Here is Where: Discovering America’s Great Forgotten History

By Andrew Carroll

This was my bedside book for the past couple of months because the chapters are brief and independent of each other. So in the evening I would read a chapter on some lost or forgotten piece of American history and sleep peacefully…most of the time.

The author takes us to places that most people drive by and don’t know about the significant historical events. He starts with President Lincoln’s son Robert Todd being saved by a man when a train nearly crushed him. Turns out the man that saved him was the brother to John Wilkes Booth. Holy crap! What are the odds of that??

Well that was just the beginning of this book. Stories included the man who created a number of vaccines that ultimately have saved millions of lives (you’ve never heard of him, neither did it), and several organizations that placed orphans and indigent children in rural towns scattered throughout the mid-west. Often immigrants children who didn’t really want to go.

There are stories about forgotten graves and much more. I enjoyed this book and a lesson in all the small (and sometimes not so small) historical facts get lost unless someone tells us the story.