THE SMALL AND THE MIGHTY

A survey of footnote-level historical figures who exemplify McMahon’s declaration, “the best Americans are not always famous.”

“America’s Government Teacher,” as McMahon brands herself, turns out to be a reliable guide into lesser-known corners of history as well. Her initial specimen is Gouverneur Morris, a friend of Alexander Hamilton and signer of the Declaration of Independence who is unjustly forgotten in our day, McMahon holds. Morris, after all, wrote the preamble to the Constitution (“We the people…”). Many more of McMahon’s subjects were never known to history in the first place: the enslaved Clara Brown, for instance, who moved westward to frontier Colorado and built a tidy fortune that, alas, did not outlive her. McMahon calls on the clothier Levi Strauss, who added rivets to jeans and then “marketed the heck out of them” as “the only kind made by white labor” (though enslaved people grew the cotton and indigo). The mid-19th-century president James Buchanan openly lived with a man who “helped found a city you may have heard of because of the Civil Rights movement: Selma, Alabama.” Katherine Lee Bates, author of “America the Beautiful,” also had a same-sex partner; as a couple, they “were obviously in love and ‘together’ together.” McMahon tips her hat to Daniel Inouye, the Hawaiian senator who, in the era of Japanese American imprisonment during World War II, distinguished himself as a battlefield hero. The author is generally nonsectarian, though she gets in a subtle dig or two at Trump, denounces the “moral panic” that is the enemy of progress, and defends critical race theory. Her carefully researched book is just plain fun to read, especially at moments such as her takedown of those who hold that the Civil War was about states’ rights: “Calmly look them in the eye, and ask, politely and inquisitively, what exactly the states wanted the ‘right’ to do?”

An accessible, cheerful, and affectionate portrait of Americans who, though little known, made a difference.