Personalities. Characters. History. John C. Waugh, the author of the popular and award-winning The Class of 1846, presents forty of the most memorable and impactful individuals he has come across during his three decades of researching and writing about the American Civil War—or as he calls them, his “Unforgettables” in the aptly titled, Unforgettables: Winners, Losers, Strong Women, and Eccentric Men of the Civil War Era.

Waugh’s unique pen and spritely style bring to life a mix of the famous and the infamous, the little-known and the unremembered. He reintroduces us to Abraham Lincoln the writer, Jefferson Davis the losing president, and their fascinating and influential wives Mary and Varina. Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun, and Daniel Webster (“three for the ages”) are juxtaposed with Presidents Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan—four chief executives who failed to avert the coming war. Military personalities include U. S. Grant and Robert E. Lee with a nod toward their mentor, the nearly forgotten General Winfield Scott.

The author cast a wide net to include “the seekers of equality,” African Americans Sojourner Truth and Lincoln’s friend Frederick Douglass, a half dozen women like Maria Mayo, Kate Chase, and Anna Dickinson who helped shape our understanding of cultural issues, and influential media mavens Horace Greeley and Adam Gurowski.

Poet and political activist Muriel Rukeyser once wrote, “The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.” She was right. Had she elaborated, she might have added that these stories are driven by the passions of their characters and are what history is all about. “My hope,” explains the author in his Preface, “is that these sketches and word portraits rekindle that passion and hook a few non-believers on the undeniable drama that is history.