Everyday heroes and heroines—ordinary men, women, and children who are honored for actual or imagined feats—have received only scant attention in heroism scholarship. While scholars have devoted thousands of pages to war heroes, heroic leaders, and superheroes, as well as to the blurring distinctions between heroes and celebrities, they have said little about the meaning and impact of ordinary citizens’ heroism. This collection of essays seeks to fill that void. Comparing the United States, Germany, and Britain from a multidisciplinary perspective, Extraordinary Ordinariness asks both when this particular hero type first emerged and how it was discussed and depicted in political discourse, mass media, literature, film, and other forms of popular culture. Looking across fields of study, countries, and centuries, this book sheds new light on the many social, cultural, and political functions that our everyday heroes have served.

Simon Wendt is assistant professor of American studies at Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, Germany. He is the author of The Spirit and the Shotgun: Armed Resistance and the Struggle for Civil Rights and coeditor of a number of books, including Globalizing Lynching History: Vigilantism and Extralegal Punishment from an International Perspective and Masculinities and the Nation in the Modern World: Between Hegemony and Marginalization.