Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History

by Andrew Carroll

Live free or die, death is not the greatest of evils. —From a July 25, 1810, letter by the Battle of Bennington Committee to the New Hampshire–born Revolutionary War hero John Stark, whose toast “Live free or die” became New Hampshire’s official motto 135 years later

what makes Ona different is that she was a slave and, therefore, a reminder that New Hampshire was a slave state for quite a long time—until 1857, actually. There are some aspects of our history, I think, we’d just rather ignore.”

I heard it when I asked the Cincinnati Zoo about the exhibition of live Native Americans there in 1887; the Owensboro, Kentucky, chamber of commerce about America’s last public execution next to the old courthouse on August 14, 1936 (the circuslike atmosphere at the hanging mortified the nation); and the Sonoma Developmental Center in Northern California about the forced sterilizations conducted there on thousands of men and women labeled “subhuman” in the 1920s through 1950s. “That’s just not something,” I was told time and time again, “we really want to remember.”

Confirming exactly how many died is impossible. The government’s official tally was 1,547 fatalities, which is about 30 more than were lost on the Titanic. But the consensus among contemporary historians is that 1,800 perished, making it America’s worst maritime disaster. Out of the 760 passengers who made it ashore, approximately 300 later died of burn wounds or from their prolonged immersion in the freezing Mississippi.

more people died on the Sultana than on the Titanic, which inspired hundreds of books, numerous documentaries, and one of the highest-grossing movies ever made. And the Sultana didn’t just fade from view over time; it was forgotten almost immediately. “Only a few days ago 1,500 lives were sacrificed to fire and water, almost within sight of the city,” a Memphis journalist lamented. “Yet, even now, the disaster is scarcely mentioned—some new excitement has taken its place.”

Many national tragedies have been similarly overshadowed. Three years before the Sultana blew up, an explosion at the Allegheny Arsenal in Pittsburgh killed 78 workers, mostly women. It was the worst loss of civilian life during the Civil War but was nevertheless relegated to a historical footnote because it occurred on September 17, 1862, which was also the date of Antietam, the war’s bloodiest one-day battle. On October 8, 1871, a firestorm swept through rural Peshtigo, Wisconsin, incinerating upward of 2,500 men, women, and children. Peshtigo almost certainly would be better remembered had Chicago not suffered its “Great Fire,” which left 200 to 300 people dead, that very same day. And more recently, when American Airlines Flight 587 plummeted from the sky into the Belle Harbor neighborhood of Queens, New York, killing all 260 on board and 5 on the ground, it was our country’s second-deadliest airline disaster. But because it happened on November 12, 2001, when the nation was petrified by anthrax-laced mail and a possible second wave of strikes following the September 11 attacks, there was almost relief that the crash was due to pilot error and not sabotage.

Rhode Island and Providence Plantations (the state’s official name)

For her “monster birth,” Dyer was expelled. She and her husband joined Roger Williams, Anne Hutchinson, and other exiles from Massachusetts to found Rhode Island, the first government in the New World to establish freedom of worship as a fundamental human right.

In a manner of speaking, the fact that humankind itself is unpredictable is the quintessential stumbling-block for archaeologists. We have to assume that the people whose dwelling-places, artefacts, lives even, we are dealing with were rational, integrated, sane and sensible human beings. Then we look around at our own contemporaries and wonder how this belief can possibly be sustained. —From Ancient Ireland: Life Before the Celts (1998) by archaeologist Laurence Flanagan

Prometheus was born about 2900 B.C., some two hundred years before the Egyptians began constructing the Great Pyramids. He was a wee sprout when Sargon of Akkad, the world’s first emperor, rose to power around 2300 B.C. near what is present-day Iraq, and he was just entering adulthood when the Trojan War began in 1190 B.C. (As lopsided juxtapositions go, Kerr’s two-sentence entry for 961 B.C. is a delight: “[Israel’s King] David dies and is succeeded by his son, Solomon. The Olmec invent the tortilla.”) By the time Prometheus was well into middle age, Solon had introduced democracy to Athens, the Buddha had found enlightenment, Brutus had stabbed Caesar, and Christ had been crucified. Prometheus was getting on in years but still strong and vigorous when Spanish explorers first set foot in America during the early 1500s. Then, on August 6, 1964, five men led by a thirty-year-old University of North Carolina graduate student named Donald R. Currey found Prometheus on the north slope of Wheeler Peak along Nevada’s Snake Range and literally chopped him to pieces. Despite having endured for five millennia in conditions that are fatally inhospitable to most living creatures, the ancient bristlecone pine tree was no match for half a dozen men armed with chainsaws.

