Sharon McMahon is a longtime high school government teacher best known as America’s Government Teacher on Instagram. She offers lessons to the whole nation through her award-winning podcast, Here’s Where It Gets Interesting. She is also the founder of The Preamble, a newsletter that provides history and context to important stories.
Some of the most remarkable people in history never made it into the textbooks. Behind every leader, president, and aristocrat are unsung heroes who changed history. McMahon’s meticulous research brings to light the riveting lives and legacies of these hidden characters—telephone operators, schoolteachers, and the most seemingly “normal” of Americans. She shows the behind-the-scenes story of how it has been the most unassuming of Americans who deserve credit for pushing the needle toward American greatness.
Below, McMahon shares five key insights from her new book, The Small and the Mighty: Twelve Unsung Americans Who Changed the Course of History, From the Founding to the Civil Rights Movement. Listen to the audio version—read by McMahon herself—in the Next Big Idea App.
1. Hope is not a feeling. It’s a choice
One of my personal heroes is Septima Clark. She was born in 1898 and had a life that most of us would not want to trade places with. The list of things that happened to this woman is extensive. More than once, she almost died in a plane crash or a car accident. People tried to firebomb her house. She was falsely arrested. She was fired from her job. She discovered that her husband had a secret second family. At one point, she became so despondent that she was saved from harming herself at the last moment.
She grew up to become a teacher, landing a job in South Carolina at a school called Promise Land School—but that school was no promised land. It didn’t even have glass in the windows. To keep bugs out, you had to keep the shutters closed and so the children were taught in the dark.
Septima Clark did not look around and think to herself, “Wow, I am really going to change the course of history here.” In fact, she probably felt like the world’s problems were too overwhelming for her to address. She had every right to look around and feel hopeless.
And yet, rather than waiting for a reason for hope, she made a choice. That choice changed the course of history. Suffice it to say that the United States would have no civil rights movement as we know it without the efforts of women like Septima Clark.
2. Most important changes happen because ordinary people do what’s necessary
Most of the Civil Rights Movement was people putting one foot in front of the other, saying, “Hey, I have an idea . . . Yeah, let’s give that a try . . . Oh, this is going well . . . Okay, what if we keep going for another week? . . . What if you do that, too?”
The same thing is true of women’s suffrage. Women worked for more than 80 years to gain the right to vote. This idea that somebody is out there with “The Plan” and we all need to implement it is not reality. People just kept looking at the situation before them and did the next needed thing. For some of us, the next thing we need is a big deal. Some of us have millions of people in our audiences or millions of dollars. Some of us are literally nursing a baby while a two-year-old runs around the house.
You might be thinking, “I don’t know what the next needed thing is. I’m just trying to make it through the day.” But what I’m telling you is that the next needed thing is something different for each one of us, and that is the way it is meant to be. What you can do today is not always indicative of what you’ll be able to do in five or ten years. History shows us that when people do the next needed thing where they are with the resources available to them, incredible things can happen.
3. True leadership is about who you lift up, not tear down
Many people who make headlines are famous for posting some sick burns in the comments section on Twitter. They’re excellent at making fun of their political opponents. We’ve all been prone to watching those takedown clips and perhaps feeling secretly gleeful when somebody we dislike gets kicked down a few notches. Ultimately, the people upon whom history smiles kindly are those who spent their lives building others up, asking, “How can I be of service?” instead of orienting themselves toward self-aggrandizement.
For instance, consider Julius Rosenwald, who came by an incredible fortune by what he calls luck and proximity. He was born the middle-class son of an immigrant family who had arrived in the United States with absolutely nothing. They were peddlers with no way of knowing what their son would someday become.
Julius Rosenwald became rich beyond his wildest imagination and could buy everything he had ever wanted and set up his children and wife with fancy clothes, vacations, and a beautiful home. At age 50, he wondered, “What should I do with all of this money?” He decided to give most of his money away in a very interesting fashion. What he did continues to impact the United States today. He did not put it on the side of a museum. He did not buy himself a fleet of rail cars. He did not build monuments to himself; instead, he built a truly remarkable legacy. Most prominent people in the Civil Rights Movement were impacted by what he did with his fortune.
4. The U.S. Constitution contains a mission statement that should be our North Star
Gouverneur Morris was one of America’s founding fathers, and man, does this guy have a backstory. One quick example is that he married his housekeeper later in life, and this housekeeper was a relative of Thomas Jefferson. She became his housekeeper because she was disgraced and had to flee her living situation. She allegedly had a baby with her sister’s husband, and she and her sister’s husband conspired to get rid of their newborn baby.
Gouverneur Morris was also a fantastic writer. He’s the man who penned the words “We the People”—he wrote the preamble to the Constitution. There are four principles in the preamble to the Constitution that, if you summarize them in modern language, say this: The United States is at its best when it is just, peaceful, good, and free. Time and time again, the best Americans have done their part to uphold these four principles. Today, we can ask ourselves, when making public policies or electing leaders, to what extent does this leader uphold America’s mission statement?
5. To make progress, we must be honest about where we’ve come from
There is a tendency to go through history and pick out all the good stories. We love reading stories about people who did something incredible, and I think those are worth reading. It is worth surrounding ourselves with a community of ancestors who did amazing things and who provide inspiration. That’s a very valuable exercise.
But, in addition to examining what people from history have gotten right, we also must examine what people from history have gotten wrong. Often, in today’s political climate, we tend to shy away from examining what people from the past have gotten wrong. They’re labeled “divisive concepts” or given another name that makes them sound big and scary. Some people think we can’t possibly handle discussing the real, beautiful, unsparing truth of history. We do ourselves a disservice when we orient ourselves toward this posture because, to build true patriotism, we cannot found it on lies.
There will come a moment in your life where you will be asked to choose: Will I retreat, or will I move forward with courage? And you will realize, just like the people in this book, that every experience, every setback, every heartbreak, every triumph, every joy will all be used. The character that you’ve been cultivating will be called upon. When that moment comes, I hope you’ll rise to it.
This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with permission.
