Redacted

Have you ever heard of the Homo Floresiensis people? Or World War Two's 'Operation Cowboy', where American soldiers teamed up with German SS units? Or the US government's plot to nuke the moon? When he discovered his own forgotten family member, a great uncle who died aged eighteen during the Battle of Passchendaele in 1917, Otto English began to question how society collectively chooses to memorialise some things over others. How was it possible that someone so close in time could have been erased from his family's memory when so many other stories had survived? And what does it tell us about all those other tales that time conspired to forget because they were awkward, or embarrassing or simply better forgotten? In Redacted, English takes readers through an entertaining and illuminating journey of the people, events and ideas that have been forgotten from history and excluded from our memories. From the deliberately erased history of Year Zero to the forgotten war of the English Armada; the unknown Chinese eunuch who invented paper to the forgotten moral panics of the twentieth century, English will ask why we remember some things and are encouraged to do so - whilst we forget so much else. Most of history is resigned to the edges of our collective minds, and the past is but a gigantic iceberg, submerged beneath the ocean waves, with only the tip of it visible to the naked eye. This book will shed light on what lies beneath.