Prometheus was history, in both life and death. When his rings were finally counted, the full horror of Currey’s actions became apparent. He and his team had not just destroyed a 4,900-year-old tree (some estimates have put the number closer to 5,100), they had killed the oldest living thing in the United States and, quite possibly, the world.

“No one would have walked more than a hundred yards to see it,” Cox purportedly said later, defending his and Currey’s decision to have WPN-114 “sectioned.”

I'm so disgusted with this quote! It makes me angry. It didn't matter if anyone would ever want to go out and see the tree, it had survived for nearly 5,000 years, it should've been left alone. Yes they didn't have any idea of the tree's age beforehand but they were able to tell before touching it that it was much older than the others around it.

A quaking-aspen grove nicknamed “Pando” (Latin for “I spread”) in Utah’s Fishlake National Forest is considered to be the oldest clonal organism in America; the individual trees live only to the age of 120 or so, but they share a root system that supposedly has been expanding for 80,000 years. It’s also possible that deep within some foreign cave, there’s a plucky little million-year-old microbe that has escaped notice all these years. But for all intents and purposes, when it comes to the oldest single living organism in the United States, Prometheus was the champ. (Methuselah, a 4,800-year-old bristlecone pine named after the oldest person in the Bible, is now, by default, believed to be the current title holder. Located in California’s Inyo National Forest and sheltered under a kind of arboreal witness protection plan, the tree’s exact location is kept a secret.)

From an aesthetic standpoint, bristlecone pines are wonderfully expressive, almost humanlike in their proportions and poses. The trees grow out instead of up, making them more stout than towering. (At 17 feet in height, Prometheus would have looked like a bonsai next to the 379-foot Hyperion, the world’s tallest tree, located in Northern California’s Redwood National Forest.)

He must have been enormous, I think, reassembling the pieces in my mind. Currey reported the circumference to be 252 inches, or exactly 21 feet.

he had been cut down by those who, ostensibly, should have been protecting him—as

In early April 1513, Juan Ponce de León waded onto a Florida beach, making him the first non-native individual to set foot on what would eventually be the United States of America. Beginning in 1524, Giovanni da Verrazano made three trips to North America, sailing up and down the Atlantic coast until he was eaten by Carib Indians in 1528. That’s also the year Pánfilo de Narváez organized the first—and, to this day, most catastrophic—overland expedition across the continent. It started near Tampa Bay with more than four hundred men and ended in present-day Arizona with four, including the Spanish nobelman Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca and a Muslim slave named Estevanico—but not Narváez, who perished along the way. A decade later, fellow Spaniard Hernando de Soto led a six-hundred-man army from Florida to the Mississippi River, thinking he would do better. He would not. By 1542 half of his troops were dead, as was de Soto, and the rest had given up. And in 1565 the Spanish Navy’s Admiral Pedro Menéndez de Avilés founded St. Augustine, the oldest permanent European settlement in the States.

After returning to Egypt, he traveled throughout the Middle East lecturing and writing extensively about the West’s spiritual wickedness, as evidenced in little Greeley, Colorado. Qtub isn’t exactly a household name in the United States, but the movement of like-minded souls he inspired, “the Base,” is universally recognized. The original Arabic translation is probably more familiar to most of us: al-Qaeda.

“The buffalo cow as well as the bull is naturally a very timid animal, save when wounded or driven to bay. I learned that the mother of the captured calf made a heroic stand, and presented a beautiful illustration of maternal feeling over fear.… She died in his defence.”

quaking aspens, whose bark, we learn, can be rubbed on the skin to prevent sunburn. “It has a natural SPF of seven,” she informs us.

