The Lest We Forget Project

“I have been asking online learners to record and share their Lest We Forget presentations for twelve years… I need to see and hear them knowledgeably and responsibly discuss the American past as a capstone of their learning. I also want to empower them to share that new knowledge with the rest of the world…”

Select a controversial or lesser-known American figure from our era of study, then prepare and record a 5-6 minute YouTube presentation that explores that person’s life and reconsiders his or her historical legacy here in the 21st century…

Four topics will guide your research

  • your figure’s personal backstory and life circumstances

  • the decisions and events that catapulted your figure into the historical record 

  • the shortcomings that made your figure supremely human

  • your case for how we should continue to remember this figure in the 21st century 

“In assuming the role of the historian, your effort – available for all the world to see — will promote academic knowledge in an era in which historical understanding is not just dismissed, but is often criticized or outright rejected…”

Lest We Forget… U.S. History I (Prehistory - 1877)

Thinkers & Political Leaders: Samuel Adams, Edmund Randolph, John Jay, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Thomas Paine, Patrick Henry, George Clinton, James Madison, John C. Calhoun, Henry Clay, Jefferson Davis, John Brown, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Abraham Lincoln, Dorthea Dix

Battlefield Leaders: John Paul Jones, Stonewall Jackson, William Tecumseh Sherman, Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Marquis de Lafayette, Robert E. Lee

Native Leaders: Red Jacket, Neolin, King Philip, Tecumseh, Sacagawea, Black Hawk 

Outlaws: Wild Bill Hickok, Benedict Arnold, Aaron Burr, Boss Tweed, Deborah Sampson, Mary Ludwig Hays

Religious Leaders & Philosophers: Jonathan Edwards, Joseph Smith Jr., William Penn, Brigham Young, Roger Williams, Anne Hutchinson, Antoinette Louisa Brown, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson

Artists & Entertainers: Asher Brown Durand, George Catlin, John J. Audubon, Annie Oakley, Buffalo Bill Cody, Edward Bailey, Edgar Allen Poe, Louisa May Alcott, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Washington Irving, Mark Twain, Herman Melville (other suggestions welcome

Sample Student Projects

Frances La Jeau.
Susan B Anthony
Daniel Boone
Sacajawea
Joseph Smith
Peggy Shippin
Eliza Hamilton.
Chief Justice John Marshall
John Brown
General William T. Sherman

Lest We Forget… U.S. History II (1877 - Present)

Thinkers & Writers: Mary Ware Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, Milton Friedman, Noam Chomsky, Joseph Campbell, Stephen Hawking, Ayn Rand, bell hooks, Betty Friedan

Presidents & Candidates: Teddy Roosevelt, Barry Goldwater, Eugene V. Debs, William Jennings Bryan, JFK, Ross Perot, Ralph Nader, Geraldine Ferraro, Jimmy Carter

Politics: George Jackson, J. Edgar Hoover, Jimmy Hoffa, Malcolm X, Sen. Joseph McCarthy, Phyllis Schlafly, Carrie Nation, Huey P. Long, John Lewis, Laura Cornelius Kellogg, Tipper Gore, Monica Lewinsky, Rush Limbaugh

Sports: Pete Rose, Tommy Smith, Ty Cobb, Jim Brown, Yogi Bera, Walter Payton, Mike Tyson, Billie Jean King, Mia Hamm, Colin Kapernick, Ronda Rousey, Vince McMahon

Celebrity & Media: Orson Wells, William Randolph Hearst Sr., Jane Fonda, Bob Hope, Hattie McDaniel, Katherine Hepburn, Charles Lindbergh, Hunter S. Thompson, Oprah Winfrey

Science & Religion: Oral Roberts, L. Ron Hubbard, Henry Madison Morris, Margaret Sanger, Jonas Salk, Jane Roe (Norma McCorvey), Anthony Fauci

Artists & Entertainers: Gutzon Borglum, Toni Morrison, Richard Pryor, Aretha Franklin, Tupac Shakur, Cat Stevens, Sylvia Plath, Woody Guthrie, Buffalo Bill Cody, Jack Kerouac, Chuck Berry, Loretta Lynn, Bob Dylan, Lucille Ball, Madonna, Marshall Mathers, Frank Lloyd Wright, Andy Warhol, Keith Herring, David Lynch, Pamela Anderson, Kathryn Bigelow, Arnold Schwarzenegger

Helen Keller
Ceasar Chavez
Rose Wilder Lane
Virginia Agpar
John D. Rockefeller
Johny Cash
Gloria Richardson
Sylvia Plath
Grace Hopper
Oprah Winfrey




American icons memorialized in statue and monument, defaced and torn down since 2017

A statue of explorer Christopher Columbus was beheaded by protesters in Boston on June 10, 2020 and another statue dedicated to him in Richmond, Virginia was toppled by a crowd and thrown in a nearby lake.

