Sharon McMahon was a high school government and law teacher. She still teaches government and law, only now her classroom is the world.
That may sound like hyperbole. It’s not.
Through her podcasts, Instagram feed and ubiquitous media appearances (like this one), she reaches millions. In our topsy-turvy and often divisive world of government, politics, and law, McMahon’s growing army of followers (many of whom regard themselves as “Governerds”) appreciate her even-handed gift for explaining how the founders intended our government and law to work.
When she became a teacher, she noted that some of the most interesting and consequential people from history weren’t highlighted in textbooks. So she features several of them in her debut book The Small and the Mighty: Twelve Unsung Americans Who Changed the Course of History, from the Founding to the Civil Rights Movement.
This book is an unusually enjoyable read. You’ll learn about Inez Milholland, a suffragette who rode a white horse down Pennsylvania Avenue to fight for women’s right to vote and who would eventually give her own life for the cause. You’ll learn about a group of World War I female telephone operators—known as the Hello Girls—who risked their lives to manage switchboards on the front lines. You’ll learn about Daniel Inouye, Hawaiian-born with Japanese ancestry, who survived the attack on Pearl Harbor and combat in World War II to become the only U.S. senator to receive both the Medal of Freedom and the Medal of Honor. And many more.
In her comfortable let’s-sit-down-and-have-a-chat style, McMahon introduces us to a cast of improbable champions who helped light America’s path to freedom and greatness. Maybe her book will inspire others to step up and contribute to the cause.
Judging by the media interviews we see, many everyday Americans seem to be woefully bereft of basic knowledge regarding our constitution, our national history, and how government works. What does McMahon see as the root causes of such illiteracy?
“There’s been a systematic dismantling of Social Studies and civic education over the past thirty years,” she says. “Every year, the federal government spends $50 per student on STEM education, and $.05 on civic education. Additionally, social norms have changed. We used to get our information by belonging to community organizations and social groups, reading the newspaper, or watching one 30-minute news broadcast per day. Now, most Americans get their news from social media. It can be an incredible tool, but it’s also a place where misinformation can quickly spread.”
With so many people operating with only superficial (and often incorrect) understanding of how government works, what impact does that have on the selection of our leaders?
“They can easily fall prey to false promises,” McMahon says. “In other words, when a leader that they like tells them they can achieve policy X, they don’t have enough knowledge of government to understand how it might be politically impossible, or in some cases, how it might be quite damaging to the important structures of government. People also take real world actions based on what leaders tell them, and those actions can have very serious consequences. The best inoculation against misinformation is the truth. If we know the truth, it is far more difficult for people to be led astray.”
McMahon has built an impressively engaged following with her Instagram account and podcast. What does she hope her followers are taking away with her content?
“I hope they know the importance of voting AND doing something else,” she says. “When they feel helpless about the state of the world, I hope they know that the best antidote to despair is action. That the weight of the world is not on their shoulders alone, but it is their job to do what they can, where they are, with the resources available to them. That engaging in civic life does not have to mean devoting your entire existence to canvassing or working for a politician, that the world is made better by the actions of both government AND individuals, and that many of the important things in the world have come about from ordinary people who just had the audacity to try.”
McMahon’s book focuses on the unsung heroes of America’s past. She explains why their stories are so often ignored in the telling of our history.
“In many cases, they are the people without money,” she says. “And the people with money are the people who are written about. They are often women and people of color, people who were denied access to education and the levers of power. They died without having written their autobiographies, and because they were not “seen” by the people who controlled who wrote history, they were either forgotten about or purposely excluded. But it is their stories that bring me hope. Their stories help us see how mighty the impact of a small life can be.”
To what does McMahon attribute the growing popularity of her approach to history and government?
“I hear from people every day that our traditional approach to learning history—memorizing dates and marking time by wars, studying only the dominant suns around which all other people revolve, hearing the same stories about the same five presidents over and over throughout their entire educational experience—is boring and unrelatable,” she says. “History seems two dimensional. My approach colorizes history, much like that moment in the Wizard of Oz when the picture changes from sepia to technicolor: suddenly history is alive, and we realize we are surrounded by a great crowd of witnesses, a community of ancestors who came before us and who made a way in the wilderness for us.”
In some quarters of our society, there seems to be an eagerness to vilify great—though humanly imperfect—historical figures who have long represented praiseworthy contributions to our nation’s success. What does McMahon think can be done to help people adopt a balanced view of our historical icons?
“It’s important that we tell the truth,” she says. “And that means the whole truth about a person. The feeling someone has when they realize they’ve been lied to is quite different from one where they were told the difficult truth to begin with. For example: we can admire Thomas Jefferson’s work on writing the Declaration of Independence while also acknowledging his role as an enslaver, and how the entire success of early America was built on the back of enslaved labor. It’s not an either/or. To study only someone’s success or failure is to deny them the fullness of their humanity. But it’s also unfair to remove them from the tapestry of American history by pulling their contributions from the picture.”
McMahon believes fair and balanced history education can play an important role in our nation’s future.
“We can’t build pride on a lie,” she says. “True patriotism, just like true love, comes from seeing who someone truly is: what makes them special and wonderful, but also where their flaws and foibles are. If we want to raise generations who care enough about America to work to improve it, we must tell the whole truth. What comes from lying is disillusionment and disengagement, and that is not a place from which healthy democracies grow.”
What does McMahon hope readers will know when they finish reading her book?
“I want them to know that being a great American isn’t dependent on fame or fortune. It doesn’t require your name to be recorded in the annals of history or to appear on a ballot,” she says. “The American experiment is full of ill-equipped people, people with the ‘wrong’ faces and the ‘wrong’ life circumstances, who just went for it. They just tried something no one had done before. They were willing to let other people watch them fail. They just did the next needed thing. I want my readers to know that America at her best is just. She is peaceful. She is good. And she is free. And it is us, the small and the mighty, who make America great.”