Memorials nationwide pay homage to Amelia Earhart, Harriet Tubman, and Sacagawea, Lewis and Clark’s indispensable Shoshone guide, all of whom charted new trails at enormous risk. But Julia Archibald remains largely forgotten, along with dozens of other intrepid women. Amanda Berry Smith, a former slave, crisscrossed four continents in the late nineteenth century as a missionary and educator, and her autobiography contains some of the earliest writings by any American on customs and daily life in remote African villages. Inspired by her globe-trotting father, Hawaiian-born Annie Montague Alexander traveled almost nonstop gathering fossils and hunting live animals for scientific study. She donated her massive collection along with considerable funding to create the Museum of Paleontology and the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, both in Berkeley, California. While Alexander was digging up bones and shooting wild animals (the Alaskan bear Ursus alexandrae is named after her), botanist Ynes Mexia was logging thousands of miles in Mexico and South America collecting 150,000 plant specimens. And in the spirit of Julia Archibald, a fifty-eight-year-old mountaineer named Annie Smith Peck was the first person of either gender to summit Peru’s 22,205-foot Mount Huascarán. A year later, in 1909, she planted a VOTES FOR WOMEN banner atop Peru’s Mount Coropuna.

Harmony among people comes from the true principles and attitudes of the present, not from purging the past.

President Teddy Roosevelt, birth control activist (and Planned Parenthood founder) Margaret Sanger, John Kellogg of breakfast-cereal fame, and Alexander Graham Bell, a lifelong advocate for deaf individuals who nevertheless believed they shouldn’t marry lest they reproduce hearing-impaired offspring, were just a handful of illustrious Americans who endorsed some variation of selective breeding. But none of them, it’s worth noting, collaborated with the Nazis or promoted eugenics as zealously as Grant.

A small but growing community of prominent journalists, scientists, elected officials, academics, judges, lawyers, and other impassioned souls, along with the Catholic Church, all advocated the abolishment of forced sterilizations and other forms of negative eugenics.

The old Murrah Building had, of course, stood across the street until the morning of April 19, 1995. At 9:02 A.M. a Ryder van packed with almost five thousand pounds of a diesel fuel and ammonium nitrate fertilizer mix exploded outside the nine-story building, killing 149 adults and 19 children. More than 320 buildings within a sixteen-block radius were damaged, and the blast could be heard in Stillwater, Oklahoma, some fifty-three miles away.

the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, which was orchestrated and funded by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (Osama bin Laden’s partner in crime),

While the impulse to excise men such as Pierce and Grant from our national autobiography with a hearty “Good riddance” is understandable, there’s a risk in doing so. Sanitizing history prevents us from seeing the warning signs of another Haun’s Mill, Mountain Meadows, or Rock Springs. These incidents occurred so long ago they’re almost unreal now, and the idea that similar massacres and riots could take place in our own time seems impossible. Such atrocities always do—right up until the moment they happen again.

the surprising evolution of the Pledge of Allegiance itself. The original 1892 version was first published in a wildly popular magazine called The Youth’s Companion, and it made no mention of God; Francis Bellamy, the socialist minister who authored it, initially wrote: “I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands: one Nation indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all.” And while Bellamy was by all accounts a patriotic man, creating a “Pledge of Allegiance” was the brainstorm of The Youth’s Companion’s promotional wizard, James Upham. Several weeks later, Bellamy added a “to” before “the Republic” because he thought it sounded better. In 1923 “my Flag” was altered to “the flag of the United States” and “of America” was tacked on a year later. In 1942 a major change was made to the gesture that accompanied the Pledge. Traditionally, after students recited the words, they stretched their right arm straight out and at a raised angle, giving what was known as “the Bellamy salute.” Small problem: This looked awfully Nazi-ish, so students were encouraged to place their hands over their heart instead. “Under God” was included by an act of Congress in 1954.

