A Treasury of Foolishly Forgotten Americans: Pirates, Skinflints, Patriots, and Other Colorful Characters Stuck in the Footnotes of History(ISBN=9780143113058)

A lively, compulsively browsable collection of neglected notables-from the bestselling author of A Treasury of Royal Scandals

"History," wrote Thomas Carlyle, "is the essence of innumerable biographies." Yet countless fascinating characters are relegated to a historical limbo. In A Treasury of Foolishly Forgotten Americans, Michael Farquhar has scoured the annals and rescued thirty of the most intriguing, unusual, and yes, memorable Americans from obscurity. From the mother of Mother's Day to Paul Revere's rival rider, the Mayflower murderer to "America's Sherlock Holmes," these figures are more than historical runners-up-they're the spies, explorers, patriots, and martyrs without whom history as we know it would be very different indeed.

Michael Farquhar, a former writer and editor at The Washington Post, is the bestselling author of the Penguin Treasury series.