National Histories

In Paris you will find a statue memorializing the originator of the theory of evolution…Jean Baptiste Lamarck.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Rosing

The answer to the original question is likely to be Alexander Hamilton. Unless, one’s pessimism about Americans’ historical knowledge intervenes and opens up several Presidents (James Madison and Andrew Jackson for instance) as candidates.

mq @1,

don’t know whether Lamarck was truly the first to propose evolution, but he certainly got there before Darwin did. He simply didn’t hit upon natural selection as the explanation for it…

I’m proposing Charles Finney. It’s nearly impossible to imagine the current structure of American religion/politics without him.

david sarnoff

I had to google “Philo Farnsworth” to see if he really existed. The name sounds far too much like a character that Groucho would play in a Marx Brothers movie.

I forget the Russian inventor’s real name.

Vladimir Zworykin

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Zworykin

In a bunch of places, the periodic table is called the Mendeleev table. Not in the US though.

I don’t have anything, you know, actually useful to add here, other than to say that “Alexander Televishnevsky” is a most awesome name.

Philo T. Farnsworth and Alexander Telivishnevsky both belong a Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon.

Doesn’t Stigler’s Law violate itself? Or did he secretly get the idea from someone else?

I remember a really fascinating story about Bernoulli’s equation and how nobody really knows which Bernoulli invented it, father or son, because they hated eachother and stole eath others work all the time.

And then there’s the Bunyakovsky inequality.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cauchy%E2%80%93Schwarz_inequality

Actually it’s pretty true that a lot of Russians independently discovered many scientific facts, both during the Soviet era and tsarist times. Part of that was just due to the intellectual separation caused by the Cyrillic alphabet – Russians couldn’t read Western (mostly French) journals and vice versa.

But the person who first wrote that Wiki entry on Stigler’s Law better get his rightful credit.

Surely everyone knows that everything comes from India.

My Russian professor lied to me!

Speaking of misattributions in maths, wasn’t it Whitehead who said something like `Everything important was earlier by someone who didn’t discover it?’

Hmmm… hard to say, but I’ll make a biased statement that Smedley Butler is a good candidate. Then again, I’m biased because I’m writing a book about him.

Roger Baldwin, a contemporary of Butler’s and founder of the ACLU, would be good. As would a guy of whom even a lot of historians may never have heard: Alfred Bingham (son of Hiram, about whom also a good book could be written–and maybe has?).

I think one of the hard things about this question is that there are just so many people who fit the bill, at least if we’re talking “popular biography.” Was Solnit’s Muybridge book (River of Shadows) a “popular biography?”

Also: a lot of what makes popular biography great can get pretty happenstance when you get into the archives: not every subject wrote great or voluminous diaries/letters/etcetera or had dramas that play out in nice clean narrative arcs. I know I cursed the invention of the telephone and telegraph repeatedly in the months I spent in the archives for the Butler book && would have finished the book last year if I’d found a cleaner narrative (this ain’t no Seabiscuit).

I don’t have the books to hand to check this, but didn’t the curriculum at St Custard’s reveal that Stalin invented the steam engine.

Perhaps amongst you there is a Willans & Searle expert, hem hem, wot mite be able to enlighten me.

No, the steam engine was invented by
Hero of Alexandria.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero_of_Alexandria

As you would know if you spent a bit less of your time reading these new fangled ‘books’ and spent just a bit more time doing something constructive: like watching reruns of QI on Channel Dave.

Damn me, but that Smedley Butler book would fit a gap on my bookshelf nicely.

Leonardo da Vinci invented everything there is to invent.

… who’s the most important … [American] historical figure about whom most people know nothing?

I humbly put forth the name of Thomas Paine.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_paine
(note: wiki artickle contains recently disputed biographical details. Hope someone (who isn’t as lazy as me) updates it soon)

The catalyst for the American Revolution. Coined the phrase “The United States of America.” Originator of “constitutionalism” and many modern human rights ideals. Arguably the 18th century’s biggest best-seller (American revolutionaries usually owned only the Bible and “Common Sense”). Participated in both the American and French Revolutions (and had an abortive attempt at a British one as well). Invented the first entirely metal stanchion-less bridge and a smokeless candle. Ur-socialist (welfare, income equality, social security). Lived his entire life in poverty. Later vilified for his open Deism (Teddy Roosevelt inaccurately called him a “filthy little atheist”). Oh, and he fought pirates(!) when he was a young man.

Advocated women’s suffrage; the abolition of slavery, the death penalty, and animal cruelty; and recognizing the sovereignty of aboriginal tribal nations; . . . in 1774. Only one of the “founding fathers” who would be labeled “liberal” or “progressive” nowadays (eat it, Jefferson: you owned slaves).

Obviously, I’m rather fond of the guy.

And since others are posting both here and out West, let me repeat myself:

(1) Ella Baker–who not only was there throughout every critical stage of the civil rights movement, but played a critical role in it in more ways than one.

(2) E.D. Nixon of Montgomery, Alabama. A. Philip Randolph already has a movie and a shelf of books about him. Nixon exemplifies what being a member of the Brotherhood allowed activists to do in the depths of the Deep South during the 40’s and 50’s.

(3) Rose Schneiderman, whose life traces the arc from sweatshops and the Uprising of the 20,000 to New Deal reformism, with some detours through the class-based fissures in early feminism.

The claims of post-WWII Stalinist propaganda that everything was invented in Russia were well-known enough to be satirized in Pogo. In one sequence, the Communist cowbirds claim that baseball was invented in Russia.