The Small and the Mighty: Twelve Unsung Americans Who Changed the Course of History

by Sharon McMahon

The best Americans are not the critics, they are the doers. They are the people who went for broke when everyone else yelled to turn back. They are those who know that one becomes great because of who they lift up, not who they put down. I have learned that no one reaches their final moments of mortal existence and whispers to their loved ones, “I wish I had gotten in some more sick burns in the comments section on Facebook.”

For all the things one could learn about Paul Revere, he rode a horse and shouted at people is perhaps one of the least interesting. Revere wasn’t even the only one who rode a horse to warn troops in the distance that the British were coming. A teenage girl did it, too, and she rode twice as far, in the rain.

One reason why so many people, particularly southern Democrats, opposed suffrage for women is because they knew it would give Black women the right to vote, and that, they just couldn’t abide. Giving them the right to vote would upset the entire power dynamic that the United States was founded upon, and the rock upon which it still rested: the supremacy of white men.

“Justice is inflexible,” she said. “It does not lean to the right or the left. Justice and truth are fixed eternal principles, but mankind has leaned away from this tower, until the standard lies prone upon the earth, at right angles with justice, the will or the passions of men being recognized as the law.”[15]

Being at the forefront of progress has always come with a certain amount of fear—you’re asking people to abandon comfort for the sake of growth. It’s like asking people to follow you into the wilderness for the promise of a better tomorrow. Some people would rather stay where they are, because home is comfortable. Home is safe. Change is scary.

Humans aren’t so much afraid of failure as they are of having people watch them fail. The shame doesn’t come from not scaling the summit, it’s from the people who judge you for not having succeeded.

At one speech in Boise, Inez shouted, “What is your answer, women with the ballot? Are you going to lick the hand that smites you like the hounds?” And, “Women should assert their power. If women don’t respect themselves, no one else will.”[11]

Maud Younger continued. “But neither legend nor vision is liberty, which was her life. Liberty cannot die. No work for liberty can be lost. It lives on in the hearts of the people, in their hopes, their aspirations, their activities. It becomes part of the life of the nation.”[24]

It’s long been a source of amusement to me that some of the greatest thinkers in history, the people of the Enlightenment, the humans who wrote the Constitution and founded the world’s oldest democracy, didn’t know about dinosaurs.

Hope is a choice that we make each morning, and we do not have the luxury of hopelessness if we want to see progress.

Our minds want to categorize people into one of two camps: Good or evil. Angel or demon. Most often, that viewpoint denies people the fullness of their humanity and can overlook positive contributions or ignore negative impacts.

the reason he wanted to be a Democrat was that he thought that the Republicans wanted to protect property—what we have—but the Democrats wanted to protect people—who we are.[12]

Education wasn’t only liberation, she came to realize; education was self-sufficiency. It was independence. It reduced your vulnerability, because it was much harder to cheat someone who could read and do basic sums. It was connection, allowing you to read and send letters to your loved ones. It was faith, because it let you read your scriptures.

Then, and now, one of the most effective ways to stop cultural change is to create a moral panic around it.

“You know the measure of a person is how much they develop in their life,” she said. “Some people slow down in their growth after they become adults. But you never know when a person’s going to leap forward or change around completely—I’ve seen growth like most people don’t think possible. I can even work with my enemies because I know from experience that they might have a change of heart any minute.”[19]

schools. White supremacy and white Christian identity are inextricably linked in American history. Facts don’t require our personal approval for them to be facts.

Nothing had been wasted. Not one moment, not one sacrifice. Everything she lived through was now being used.

One of the three judges on the federal panel asked the city attorney, “Can you command one man to surrender his constitutional rights to prevent another man from committing a crime?”[17] The attorney had no way to answer that.