AN AFRICAN AMERICAN woman riding on a bus is told to relinquish her seat for a white passenger. She says no. The driver warns her that if she doesn’t move, she’ll be arrested. The woman stays put, and the driver summons local police, who throw her in jail. Her case sparks a lawsuit that eventually helps bring an end to de jure discrimination on buses across the country and galvanizes early civil rights advocates. To the general public, however, she remains virtually unknown. Her name was Irene Morgan, and on July 16, 1944, she boarded a Maryland-bound Greyhound Bus in Gloucester, Virginia.

All of this occurred eleven years before Rosa Parks famously refused to surrender her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama.

In 1956 the Supreme Court upheld Browder v. Gayle, a case similar to Morgan that was sparked by the incarceration of Claudette Colvin, who, on March 2, 1955, wouldn’t give up her seat on a city transit bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Colvin’s act of civil disobedience preceded Rosa Parks’s by nine months,

sixteen young men (eight of them white, eight black) rode a bus together through Virginia and North Carolina in what they called a Journey of Reconciliation. This, in turn, inspired the Freedom Riders, a much larger group of whites and blacks who traveled on Greyhound and Trailways buses across the South during the summer of 1961. Their actions—along with nonviolent protests, sit-ins, and marches—shone a glaring spotlight on the racism that permeated much of the country and culminated in the sweeping Civil Rights Act of 1964.

a mere ten days before Morgan’s fateful stop in Saluda, twenty-five-year-old Lieutenant Jack Roosevelt “Jackie” Robinson was accosted by a driver for not moving from his seat on an Army bus—despite the recent integration of all military transportation. Robinson’s furious reaction almost earned him a court-martial, but he was spared because he was already a star athlete (and this was three years before he broke professional baseball’s color barrier in 1947).

After her husband passed away in 1948, Morgan left Virginia for Queens, New York, where she operated a child care business. At the age of sixty-eight she attended St. John’s University to acquire her bachelor of arts degree, and five years later she earned a master’s degree from Queens College. Morgan moved back to Virginia in 2002 and passed away at the age of ninety.

At both Deseret and Dugway, the U.S. military conducted medical experiments on human subjects, and the testing at Dugway led to a lawsuit by one of the victims.

Because of these and other systemwide measures, hijackings of major passenger airliners became increasingly rare in the United States—until September 1976, when Croatian separatists ordered Chicago-bound TWA Flight 355 out of New York’s LaGuardia Airport to land in Paris. After commandeering the plane, they announced that, as proof of their seriousness, they had stashed explosives in a subway locker under Grand Central Terminal. Although their claim of having smuggled weapons aboard Flight 355 turned out to be a bluff, the Manhattan bomb was real; on Saturday, September 11, a police officer named Brian Murray died while trying to deactivate the explosives. There were no other hijacking-related fatalities within the United States for another twenty-five years. To the day.

Beatosu is a “paper town,” one of countless fictitious entries—along with fake roads, alleyways, streams, mountains, lakes—that lurk on various U.S. and foreign maps. Cartographers include these on road atlases as either boredom-killing pranks or, more legitimately, as “copyright traps” to catch competitors who’ve duplicated their information instead of doing original research.

Leading the charge against Jacobellis was the Citizens for Decent Literature, an Ohio-based group founded by Charles H. Keating Jr. (the same Charles Keating caught up in the savings-and-loan scandals three decades later and sentenced to prison by a young Judge Lance Ito—of O. J. Simpson trial fame—for conspiracy, fraud, and racketeering).

As Chief Justice Warren predicted, Jacobellis prompted a surge in the number of movies the Court had to review, and adult movie day became a regular event. The films were shown in a large ceremonial room on the first floor. Justice Thurgood Marshall relished the screenings and particularly enjoyed when directors made gratuitous attempts to bestow an element of educational or artistic merit on their otherwise lurid movies.

Rum Riot of 1855 in Portland, Maine’s Monument Square,

At the epicenter of the incident was Neal Dow, whose obsession with curing America of its licentious ways catalyzed two constitutional amendments and ushered in a new era of search-and-seizure procedures that fundamentally altered our judicial system.