The statue of conquistador Don Juan de Oñate’s foot was cut off in symbolic retribution 2017 in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

A statue of conquistador Juan Ponce de Leon on June 10, 2020 spray painted with a hammer and sickle and the BLM symbol in Miami, Florida.

The Saint Junípero Serra monument at his grave site was recently defaced at California's Carmel Mission.

The statue of English soldier Captain John Mason was removed from the intersection of Pequot Avenue and Clift Street in Mystic, Connecticut.

A statue of Diego de Vargas, a symbol of Spanish conquest and rule, is being considered for removal from a city park in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

A statue of American revolutionary soldier Colonel William Crawford outside of the Crawford County Courthouse in Ohio was decapitated in August 2017.

The statue dedicated to the Revolutionary War General and 1st U.S. President George Washington in Chicago’s Washington Park was found vandalized on June 14, 2020. The statue could be seen spray painted, and it had a white hood placed on its head. In Portland, a statue of Washington was toppled and set on fire on June 18, 2020. More Washington statues were defaced in Minneapolis, MN on Thanksgiving Day, 2020.

The memorial to famous Freemason Albert Pike was toppled by protestors in the summer of 2020.

The statue of anti-secessionist-turned Confederate General Williams Carter Wickham in Richmond, Virginia was toppled in the summer of 2020.

Greenough’s controversial monument The Rescue, which depicted frontiersman Daniel Boone fending off an Indian attack in front of the U.S. Capitol Building, was removed in 1958.

Sculptures in Baltimore and Annapolis of Chief Justice of the United States Roger B. Taney were officially removed in 2017.

The Francis Scott Key monument in Bolton Hill, Baltimore, was spray-painted with the phrase "Racist Anthem" and defaced with red paint in 2017.

A Thomas Jefferson statue at the University of Virginia (which he founded) was shrouded in black by student protesters in 2020 in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Their First View of the Pacific, depicting Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and Sacagawea reaching the west coast, was removed by City Council of Charlottesville, Virginia in 2020.

In 2016, the U.S. Treasury announced plans to replace the image of President Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill.

The city of Austin, Texas could be headed for a name change because of founder Stephen F. Austin's pro-slavery stance, according to (perhaps exaggerated) speculation in 2020.

Statues of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were planned to be erected in 2020 in New York’s Central Park. Critics argue the monuments "manage... to recapitulate the marginalization black women experienced during the suffrage movement” and those plans have been postponed.

Calhoun College at Yale was named for John C. Calhoun, a politician, thinker, and pro-slavery advocate who died in 1850, and was renamed in 2017.

A statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee was torn down by four protesters at the high school of the same name. Montgomery, AL, summer 2020.

A statue of the abolitionist Has Christian Heg was torn down on the UW-Madison campus after a night of protests in the summer of 2020.

In August, 2017, a bust of President Abraham Lincoln in Chicago was spray-painted black and later covered in tar and set on fire. The city of Boston and the University of Wisconsin-Madison are considering removing their monuments to Lincoln in the summer of 2020.

On June 10, 2020 a statue depicting former President of the Confederacy Jefferson Davis was torn down by protestors in Richmond, Virginia.

A statue of Confederate general Lawrence Sullivan Ross in College Station, Texas was vandalized on the evening of June 9. The statue had been spray painted with the word “racist.”

A statute of industrialist (and Confederate officer) Charles Linn was toppled June 2, 2020 in Birmingham, Alabama.

The unfinished Crazy Horse Memorial, a massive stone sculpture in the Black Hills depicting the Lakota Indian warrior, has been mired in controversy for decades in South Dakota. Nearby Mount Rushmore has also been a source of controversy.

Various Sam Houston monuments in and around Houston, Texas depicting Texas’ founding father were threatened online by demonstrators in 2020.

Activists claimed responsibility for vandalism of a Benjamin Franklin statue in front of the University of Pennsylvania’s College Hall in September, 2024, claiming it was a “symbol of imperial violence and colonialism.”