Rodney

There are a lot of colorful characters in American history who were important in their time but aren't well remembered now.

If you were going to write a book called "Heroic Nerds of American History," one of your main characters would be a guy named Henry Knox. He ran a bookstore in Boston before the revolutionary war, and he was a military buff. He liked to chat up British officers and talk about earthworks and fortifications; they were his hobby. He was over six feet tall and well over 300 pounds. If he were around today, he'd be a serious gamer.

And when George Washington needed somebody to lay out earthworks for the revolutionary army in and around Boston, Knox was his man. He did the job. He was happy as a pig in shit. Moreover, he sealed the defeat of the British in Bostom by bringing captured British artillery from 300 miles away down nonexistent roads and frozen rivers in the dead of winter and surrounding Boston with them. The British left without a fight. The story of his retrieval of the guns is great; it reads like an adventure novel. They named Fort Knox after him. He was one of Washington's best pals, loved to eat, and died at a relatively early age from choking on a chicken bone. Definitely biography material.

The other interesting dude from Revolutionary War times was a guy named Baron Von Steuben. He wasn't really a baron, he was a down-and-out Prussian drillmaster. But some people thought that the American army wasn't disciplined enough to win against the British, and they brough this guy over (as a "baron," to give him more authority), to drill the army. And he did, through long winters at Valley Forge and elsewhere. His English was terrible, and sometimes he'd just lose it over the troop's incompetence and start raving at them in German. And they'd laugh, and he'd laugh with them. Anyway, he was a key figure in the American victory, apparently a great guy, and much beloved by those who remember him, who aren't many.