The everyday Americans behind our greatest achievements deserve to be remembered

Earlier this month, I sat at The New School in New York listening to Walter Isaacson talk about how we tell stories about America. He was speaking at the launch of the Center for the American Experience, on whose advisory board I serve. The conversation eventually turned to Isaacson’s many books and which ones had sold well. His answer left me thinking about how much of American achievement we overlook. America’s 250th anniversary gives us a good reason to look for these stories and share them.Isaacson has written about Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, among many others. He noted that his books about individuals have generally sold better than those about people working together. The Innovators, his fascinating, layered account of the people who created the computer and the Internet, was one example. Readers, he suggested, prefer stories of the “great man” to those of the group.As a teacher, I completely understand the appeal. It is easier to follow a complicated history through one person’s life, and this is certainly the case in the classroom when I try to teach political history. In thinking about Apple, Steve Jobs mattered enormously, and there is good reason to study what he did. But so did Steve Wozniak, Jony Ive, and so many others who helped build Apple. If Jobs is all we remember, we have a pretty incomplete, if not impoverished, account of how the company succeeded. Isaacson’s remarks made me think about a huge theme in the musical Hamilton: “Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?” We tend to remember the person at the podium or in the famous photograph. For better or worse, the people around them tend to disappear, even when the accomplishment would have been impossible without their work.The story of America’s moonshot is a powerful example. John F. Kennedy committed the country to landing a man on the moon before the 1960s ended, and Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took the first steps. Both astronauts belong at the center of the story. But there is an enormous amount of America between Kennedy and Armstrong. That includes Michael Collins, who remained in the command module while Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the moon.In fact, some of the story took place on Long Island, where Grumman built the lunar module. Engineers and machinists had to build a complex machine that could land two people on another world and return them safely to lunar orbit. The command module brought them home. They had to invent and engineer much of it from scratch, and they worked through one problem after another. Most Grumman engineers will never have biographies written about them, and most Americans will never know their names; yet there would have been no moon landing without them.One of the best-known issues with the lunar module was weight. Some of the early designs for the lunar module included large curved windows, but they were eventually replaced with smaller triangular ones to save weight and improve safety. That is a detail a child can understand, and the problem figures prominently in From the Earth to the Moon miniseries on HBO. The Grumman team had to figure out how to give the astronauts the view they needed while keeping the spacecraft light enough to do its job. The familiar photograph of the lunar module on the moon shows the result, but the history at Grumman on Long Island is a remarkable American story of ingenuity and grit.I also think about the film October Sky, an uplifting movie based on Homer Hickam’s memoir Rocket Boys. Hickam eventually became an aerospace engineer with NASA. His autobiographical account of growing up in Coalwood, West Virginia, became well known in American culture. By telling his own story, Hickam brought his friends, his teacher, and the town around him to an audience far beyond Coalwood.Hickam’s story is certainly inspirational, and there are so many more stories like it in small towns across the country that have not been told or have not gained much public attention. What is spectacular about today is that, thanks to advances in technology, families and friends can record interviews, post photographs and documents online, and share their own American experiences without waiting for a publisher to take an interest. A picture of a relative or friend at a factory or laboratory can come with an explanation of what they did there and why it mattered. We have the means now to tell our own stories and make them available to people far beyond our families and friends.This need not be a huge undertaking, but it would benefit from a conscious effort. Children and younger Americans should be encouraged to ask older relatives, family friends, and even neighbors and fellow members of religious communities what a normal day at work looked like, what was difficult, and who helped them learn the job. Students could bring family photographs and stories into classrooms, interview retired workers and make real connections with the past. Old letters and local newspapers could help them check what they learn. Libraries, historical societies, and various community centers can help collect and organize these accounts, preserve them, and make them available for others to discover.The world may not care about a story right now, and Isaacson’s observation about his own books is a reminder of that. But that does not mean that we shouldn’t document and record as many stories as we can or that the story being recorded has little value. An account we record and share today may help someone understand a family, a town, an industry, or a particular moment in time years from now. It may also be the case that a minor meeting or a seemingly inconsequential action may lead to a series of events that end up changing the world. We don’t always know.Regardless, schools can work with libraries, museums, and local historical societies to bring these accounts into the classroom and make them accessible to the broader public too. To help this country prosper and thrive, and to appreciate the nation’s blessings and many gifts, younger generations should know what people in their communities accomplished, including those who worked in the old factory they pass every day.When a child discovers that someone in their family or town helped build something, American history becomes a little less distant. There is a connection between the country they read about and the people they know. The American creed can sound pretty abstract until we look at what people have done with their freedom. The opportunity to pursue an idea, build a business, or make a life in a new town means something different when we know a person who did it. We should give children those examples when we talk about what America means.That matters as socialism finds a wider audience. The Democratic Socialists of America explicitly call for replacing capitalism, and before embracing calls to replace that system, Americans should know more about what people have accomplished within it. Apollo itself brought government and private industry together to do something extraordinary. We should be talking about what we actually value and all the great things Americans have done. Free enterprise and the freedom to pursue an idea have given people opportunities to build something and make a life of their own. If children hear mostly about a few billionaires, celebrities, and influencers, and neglect to learn about the everyday Americans who make up this nation’s fabric, history, and its economic engine, they miss much of that experience. There are people in their own families and communities whose stories can help them understand it.Younger Americans should admire exceptional people and have serious ambitions of their own. But if we teach achievement mostly through famous names, we give them a pretty narrow idea of what they can contribute. Children should know about the people who helped Grumman and Hickam succeed when thinking about their own lives.SOCIALISM REACHES ITS HIGHEST PUBLIC APPROVAL YET: POLLI want to be very careful here, too. A person does not have to help land an astronaut on the moon to belong in the American story. There are so many versions of the story, and they reach well beyond the famous and well-known. The teacher who spends a career in one school, the shop owner who serves a neighborhood and creates a gathering place, and the parent who raises a family and contributes to the many layers of civic life are all meaningful parts of the American experience and contribute to our nation’s greatness. The lives and particular stories of everyday Americans tell us something about how Americans work, what they value, and how communities endure. And we are all part of it, including people whose names never appear in a history book.The great man usually has a biographer and students studying him decades later, while the everyman may have a box of photographs and a few relatives or friends who remember what happened. Without written and preserved records, those memories can disappear with a generation, and that is tragic. With America’s 250th anniversary now behind us, we should deliberately leave our children a fuller record of the country and the people who made it. We have the technology to do it, and there are still people here to tell us what happened and how they helped build and shape America.