Lost to Time: Unforgettable Stories That History Forgot
Author: by Martin W. Sandler (Author)
Publisher: Union Square & Co.
Publication Date: 2010-06-01
Language: English
Print Length: 304 pages
ISBN-10: 1402729588
ISBN-13: 9781402729584
Book Description
Stories that history forgot but readers will remember
The only thing new in the world,” said Harry S. Truman, is the history you don't know.” In this fresh and fascinating collection of historical vignettes, Martin W. Sandler (author of Resolute and Atlantic Ocean) restores to memory important events, people, and developments that have been lost to time.
Though barely known today, these are major historical stories, from Ziryab, an eighth-century black slave whose influence on music, cuisine, fashion, and manners still reverberates, to Cahokia, a 12th century city north of the Rio Grande, which at its zenith contained a population estimated to have been as high as 40,000 (more than any contemporary European city), to the worst peacetime maritime disaster ever, the explosion and sinking of the Sultana on the Mississippi in 1865.
These tales are far from trivia; they illuminate little-known American and foreign achievements, ingenuity, heroics, blunders, and tragedies that changed the course of history and resonate today.
*Starred Review* Such a splendid book, full of fascinating, well-told tales. Here’s the Sultana, a 260-foot steamboat that sank in 1865 with a death toll higher than that of the Titanic. Here’s America’s first subway, constructed in New York under utmost security in 1870, more than 30 years before the current subway system opened. Here’s Exercise Tiger, a rehearsal for the 1944 D-Day invasion of Normandy that, believe it or not, led to more deaths than the actual Utah Beach attack. Here’s Gustave Whitehead (born Gustav Weisskopf), a German immigrant who piloted a powered aircraft a full two years before the Wright brothers. And that’s just a taste of this eye-opening book. Historian Sandler has assembled a diverse and bafflingly overlooked collection of historical curiosities, forcing us to wonder how it’s possible that we never learned this stuff in school? In some cases, there are explanations: the Sultana sinking, for example, was overshadowed in the press by the aftermath of Lincoln’s assassination 13 days earlier, and the Exercise Tiger debacle was covered up for decades. But in other cases we’re just left scratching our heads, wondering how these remarkable moments in history were allowed to slip through the cracks of time. --David Pitt
About the Author
Martin W. Sandler has received two Pulitzer Prize nominations, a Boston Globe-Horn Book Award for The Story of American Photography: An Illustrated History for Young People, and seven Emmy Awards. He is the author of more than fifty books, including Sterling's Atlantic Ocean and Resolute: The Epic Search for the Northwest Passage and John Franklin, and the Discovery of the Queen's Ghost Ship. His best-selling Library of Congress American History series has sold more than 500,000 copies. For television, Mr. Sandler was creator and cowriter for the acclaimed This Was America series, hosted by William Shatner. Other television programs and series for which Sandler was executive producer and writer include Excellence in the Public Sector (starring Tom Peters), American Treasure (starring Gene Kelly), and The Entrepreneurs (starring Robert Mitchum). He has taught American history and American studies at the University of Massachusetts and Smith College.
评论前必须登录！
登陆 注册