REAL LIFE UNTOLD HISTORY Keep Looking Beyond the History Books

Remember the history class where a whole town got one sentence, and a whole group of people got none?

Real Life, Untold History is 51 true stories that got left out of the classroom. Teresa Lockhart, known to her grandchildren as GiGi, started sharing them online one post at a time. This book gives each story room to breathe: the people inside it, the record behind it, and what happened after.

Inside you'll find:

• Lost cities beneath the Midwest, like Cahokia, a city bigger in its day than many in Europe
• Black towns people built themselves, like Weeksville, Boley, Allensworth, and Idlewild
• Communities erased on purpose, like Greenwood in Tulsa, Rosewood, and Mill Creek Valley
• People who served anyway, like the Montford Point Marines, the Six Triple Eight, and the WASP
• The price of progress, from the Radium Girls to the Hawks Nest Tunnel to the Great Molasses Flood
• Vanishing places, like Times Beach, Centralia, Picher, and Glenrio
• People history skipped, like Mary Golda Ross, Hedy Lamarr, and Marie Van Brittan Brown
• Stories from beyond America's borders, including the Code of Hammurabi, Babylon, and the 1928 Banana Workers strike in Colombia

Some of these stories are hard. Some will make you proud, and some will make you angry. A few might make you want to get in the car and go see the place for yourself, so the book includes a "Where to See It Now" guide to the sites you can visit today.

Where a popular story turns out to be messier than the version most people tell, the book says so. When sources disagree, it tells you. Numbers nobody can confirm are labeled as estimates. These stories hold up better told straight.

Every chapter stands on its own. Start at the beginning, or open to whatever name catches your eye.