Bayard Rustin’s life is the history of the civil rights movement. As a child, he learned from NAACP leader W.E.B. Du Bois. He studied with Gandhi and taught Martin Luther King Jr non-violent protest. He protested against Jim Crow and Japanese internment camps. However as a homosexual, he was viewed as a pervert by his enemies and liability by his allies and he never received the credit for his contributions. 

Ignaz Semmelweis, chief resident of the Vienna General Hospital in 1846, uncovered a causal link between lack of hygiene and disease almost 20 years before Louis Pasteur’s germ experiments. He was the first to require doctors to wash their hands leading to an instantaneous drop in staff infections. The medical community however rejected his theories. He was fired and later declared insane and committed. In the asylum he was beaten by guards and died of a staff infection. 

Vaudeville stars Daisy and Violet Hilton were born literally joined at the hip. Sold off by their birth mother and exploited by managers, Daisy and Violet had to fight to control their own act. At their height, they were nationally recognized. Their fame diminished as Vaudeville disappeared. By 1961, they were abandoned while on tour.

Joe Carstairs didn’t let anyone tell her what to do. Openly gay, a female ambulance driver, lover of Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo, owner and operator of an all female car service, known as the fastest woman on water for breaking boat speed records, Carstairs shattered stereotype yet now her breakthroughs have largely been forgotten.

In Hitler’s Germany, swing music was illegal. Yet recognizing its popularity, Goebbels recruited playboy and opportunist, Karl Schwedler to make covers of famous swing standards with Nazi propaganda for lyrics. The only person legally allowed to perform the popular music of the time, Schwedler became a national star. Obsessed with his fame, he performed in Berlin to the very end of the war only to disappear into obscurity afterward.