You know the usual suspects.

Kings. Emperors. Generals. Presidents. The occasional scientist who discovered something while sitting under a tree.

And then there are the people who did something absolutely extraordinary, changed the course of events, and somehow ended up as a footnote.

This week, we’re correcting the historical record.

Here are five people who should be much, much more famous.

Let’s begin with a simple question:

Who was the most successful pirate in history?

If you said Blackbeard, congratulations on having watched Pirates of the Caribbean.

The better answer is probably Ching Shih.

Born in China around 1775, Ching Shih began her adult life working in a floating brothel. In 1801, she married the pirate Cheng I, who commanded a powerful fleet operating in the South China Sea.

Then, in 1807, Cheng I died.

And Ching Shih took over.

Not just his ship.

His entire pirate confederation.

At its height, her Red Flag Fleet reportedly consisted of hundreds of vessels and tens of thousands of sailors. Estimates of its size reach roughly 1,800 ships and as many as 80,000–120,000 sailors.

That's not a pirate crew.

That's a navy.

And Ching Shih didn't run it like a collection of drunk men with parrots. She ran it with rules.

Her fleet operated under a detailed code governing everything from discipline to the treatment of captives. Loot was divided according to established procedures. Orders were enforced. And her organization proved capable of defeating forces sent against it by the Qing government and European powers.

Eventually, the Chinese government decided that perhaps the more sensible strategy was to stop trying to beat her.

In 1810, Ching Shih negotiated a surrender.

And here's the truly remarkable part:

She got to retire.

She kept much of her wealth, received a pardon, and eventually settled down in Guangdong.

She later ran a gambling house.

So the career trajectory was essentially:

prostitute → pirate queen → commander of a massive maritime empire → negotiated peace → successful retirement → gambling-house proprietor.

Honestly, Hollywood has been asleep at the wheel.

In the early twentieth century, astronomy had a problem.

Astronomers could see stars.

They could measure how bright they appeared.

But figuring out how far away those stars actually were was considerably harder.

Enter Henrietta Swan Leavitt.

Leavitt worked at Harvard College Observatory as one of the women known as “computers”, people hired to painstakingly examine astronomical photographs and catalogue stars.

It was repetitive work.

It was also incredibly important.

While studying a particular type of variable star called Cepheid variables, Leavitt discovered a relationship between how long these stars took to brighten and dim and their intrinsic brightness.

That relationship became known as the period-luminosity relation.

And it gave astronomers something enormously valuable:

A cosmic measuring stick.

If you knew how bright one of these stars really was, and you could measure how bright it appeared from Earth, you could estimate its distance.

That helped make it possible to determine distances far beyond the range of older astronomical methods.

Later astronomers used Leavitt's work to establish that the universe extended vastly farther than the Milky Way and to investigate the expansion of the universe itself.

Which means that a woman sitting at a desk studying photographic plates helped give humanity a way to measure the universe.

Leavitt died in 1921.

Her name is nowhere near as familiar as Einstein's, Hubble's, or even Galileo's.

Which is a little unfair.

Because sometimes the person who invents the measuring tape deserves as much credit as the person who measures the room.

In 1811, a teenage girl in Lyme Regis, England, found something extraordinary.

Her name was Mary Anning.

And the thing she found was the fossilized skeleton of an ichthyosaur, a marine reptile that had lived millions of years before humans existed.

Anning came from a poor family and made money searching the cliffs around Lyme Regis for fossils, which she sold to tourists and scientists.

This was not an easy profession.

The cliffs could collapse.

The weather could be brutal.

And the scientific establishment of nineteenth-century Britain was overwhelmingly male and dominated by wealthy gentlemen.

Anning nevertheless became exceptionally knowledgeable about fossils and geology.

She found important specimens, including an early complete plesiosaur skeleton, and her discoveries contributed to a growing realization that the Earth had once been inhabited by creatures radically different from anything alive today.

There was just one problem.

The scientific establishment wasn't particularly interested in giving her credit.

As a working-class woman, Anning was an outsider in a scientific world that generally excluded women from its institutions.

Men who purchased or studied fossils she discovered often received the scientific recognition for describing them.

Anning's contribution was therefore twofold.

She helped uncover the prehistoric world.

And she did it while being systematically excluded from much of the scientific world that benefited from her discoveries.

Today, paleontology is one of the most popular branches of science.

Dinosaurs are everywhere.

