In the 1775 Revolutionary War battle on Breed's Hill, which most people call Bunker Hill, Dr. Joseph Warren, a colonial general fond of togas, fell dead with a British musketball in his head. There were no government provisions for his children back then, so a promising colonial officer vowed to see that they were provided for.

A gentleman to the marrow in his bones, our Benedict Arnold.

Kenneth Davis, author of the best-selling "Don't Know Much About" series, merrily removes the whitewash from an often-bland concept of the past, peeling people from their statues with tales of how some of the most famous Americans of whom you never heard shaped our nation.

The takeaway here is that history can be a lot of fun. And in "Hidden History" it is, although it's no fluff piece. It traces interesting patterns of how single events with not much to link them often evolved into greater ones. The stories here were never secret but most of them are, as the title suggests, forgotten.

More's the pity.

But like childbirth, Davis writes, the birth of the nation was messy, painful and sometimes tragic.

He describes America's infancy not as a love fest of Pilgrims and Indians, but as one of continued strife and bloodshed, often between groups murderously certain that the others' theology wasn't straight. At times, the religious persecution seems to have topped what the colonists fled England to avoid.

Long forgotten are the horrendous massacres of French settlers, many unarmed prisoners, by Spaniards in Florida in the 1500s on grounds that the French were infidel Lutherans (they weren't, but never mind). The French retaliated.

What the French probably were, Davis argues, is the real first pilgrims. The Mayflower batch didn't show up for decades.

King Philip's War in the 1700s killed thousands of colonists as well as Indians. It is largely forgotten, as are many upheavals like it.

It was triggered when three tribesmen were convicted and executed on flimsy evidence for the murder of one John Sassamon, a Harvard University-educated "praying Indian."

Was George Washington, the Father of our Country, a war criminal? Davis makes an interesting case.

In 1754, he was a young officer still in the service of the Crown in the Ohio Valley when he jumped the gun on the French-Indian War.

Washington apparently was persuaded by a cooperative Indian dubbed Half King that a small French encampment was an advance party for a French invasion.

Half King didn't like the French much, apparently believing they had boiled and eaten his father. Washington attacked, retreated, surrendered and was captured, gaining a formal "parole" from the French after promising not to fight for a year. That was on a July 4, a date yet to become famous.

In the letter of parole he signed, he confessed to murdering a French diplomat in the fray, then considered cause for war.

For the rest of his life, he swore he didn't understand what he had signed.