You could dedicate a ton of space to those that are underappreciated because of their gender. Lise Meitner, Emmy Noether, Ida B. Wells, Annie Besant...the list is huge, and probably larger than we will ever know.

There are plenty artists that suffer due to politics. Ezra Pound was hugely influential on the Modernist movement but has uncomfortable fascist associations.

Leni Riefenstahl's films have been cited as groundbreaking, and the Economist described her as "the greatest female filmmaker of the 20th century", but she was a Nazi Propogandist so it's not exactly common knowledge (though people studying film will probably come across her).

Nietzsche also suffers due to the Nazi's use of his philosophy (which involved editting it).

Turing is interesting because it's not only glossed over that he was gay, but that the British government treated him in a frankly abhorrent manner.

There are also larger historical events that are underplayed, or that we often don't see the whole picture with...My favourite being the relationship of the British welfare state and the overthrow of Mossadeq in Iran.

The British welfare state is often cited as a major success of the postwar government, with noble ideas like the NHS providing free treatment etc etc...What I certainly wasn't taught at school was where the money for this came from. The war of course was hugely expensive. At the time, Britain's largest foreign asset was the Anglo Iranian Oil Company. This had a historic concessionary basis, and was extremely profitable, partly due to the fact that the agreement was extremely generous compared to others in the region (Iran recieved less than 20% of the profits -- many concessions in the region were negotiated from positions of strength from the European powers, while the Iranian Shah's were often desperate for quick money and didn't care that much about if it was good for the country or not).

There was a lot of discontent in Iran about this agreement, and in 1951 the Iranian government attempted to nationalise the oil. Britain, trying to protect its interests, opposed this, and (along with the Americans and segments of the Iranian populace) helped to orchestrate a coup to overthrow the government and bring in the Shah as a dictator. It's always struck me as incredibly ironic that the British welfare state -- a noble endeavour started by a government with equality in mind, and more, a labour government that was very keen on nationalising British assets -- was funded by fervently denying Iran its attempts to nationalise its own resources, which in turn meant keeping the living standards of many Iranians low (one grievance contributing to the drive for nationalisation being the low wages and awful conditions for Iranian oil workers). As an interesting side note, the Anglo Iranian Oil Company was renamed British Petroleum in 1954.

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