Invisible Giants: Fifty Americans Who Shaped the Nation But Missed the History Books.

• Author: Kellman, Steven G.

EDITED BY MARK C. CARNES OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 2002, 315 PAGES, $26.00

Despite this work's subtitle, it is not quite accurate to claim that the 50 Americans commemorated in Invisible Giants missed the history books, since all appear in at least one important one, American National Biography. An editor of that 25-volume opus, Mark C. Carnes, canvassed 50 writers, politicians, scholars, and other figures whose accomplishments might have earned them, too, a place in American National Biography, except that they are still alive. Carnes asked each to scan the 18,000 entries in the ANB and select one deceased American who is now unjustly neglected. The result is an alphabetical inventory of 50 "invisible giants," major agents of change who have fallen off the public radar screen.

Following a very brief introductory explanation by each selector, Invisible Giants reproduces the entry from the ANB. In effect a trailer for American National Biography, the book is likely to encourage readers to browse its copious arcane treasures in search of their own favorite forgotten personalities. Visible giants such as George Washington, Emily Dickinson, and Babe Ruth are, of course, all included in the massive reference book, but so, too, are thousands of others languishing in posthumous obscurity.

Intent on correcting our collective amnesia, Invisible Giants offers profiles of extraordinary, neglected people, including Oliver Evans, a prodigious and prophetic inventor; Henry Haupt, a formidable figure in the history of American engineering and railroading; and Charles Grandison Finney, the evangelist who, claims selector Edmund S. Morgan, "probably affected the daily lives of more Americans in the nineteenth century than any other single individual." About DuBose Heyward, lyricist of "Porgy and Bess," selector Stephen Sondheim laments: "His work is sung, but he is unsung."

However, Joseph Smith, Malcolm X, Bela Bartok, Rocky Marciano, Walter Lippmann, and James Agee are not exactly unknown, at least to those who know a little bit of history, and their selection for this project seems inappropriate. That of John Jay Chapman (according to selector Jacques...