America's Hidden History. What's in the book?

In AMERICA'S HIDDEN HISTORY, I tell six separate stories, each of which reveals an "untold tale" that your schoolbooks left out.

These six stories cover a broad range of our history, spanning from the Spanish exploration in the mid-16th century to George Washington's inauguration in 1789. In some ways, these stories found me -- like lucky accidents. When I set out, I knew I wanted to write about a certain period, and I began, as I always do, by following my curiosity. For instance, I had long been fascinated by the largely untold tale of a Spanish explorer named Cabeza de Vaca who was the first man to go from one end of North America to the other. When I was in Florida, where Cabeza began his epic journey, I literally stumbled across Fort Matanzas and the story of the real first Pilgrims in America. They were, in fact, French Huguenots who were massacred by the Spanish in 1565. Matanzas is the Spanish word for "slaughters."

I had never heard this story and it was compelling on so many levels -- religious wars, European contact with the Indians and the untold story of the Spanish in America.

And that is a perfect example of "hidden history." Just as Fort Matanzas is an obscure spot off the beaten tourist path in Florida, many stories have been hidden away from us, but are really crucial to understanding how America came into existence. In part, these episodes have been 'untold' because they are messy and brutal. They don't fit the tidy, schoolbook history served up to us when we were children.

The second chapter tells of three extraordinary women in Puritan Massachusetts whose lives offer a much different picture of the Puritan past than the Thanksgiving idyll familiar to most Americans -- of the Pilgrims sitting down for a 'happy meal' with the Indians. Most of us didn't hear about the Massachusetts mother who took 10 scalps and became America's most famous woman. But Hannah Dustin's exploits speak volumes about the dangers of life in colonial New England in the 18th century.

Each following chapter then explores one of these little-known or otherwise obscure moments or people in a way that lets the reader see a whole slice of American history from a fresh perspective.

We are all familiar with the phrase 'turning points' in history. Each of the stories in this book are turning points --I call them 'fulcrum moments' -- in their own way. But for many reasons they were largely overlooked. If a headstrong 22-year-old George Washington had been strung up by the French at Fort Necessity, how would that have changed history? If a British plan to assassinate three of Boston's most prominent patriots in 1775 had succeeded, would there have been a revolution? When a few thousand dissident farmers and veterans of the revolution rebelled in western Massachusetts in the 1780s, it completely altered American history. We might not have a Constitution without that crisis.

That's how these untold tales all "shaped a nation."

Did your textbooks leave these stories out?

Learn more about America's Hidden History at Smithsonian.com.

© 2008 Kenneth C. Davis

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