Tell us a little bit about what they did

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  3. Roger Sherman’s Connecticut Compromise is the reason that Congress is structured the way it is, hugely important in the foundation of the government.

    He is also the only person to sign the Declaration of Independence, Continental Association, Articles of Confederation and Constitution.

  5. William Seward, Lincoln’s Secretary of State and right hand man. He made the Republican Party mainstream when he defected from the Whigs; was the leading American abolitionist for years; took care of foreign relations for Lincoln while he focused on the war, managing to keep Britain and France from intervening on the side of the Confederacy; was considered so important that John Wilkes Booth’s associates unsuccessfully attempted to assassinate him the same day as Lincoln; and later negotiated the purchase of Alaska from Russia.

  7. I know Russia isn’t popular, but I am going to go with Stanislav Petrov, a Russian soldier that was incredibly important to American history. In 1983, the Soviet equipment was reporting ICBM’s headed their way, from the US. He made the call to assume that the equipment was malfunctioning and that there were really no missiles coming. If he had not done that, it would have triggered a nuclear war. It was a false alarm and Russia had over 30,000 nukes.

  9. Some Revolution era figures.

    Admiral DeGrasse of the French Navy, without him we would not have won the Revolution.

    Casimir Pulaski, the founder of the US Cavalry.

    Henry Knox, who got us the cannons from Ft. Ticonderoga in one of the most daring and incredible stories of the Revolution.

    Mum Bett who took her case for freedom from slavery to the Massachusetts Supreme Court which found in her favor deciding that slavery was indeed unconstitutional in Massachusetts after the Revolution.

    Others

    Norman Borlaug, plant biologist that may have saved billions of lives by increasing crop yields through breeding.

    Maurice Hilleman developed vaccines for measles, mumps, hepatitis A and B, chicken pox, meningitis, pneumonia, and haemophilus influenzae bacteria. Eight of the 14 recommended default vaccinations.

    Henrietta Lacks, she wasn’t personally famous or influential but the cells from her body taken from the cancer that killed her established the first immortal human cell line and are the most common cell used in vitro in molecular biology. Because of her unwitting donation to science she gave us the basis of modern human molecular biology.

    Dr. Charles Drew, pioneered blood banking and blood storage prior to WWII and is likely responsible for saving tens of thousands in that war alone. He was a black man and was eventually fired for protesting segregation, specifically in blood banking because he knew their was no scientific basis for discriminating between “black” and “white” blood.

  11. Cassius Marcellus Clay is the guy that basically forced Lincoln to free the slaves.

  12. Bayard Rustin was the person who convinced MLK to commit to non-violent conflict resolution. He was a gay black man, so he kept a low profile to stay safe. He was very important in 60s/70s civil rights & then in the gay rights movement.

  14. There’s a ton of politicians who were super influential and famous in their day that aren’t very well known today because they never became president. Daniel Webster, William Jennings Bryan, George Norris, Joseph Gurney Cannon to just name a few.

  15. Hiawatha, co-founder of the Iroquois Confederacy that (allegedly) was an important inspiration for the founding fathers in their design of the US Constitution.

  16. Helen Keller. Textbooks portray her as a deaf and blind girl who overcame her disability in a harsh world…and then her story just ends

    Hardly anyone knows that she was a hard-core socialist that traveled the world and fought for workers’ rights, women’s rights, led peace efforts during ww1, and helped found the American Civil Liberties Union

    She campaigned for women’s suffrage and birth control education. She was a total badass and textbook publishers fucked up her legacy because it goes against the narrative

  17. President James Polk. Most people don’t talk about him much, but he spearheaded the Mexican-American War and practically doubled the size of the country.

  18. Pretty much the histories of every Black and Native Americans’ historic contributions were erased or never entered into the record.

  19. Anthony Johnson isn’t talked about in high school history books, despite being the person responsible for bringing chattel slavery to the US. Before him, in the 13 colonies, slavery was always a temporary condition, and he was a temporary slave (as was the law at the time, all slavery was temporary in the colonies) and after his contract was up, he bought slaves and then sued to keep them enslaved. His lawsuit changed the laws on slavery in the 13 colonies and ushered in the era of chattel slavery.

    It was a really dark time and made US slavery more like it was in Haiti and other deplorable areas.

  20. Marsha P. Johnson

    The face of the founders of the LGBTQ+ civil rights movement.

  21. [Jesse H. Jones](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_H._Jones)

    Fifty billion dollars. That’s how much the Reconstruction Finance Corporation spent to dig us out of the Great Depression, directly from the Federal Reserve, mainlined right to the alphabet-soup agencies like the CCC, WPA, PWA, TVA that kept people employed, warm, and fed in a time when unemployment was hitting 30% and New York City was Army soup kitchens in Central Park and Peoria and Raleigh and Baltimore were breadlines and beggars and suffering.

