Martin W. Sandler - Lost to Time

LOST TO TIME

UNFORGETTABLE STORIES
THAT HISTORY FORGOT

MARTIN W. SANDLER

STERLING and the distinctive Sterling logo are registered trademarks of Sterling Publishing Co., Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sandler, Martin W.

Lost to time : unforgettable stories that history forgot / Martin W. Sandler.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-1-4027-2958-4

1. HistoryMiscellanea. I. Title.

D10.S313 2010

904dc22

2009048992

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Published by Sterling Publishing Co., Inc.

387 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10016

2010 by Martin W. Sandler

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Please see picture credits on page 290 for image copyright information.

Manufactured in the United States of America

All rights reserved

Sterling ISBN 978-1-4027-2958-4

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FRONTISPIECE: THE GREAT CLOCK ABOVE the entrance to the rotunda of the Library of Congress Thomas Jefferson Building in Washington, D.C., was sculpted by John Flanagan in 1896. Above the clockface, Father Time strides forward, holding his scythe.

For Carol, who makes it all worthwhile.

T he only thing new in the world, Harry S. Truman said, is the history you dont know. Arctic historian Russell Potter has stated that history can only live if one recovers its strangeness, its singularity, even its shock. These two statements encapsulate much of what this book is all about. Its purpose is to inform, captivate, and surprise through stories that reveal and recover people, events, and developments that have been lost to history.

What is amazing is that all of the stories you are about to read are not only compelling and true, but also the furthest thing from trivia. They are important storiestales from throughout history (even prehistory) and from throughout the worldof unknown or little-known personalities, achievements, ingenuity, heroics, blunders, and outright disasters that changed the world and still resonate today.

Here you will find the story of a man who is likely the most famous person youve never heard of, a man who during his all-too-brief lifetime became Americas greatest hero, a man whose death elicited the greatest outpouring of grief the nation had ever witnessed, and a man whose extraordinary adventures in the Arctic signaled the beginning of the exploration of that region and led directly to historic discoveries. Here you also will encounter the forgotten story of a much earlier explorer, the man who accomplished nothing less than completing the worlds first great voyage of discovery. And here as well you will meet the ninth-century black slave who not only revolutionized the world of music, but who also transformed cuisine, fashion, and manners in ways that remain with us today.

Surprise is a key ingredient of this book, and you should be prepared to have several of your long-held historical notions challengedperhaps even disproved. Were the Wright brothers the first to achieve manned, powered flight? Did Paul Revere make the most important gallop during the American Revolution? Was the Titanic tragedy the greatest of all peacetime maritime disasters? Indeed, was the Chicago Fire of 1871 the greatest conflagration of its time or even of the very day on which it took place? Not according to what youll find within these pages.

There are other astounding but true stories here as well, including the largely unknown saga of one of the most unique rescues in world history; the story of the building of Americas first subway, totally in secret; the story of the sophisticated city of some thirty thousand people that flourished in the heart of what is now the United States some 350 years before Columbus; and the saga of one of World War IIs greatest military disasters, purposely kept hidden for more than thirty years by the government.

They are all remarkable stories, but even more extraordinary perhaps is that they have, for so long, been either lost or neglected. It is time for them to take their place in history.

LOST TO TIME

UNFORGETTABLE STORIES THAT HISTORY FORGOT

I n a world that is deeply troubled by religious antagonism and division, it is difficult to comprehend that there was a time in medieval Spain when Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived side by side in freedom and tolerance and together created a golden age of culture, commerce, music, and architecture that prefigured the Renaissance, separated Spain from the rest of Europe, and forever changed the West.

Of all the individuals responsible for bringing about this astounding multicultural civilization, none was more important than a Moorish liberated black slave known as Ziryab, a man about whom the seventeenth-century Arab historian Ahmad ibn Muhammad al-Makkari wrote, There never was, either before or after him, a man of his profession who was more generally beloved and admired. The accomplishments of this one man and his lasting influence on much of the world were so great as to be practically inconceivable, so much so that the twentieth-century French scholar Henry Terrasse was compelled to write that undoubtedly one person alone cannot change a society so deeply. But the man called Ziryab did. Perhaps even more remarkably, his name and what he accomplished have been lost to time.