15 Forgotten Historical Figures We’re Revisiting

Our fifteenth selection for forgotten historical figures is Elizabeth Coleman, also known as Bessie Coleman. An early American civil aviator, Coleman was the first African-American woman and the first Native American to hold a pilot license. She was born to a sharecropping family in Texas, but because of limited to no opportunities in the United States, Coleman traveled to France for flight school.

After earning her license, Coleman became a high-profile pilot in notoriously dangerous air shows in the United States, earning the nicknames “Queen Bess” and “Brave Bessie.” She later died in a plane crash in 1926, but her pioneering role in aviation has been an inspiration to early pilots, African Americans, and Native Americans for decades.

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Focusing on the scientific world is our fourteenth selection for forgotten historical figures, Charles Richard Drew. Drew was born into an African American family in Washington, D.C., and started working towards his dreams early. After getting through medical school, he specialized in the field of blood transfusions, developing improved techniques for blood storage. This led to his biggest achievement creating large-scale blood banks early in World War II.

Drew’s idea allowed medics to save thousands of Allied forces’ lives during the war and revolutionized the way blood was used for medicine. Drew was one of the most prominent African Americans in his field, and he used his status to protest against the practice of racial segregation in the donation of blood.

While most remember Lewis and Clark as they documented North America, most don’t remember York, our thirteenth selection for the forgotten historical figures list. York was an American explorer and the only African American member of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. He was born enslaved, inherited by Lewis from his father in 1799. Around the same age, Lewis forced York to travel across the continent and become the first African American to see the Pacific Ocean.

His survival skills and temperament were crucial to the explorers’ success, as he collected animals to eat and helped navigate both the terrain and the Native Americans who lived on the land. Today, York remains an American icon, and several monuments depicting him have been erected to remember his legacy.

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Our first forgotten historical figure comes from the first encounter with America, and the reality behind the “Thanksgiving” meal. Tisquantum, also known as Squanto, was a member of the Wampanoag Patuxet tribe. Their tribes are well-known for aiding the new colonists by becoming liaisons between Native Americans and pilgrims, and showing the pilgrims how to garden.

Often overlooked, several Native Americans died due to European diseases during this time, with Squanto kidnapped by English explorer and slaver Captain Thomas Hunt. Squanto was brought to Spain and later traveled to England, finally returning to America in 1619. When he returned, there was nothing left of his tribe due to an epidemic, so he went and lived with the Wampanoags until his death.

The next forgotten figure is our oldest one, Scipio Africanus, who was a Roman general and statesman. Notable achievements include being one of the main architects of Rome’s victory against Carthage in the Second Punic War. He also led the defeat of Hannibal at the Battle of Zama in 202 BC, earning him the honorific Africanus.

Even though Scipio Africanus had notable achievements as a general, his brutal and aggressive war tactics were not favored by all. One of these rivals was Cato the Elder who hated him deeply. The tensions between Scipio and his rivals increased until in 187 BC Scipio was tried in a show trial alongside his brother for supposed “bribes” he took from the Seleucid King Antiochus III. Disillusioned by his peers, Scipio left Rome and retired to his villa in Liternum.

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Even though we have never officially had a female President in the United States, there is a forgotten historical figure who could be seen as the first. Edith Wilson was the First Lady of the United States from 1915 to 1921 as the second wife of President Woodrow Wilson. Though she married Wilson during his first term as President, it is her actions in his later years as the leader of the U.S. that place her on this list.

In October 1919 President Wilson suffered a severe stroke, which limited his capacity of leading the country. For the remainder of his presidency, Edith managed the office of the President, later describing her role as a “stewardship.” Edith would determine which communications and matters of state were important enough to bring to the bedridden president, and which decisions she could make on her own. It proved that not only was Edith caring for her husband but the country as well.

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In recent years, the idea of climbing up Mount Everest has become commercialized, with several base camps up the mountain and trips to the peak as much as the weather allows. Before all of this though, it was extremely dangerous to climb Mount Everest, and many died along the way without reaching the peak. That is until Tenzing Norgay, a Nepalese-Indian Sherpa mountaineer, came along.

Tenzing Norgay, also referred to as Sherpa Tenzing was one of the first two people known to definitively reach the summit of Mount Everest, which he achieved with Edmund Hillary on May 29, 1953. Above is a photo of the two hikers, with Tenzing on the right and Edmund on the left. After his accomplishment, Tenzing was named one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century by Time magazine.

One of the most deadly forgotten historical figures on our list has the nickname “Lady Death.” Lyudmila Pavlichenko was a Soviet sniper in the Red Army during World War II, credited with killing 309 enemy combatants. Though this number likely puts her within the top five snipers of all time, she likely had more kills as a confirmed kill must be witnessed by a third party.