    [AskHistorians post about the RFC and Jones’s leadership](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/af2egp/comment/ee0g5ic/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)

    “The RFC bailed out community banks across the country and typically made a return on its investment. It helped pay for farm relief and recapitalize factories. It paid for infrastructure, urban renewal, public housing, private housing developments, wastewater and drinking water, rural electrification, and when we began building the Arsenal of Democracy for World War Two, it made the payments to the privately-owned factories to retool them for wartime production, among many other enormous wartime projects.
    It was figuratively a money hose. The title of Jesse Jones’ autobiography is Fifty Billion Dollars for a reason — they knew it was a staggering amount of money they were putting into circulation.”

    [Elbridge G. Spaulding](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elbridge_G._Spaulding)

    I don’t think this man’s influence on the American economy can be understated. Prior to 1862, money was held in state banknotes and specie (gold and silver). Imagine carrying a banknote from Pennsylvania to New Hampshire and not being able to pay for anything.

    To enable the North to pay for the Civil War, Spaulding created the Legal Tender Acts, beginning in 1862, which created the basis to print money in the United States. United States Notes were legal tender for all debts public and private, accepted anywhere; and freely convertible to specie.

    “Greenbacks.” We take it for granted now.

  23. Harriet Beecher Stowe, for writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin. When Abraham Lincoln met her (And God, that must have been a meeting because Abe was a big guy, and Stowe was a tiny thing), he said “So you are the little lady who started this great war.” Her book played an enormous part in hardening attitudes towards slavery in the North.

    The reason she isn’t really well known any more is that her book is now considered politically incorrect, racist or what have you. But in its day it had more impact on the real world than maybe any other American novel. And it’s better written than a lot of people realize. Eliza escaping across the frozen Ohio river with her child in her arms and the slave catcher’s bullets cracking around her ears is one of the greatest action scenes any American writer had ever put on paper.

  24. Huey Long, very popular politician from Louisiana and one of the most progressive political figures relative to their time, practically a socialist.

  25. [Dorethea Dix](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothea_Dix) a prominent nurse. Appalled that the mentally ill and those hopelessly addicted to substance abuse, were living on the streets and rotting in jails. Dix lobbied relentlessly for states to take action. Creating the original system of mental asylums to provide the care, shelter and dignity those people needed. This work also extended into Europe. In time those asylums became corrupted, underfunded and eventually disbanded leading us right back to square one in the modern day.

  27. Carl Vinson is my favorite. He was a Senator from Georgia from 1914 to 1965.

    In 1934, at the height of the Great Depression, he managed to convince Congress to pass a bill expanding the Navy, despite there really not being any money. In 1938, with the Great Depression ending and money becoming available, again he got a naval expansion act passed. And in 1940, after the fall of France, he got the famous Two Ocean Navy Act passed, expanding the Navy by 70% on top of his previous expansions.

    People generally think of Japan as always being doomed in it’s war against America, and in the long run that was true, but if it wasn’t for Vinson’s continuous expansion of the Navy, they would’ve had a much easier time for quite a while. Even then getting a capital ship built could take 2+ years.

    Of course the main downside to him is that he was racist as fuck, but honestly what can you expect from a politician from Georgia in 1914

  28. I’ll go with native Iowan Norman Borlaug. Called the “Father of the Green Revolution.”

    A genetic engineer, he was instrumental in creating a series of high yield, disease resistant crops in the 1950’s and 1960’s that were adopted all over the world and led to dramatically increased yields, saving literally hundreds of millions of people all over the world from constant hunger and starvation.

  29. John Paul Jones founder of the U.S. navy ransacked much of England fighting in ways best described as pirate like up until the French got involved he was really the only naval combatant on the American side of the revolution he managed to keep nearly a third of the English navy occupied hunting him before the French joined. He was also cool enough to where one of the towns he sacked made him the honorary Saint of their town because he was so cool

  30. Crispin Attucks. African American and first American killed in the US Revolution at the Boston Massacre.

  31. Attorney Charles Houston. Civil rights attorney who worked himself to an early grave in support of equality in schools.

    Clarence Jordan. A minister who worked to promote racial and economic equality.

  32. Mary Edwards Walker was a Civil War battlefront surgeon. The Union Army initially would not let her practice medicine because she was a woman, they offered her work as a nurse. Rather than work as a nurse, she volunteered as a civilian contractor to the army so she could continue her work as a doctor and she frequently crossed enemy lines to treat wounded soldiers and civilians. She was the only woman to ever receive the Medal of Honor.

  33. Robert smalls, he was an enslaved man who stole a confederate ship and drove him, his family, and other enslaved people to the north past multiple confederate warships. He then went on to become a player in American politics and is partly credited with convincing Lincoln to free the slaves as one of his advisors.

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