On November 11, 1620, two days before stepping onto the New World, the first Pilgrims (or “Separatists”) composed the Mayflower Compact, swearing “all due submission and obedience” to a soon-to-be-formed “Civil Body Politic.” For sixteen years they—and the thousands of Puritans who arrived in Massachusetts after them—governed themselves under a hodgepodge of mostly English precedents and Old Testament edicts until finally organizing everything into the 1636 Book of Lawes. This, along with Jamestown’s 1610 Lawes Divine, Morall, and Martiall, etc., was the earliest legal code written in America. (Ironically, some of the Virginia Company’s punishments were more draconian than those instituted by the early Pilgrims and Puritans.)

In 1851, Dow was elected Portland’s mayor, and with his newfound political power he drafted a bill that, on June 2, 1851, made Maine the first state in America to ban the sale of alcohol, with strict punishments for noncompliance.

the Bill of Rights originally applied only to the federal government; states weren’t bound by it.

A subsidiary of United Technologies since 1976, the Otis Elevator Company remains unmatched in size and reach, carrying the equivalent of the world’s population every four days on 2.3 million products in two hundred countries and territories. No other form of public transportation comes close.

Topsy, the ill-tempered Coney Island elephant, was put to death in Luna Park, Coney Island, yesterday afternoon. The execution was witnessed by 1,500 or more curious persons, who went down to the island to see the end of the huge beast, to whom they had fed peanuts and cakes in summers that are gone. In order to make Topsy’s execution quick and sure 460 grams of cyanide of potassium were fed to her in carrots. Then a hawser was put around her neck and one end attached to a donkey engine and the other to a post. Next wooden sandals lined with copper were attached to her feet. These electrodes were connected by copper wire with the Edison electric light plant and a current of 6,600 volts was sent through her body. The big beast died without a trumpet or a groan. —From the January 5, 1903, Commercial Advertiser. Thomas Edison promoted Topsy’s execution, which used alternating current (AC) power, to scare Americans into thinking that AC was so dangerous it could kill a full-grown elephant. Edison was engaged in a propaganda war with Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse, who favored AC over Edison’s direct current (DC). Edison lost, and most electronics now use alternating currents.

About half a dozen European and American inventors, for instance, patented the incandescent lightbulb years before Thomas Edison. One of them, John Starr from Ohio, is believed to have beaten Edison by decades. Electrical engineer Elisha Gray submitted his telephone patent several hours before Alexander Graham Bell’s attorney handed in Bell’s application on February 14, 1876, but Bell became the more famous of the two. Gray’s defenders argue that he lost out because an alcoholic Patent Office employee was bribed to ensure that Bell’s claim received priority. (Bell was also accused of later coming to the patent office himself, perusing Gray’s application, and then stealing concepts he later incorporated into his own design.) And more than two years before the Wright brothers briefly dipped and bobbed over the sands of Kitty Hawk on December 17, 1903, the Bridgeport Herald profiled a German-born immigrant named Gustave Whitehead who, according to the article, flew a motor-propelled airplane in Fairfield, Connecticut. Several witnesses later signed affidavits swearing that they, too, witnessed the August 1901 flight. Whitehead could have settled the question and possibly earned his chance at immortality had he, like the Wright brothers, captured his flight on film. (The true inventor of photography is also, of course, a matter of debate.)

What makes Morrison’s car all the more noteworthy is that it was electric. America’s first automobile ran on batteries, not fossil fuels. And the Morrison Electric, as he called it, wasn’t some one-time wonder constructed for his own driving pleasure; Morrison built a line of cars and sold them for $3,600 each.

Frank and Charles Duryea’s gasoline-fueled automobile, the first of its kind in the United States. The Duryea brothers were also first to set up a car-manufacturing plant, followed by Ransom Olds, who patented the assembly-line process—not Henry Ford, as is commonly believed.

Philo Farnsworth’s David-versus-Goliath battle with RCA Communications concerning the patent for electronic television. That a lone, self-taught engineer from Rigby, Idaho—where I’m off to now—took on the world’s most powerful broadcasting company and won isn’t even the story’s most remarkable angle. What’s more compelling, I think, is that Farnsworth came up with the idea when he was only fourteen years old.