During one of the battles, Pavlichenko was injured by a mortal shell and was evacuated to Moscow. After recovery, she trained other Red Army snipers and became a public spokeswoman for the Red Army. Once the war ended in 1945, she was reassigned as a senior researcher for the Soviet Navy, later dying of a stroke at 58 years old.

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Did you know that the first female paleontologist was Mary Anning? Not many people remember her today, even though she was known around the world for her discoveries in Jurassic marine fossil beds. Her findings in the cliffs along the English Channel contributed to changes in scientific thinking about prehistoric life, and the history of the Earth.

Anning was popular in geological circles in Britain, Europe, and America, getting consult requests on issues of anatomy and fossil collecting. She was not allowed to be a part of the Geological Society of London, but it did not stop her from discovering more about fossils than many of her male counterparts. The only scientific writing of hers that was published in her lifetime was an extract of a letter Anning had written, questioning the Magazine of Natural History’s editor about one of the claims present in the magazine.

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Our next forgotten historical figure is not just a pretty face. Known for her acting career in Hollywood’s Golden Age, many people forgot that Hedy Lamarr also was a technological inventor. Notable films that Lamarr appeared in include Lady of the Tropics, Boom Town, White Cargo, and Samson and Delilah. She received a Hollywood Walk of Fame star in 1960.

Lamarr’s inventing career came to fruition at the beginning of World War II. Alongside avant-garde composer George Antheil, she co-developed a radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes that used spread spectrum and frequency hopping to override the threat of radio jamming by the Axis powers. This technology later became the framework for Wi-Fi, and Lamarr received the Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award for her work.

Our fifth forgotten historical figure was also an inventor. Lewis Latimer, an African American inventor and patent draftsman created several inventions during his time. These included an evaporative air conditioner, an improved process for manufacturing carbon filaments present in light bulbs, and an improved toilet system for railroad cars. His remarkable career began when he joined the Edison Electric Light Company in 1884.

Latimer’s innovations with carbon filaments were used in incandescent light bulbs to improve their efficiency and practicality. With the bulbs lasting longer than ever, Latimer’s contributions made electric lighting more accessible and affordable. When we hear “lightbulb” we often think of Thomas Edison inventing the incandescent light bulb, but only with Latimer did the technology advance to where it is today.

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There are not many people in the world who would willingly get admitted into a mental institution, but one of our forgotten historical figures did in 1887. Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman, better known by her pen name Nellie Bly, was an American journalist who launched a new type of investigative journalism.

Bly managed to get herself committed to the Blackwell’s Island Mental Institution and spent ten days there, working undercover to expose the horrors of what happened inside the four walls of the institution. In addition to her work with mental institutions, Nellie Bly was also known for her record-breaking trip around the world in 72 days, emulating Jules Verne’s story Around the World in 80 Days.

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If you watched the film Oppenheimer in 2023, you’ll know about the Manhattan Project and J. Robert Oppenheimer. You might not know about Ernest Lawrence, another head physicist working on the atomic bombs in WWII. Lawrence was known for his work on the uranium-isotope separation for the Manhattan Project, and for founding the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

His most impressive feat was the creation of the first cyclotron. This was prompted by Lawrence’s intrigue of a high-energy particle accelerator, and the idea of making a compact machine. After building a series of cyclotrons, Lawrence won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1939 for his invention.

Our second forgotten historical figure was also a scientist, but Percy Julian specialized in chemistry. In addition to being an American research chemist, Julian was a pioneer in the chemical synthesis of medicinal drugs from plants. This included the industrial large-scale chemical production of the human hormones progesterone and testosterone from plant sterols, such as stigmasterol and sitosterol. It laid the foundation for the steroid drug industry’s production of cortisone, corticosteroids, and birth control.

Throughout his life, Julian received over 130 chemical patents and was one of the first African Americans to earn a doctorate in chemistry. He also was the first African American chemist inducted into the National Academy of Sciences, and the second African American inducted (after David Blackwell) from any field.

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Our final forgotten historical figure is perhaps the most important of them all. Henrietta Lacks was an African American woman who passed away from cervical cancer in 1951, living a short life that would gain immense importance after her passing. Lack’s cancer cells are the source of the HeLa cell line, the first immortalized human cell line and one of the most important cell lines in medical research.

Unfortunately, Lacks was an unwitting source because consent wasn’t needed by the patient to take their cells and culture them. Neither Lacks nor her family were compensated for the extraction and use of the HeLa cells. Her family did not even know about the cell lines until 1975, over twenty years after Lack’s death. In the present day, even though the HeLa cells are invaluable to scientific research, there are still concerns about patient privacy and rights.

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