A few years ago David Lefer, a high school and college history teacher in Brooklyn, was asked by a student for a good book on John Dickinson, an 18th-century American Revolutionary political figure who hailed from Philadelphia.
Lefer duly scoured the libraries and discovered a striking fact: although America's academic world is brimming with accounts of the Founding Fathers, there was almost nothing at all written on Dickinson. That struck Lefer as odd. Dickinson was important in that 18th-century independence movement, since he (in)famously penned the tracts known as Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, which eloquently defended the idea of liberty and freedom.
Indeed, that writing was so influential that during Dickinson's own lifetime he was considered “the most trusted man in America and second most famous American in the world, after Benjamin Franklin” and credited with “single-handedly rallying the colonies in the fight against British oppression”, as Lefer notes. And yet, by the 21st century, Dickinson's name had slipped out of view.