Children know what a T. rex is.

And somewhere in the background of that fascination is Mary Anning, walking along the English coast with a hammer, looking for pieces of a world that nobody yet fully understood.

She deserves considerably more than a mention in a museum caption.

You know Martin Luther King Jr.

You know Rosa Parks.

You may know John Lewis.

But there's a good chance you've heard considerably less about Bayard Rustin.

Which is strange, because Rustin was one of the great organizers and strategists of the American Civil Rights Movement.

He was an advocate of nonviolent resistance decades before the March on Washington, and he helped introduce and popularize ideas of nonviolent direct action within the American civil-rights movement.

He became an adviser to Martin Luther King Jr., helping King develop his understanding of nonviolent protest.

But Rustin's most famous achievement may have been the one that happened behind the scenes.

In 1963, he was one of the principal organizers of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

Think about what that meant.

Hundreds of thousands of people had to converge on Washington, D.C.

They needed transportation.

Food.

Bathrooms.

Security.

Speakers.

Sound equipment.

Schedules.

Marshals.

A program.

Coordination.

And, ideally, nobody getting trampled.

The famous photographs make the march look almost inevitable.

It wasn't.

Mass demonstrations on that scale don't simply happen. Someone has to make an enormous number of moving parts work simultaneously.

Rustin was one of those people.

So why isn't he as famous as King?

Partly because organizers rarely receive the same historical attention as the people standing at the microphone.

But there was another reason.

Rustin was openly gay at a time when homosexuality was heavily stigmatized and criminalized. His sexuality was used against him by political opponents and complicated his public role within the movement.

He spent much of his career being the man behind the man.

But history should probably remember him differently.

Not as a footnote to Martin Luther King Jr.

But as one of the people who helped make the movement work.

Let's end with someone who creates a particularly interesting historical problem.

Because Mary Seacole is sometimes described as “the forgotten Florence Nightingale.”

That's catchy.

But it's also a little misleading.

Seacole was born in Jamaica in 1805. Her mother ran a boarding house and was a healer, and Seacole developed extensive experience caring for the sick.

She travelled widely, treating patients during cholera outbreaks and building a career as a businesswoman and healer.

Then came the Crimean War.

Seacole wanted to join the British nursing effort.

She was turned down.

So she did what any reasonable person would do after being rejected by the official war effort:

She went anyway.

Using her own money, she travelled to Crimea and established the British Hotel near Balaclava.

Despite the name, this wasn't exactly the Victorian equivalent of a Holiday Inn.

It provided food, supplies, accommodation and medical assistance to soldiers near the front.

Seacole became well known among British soldiers, and after the war she returned to Britain with little money and serious financial problems.

Her autobiography, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands, became a bestseller and helped turn her into a celebrated figure.

And then something fascinating happened.

She was largely forgotten.

For decades, Florence Nightingale became the overwhelmingly dominant figure in popular memory of Crimean War nursing, while Seacole faded from the historical spotlight.

In recent decades, historians and campaigners have worked to restore her place in the story.

But there's an important lesson here.

We don't have to make Seacole into a replacement for Nightingale.

History isn't a football match.

There can be more than one hero.

Nightingale transformed nursing.

Seacole was a remarkable healer, entrepreneur and wartime caregiver whose story tells us something very different about the Crimean War, race, gender, class and the ways historical memory gets constructed.

Sometimes correcting history doesn't mean knocking one person off the pedestal.

It means realizing the pedestal was unnecessarily small.

That's the interesting question.

None of these people were simply “forgotten” by accident.

History tends to preserve certain kinds of people better than others.

Presidents leave official records.
Generals write memoirs.
Kings have portraits painted.
Scientists with institutional positions get their names on papers.

Meanwhile, the people doing the organizing, discovering, calculating, nursing, searching and negotiating can disappear into the background.

Women were excluded from many institutions.

Working-class people often lacked the means to publish their own accounts.

People of color frequently found their achievements filtered through institutions controlled by others.

And people who didn't fit the social expectations of their time could find themselves deliberately pushed out of the story.

Which brings us to one of my favorite things about history:

The past is much stranger “and much more crowded” than the version we were taught at school.

There are thousands of fascinating people standing just outside the frame.

Sometimes all it takes is asking:

“Wait. Who actually did that?”

Until next time,

Keep being historically curious.

And remember:

History isn't just about remembering the famous people.

It's also about asking why they became famous in the first place.