As part of PRI’s celebration of America’s 250th birthday, we are releasing a series of short videos to bring to life unsung heroes from California and across the country.  Their stories are different.  The argument they make is the same.  American greatness is not handed down from above.  It is built from the ground up, by people with the courage to act on what they believed.

The people we highlight below built, published, created and advocated within the institutions available to them and, when those institutions were inadequate, they built new ones.

In addition to the videos, we have also prepared a series of lesson plans for primarily high school teachers to bring these unsung heroes into classrooms.  We hope you fill find them useful in sharing the stories of the people whose stories deserve to be told, whose examples and legacies will make the next 250 years of American exceptionalism possible.