “America’s History Teacher”;  in The Small and the Mighty:  Twelve Unsung Americans Who Changed the Course of History, from the Founding to the Civil Rights Movement, she has produced a work that resonates with her moniker. 

 

McMahon occasionally lapses into current slang “(She was like, “What that’s all about?”) not particularly appealing to this scholar accustomed to reading weighty historical tomes, but the book is lively and informational, drawing attention to people who have affected the way we live today in a way that is in sync with my own propensity to combine research into historical documents with interviews and oral collections so as to discover the stories and the facts that might not otherwise gain wide notice.

 

McMahon provides a substantive introduction, then divides the work into seven major parts.

 

In the introduction McMahon reminds us of the achievements of Gouverneur Morris, Constitutional Convention delegate from Pennsylvania, who wrote the Preamble to the United States Constitution and edited the text of that historically most important document.  James Madison’s ideas suffused the Constitution, so that he deserves short-hand credit as author, but Morris’s work constituted major contributions and should have the wider airing that McMahon provides.

 

The part of the book entitled. “Angel of the Rockies” focuses on Clara Brown, bringing to life the horrors of slavery in her native Kentucky during the 1830s;  the anger between supporters and opponents of slavery in “Bleeding Kansas,” to which Brown moves in the 1850s;  and the crudeness of life for miners during the Colorado gold rush during the 1870s, where Brown provided all manner of free and paid services to the miners, becoming (remarkably, given her background) a millionaire and a philanthropist of fame in Colorado but not nationwide.  

 

In the part, “The Next Needed Thing,” we meet Virginia Randolph, also an African American of humble beginnings who in the 1890s gained enough education to become a teacher and by the early years of the 20^th century had opened the Virginia Randoph Training Academy to qualify other young Black residents of Virginia to teach in or launch schools of their own.

 

In “America the Beautiful,“ readers learn the story of Katharine Lee Bates, poet from Cape Cod who in the 1880s traveled to England and garnered favorable notice from literary magnates, then responded to a request in 1890 to write the lyrics for “America the Beautiful” by the organizers of the World Exposition in Chicago.

 

In “Forward Out of Darkness” we meet three women who were avid participants in the long struggle for women’s suffrage and rights:  Inez Mulholland of New York, Maria Lopez of California, and Rebecca Brown Mitchell of Idaho.  Their life stories, not as well-known as those of Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Alice Paul make vivid the courage and fortitude necessary to confront a patriarchal system that would not relent on the matter of female suffrage until 1920 and even begin to succumb to the pressure of Second-Wave feminism on matters of legal equality until the 1960s. 

 

In “An Orientation of the Spirit,” readers meet the philanthropist Anna Thomas Jeannes who most notably funded those who became known as “The Jeanes Teachers” upon the activist energy of William James Edwards;  and Julius Rosenwald (cofounder of Sears-Roebuck and creative spirit behind the Sears Catalog) who funded the institutions dubbed the “Rosenwald Schools” on the model of his friend Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute, emphasizing technical training and the achievement of economic prosperity as foundation for citizenship and the attainment of wider civil rights.

 

In “Go For Broke,” we meet Daniel Inouye, Norman Mineta, and Alan Simpson;  the former two were Japanese Americans whose families faced the ignominy of the 1940’s concentration camps but who went on to become war heroes and formidable statespersons.  Simpson, a White American who lived near the concentration camp in Wyoming into which Mineta and family had been forced to move, made childhood friends with Norm under those circumstances, objected to the injustice, and went on to become an influential Republican moderate from Wyoming who reconnected with Mineta when the latter became a Democratic congressional representative from California (and Secretary of Commerce under both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush);  the two frequently argued over issues but also cooperated in numerous legislative initiatives, Including those to aid war veterans generally and former soldiers who were Asian American specifically.  Daniel Inouye, elected in 1964 to the United State Senates representing Hawaii, gained fame as a member of the Senate Watergate Committee and, over a career that endured through 2012, at times served as the Chair of the Intelligence, Indian Affairs, Commerce, and Appropriations committees.  He connected with Mineta as a fellow Japanese-American and worked with both Mineta and Simpson to pass important legislation.

 

And in “Momentum, readers come to understand the contributions of Claudette Colvin of Alabama and Septima Clark of South Carolina, precursors of the more famous Rosa Parks in resisting oppression in the American South and in the course of resistance putting themselves in jeopardy and subjecting themselves to jail time in ways that would inspire both Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr.

 

A curiosity pertinent to the subtitle of this work is that there actually seem to be more than twelve unsung heroes covered in the chapters;

 

Gouverneur Morris is not mentioned in the introduction but is clearly considered an unsung hero.

 

These thirteen people from the narrative that I give above do appear in chapter headings:

 

Clara Brown

Virginia Randolph

Kathleen Lee Bates

Inez Mulholland

Maria de Lopez

Rebecca Brown Mitchell

Anna Thomas Jeanes

Wiliam James Edwards

Booker T. Washington

Daniel Inouye

Norman Mineta

Claudette Colvin

Septima Clark

 

Booker T. Washington certainly should be well-known enough not to be included as “unsung,” so this --- with the exclusion also of Gouverneur Morris would bring the list to twelve.  The lack of clarity, though, is puzzling.

 

Puzzling but trivial: 

 

McDonald has brought to life and wider recognition a number of people who made vital contributions to their states, communities, and nation.  In a work of popular circulation, she utilizes the arts of oral collection and oral history in conveying as fully as possible the story of the human past.  The book is a captivating read and a worthy contribution to the historian’s craft.

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