Is there a more lovely rendition of “America the Beautiful” than the Ray Charles version?  Most Americans don’t know that Katharine Lee Bates, known to her friends as Katie, wrote the poem that became the lyrics to that song.

Also unknown: Bates received an avalanche of grateful letters and requests for lyric reprints.

When she died in 1929, she’d made only $5 on the song.

Bates is one of the “unsung” Americans featured in Sharon McMahon’s new book, “The Small and the Mighty.”

A government and law teacher who became an Instagram sensation as she challenged false facts about history, McMahon writes in her introduction: “Sometimes we surprise ourselves in our capacity for greatness and sometimes the weight of regret wraps around us like a chain.”

McMahon confides in her Substack newsletter that she struggled with “threading the needle” of telling the truth about history and making it interesting.