Overlooked is a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.

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Imagine a barrel four and a half feet tall, about as big as an antique ice box — or, perhaps more to the point, a small coffin. It’s in a treacherous spot: bobbing and dunking in the Niagara River just above the cascading chaos of Niagara Falls.

Inside is a sexagenarian widow named Annie Edson Taylor, an underemployed charm school instructor who is about to add a new title, amateur daredevil, to her theretofore itinerant and largely unremarkable résumé.

Taylor, you see, is about to go over the falls.

In an era of Harry Houdini, Barnum & Bailey and other death-defying showmen, Taylor, who was about 62 years old, became front-page famous when, in a moment of unequivocal courage and questionable decision-making, she crawled into a white-oak barrel of her own design on a late October afternoon in 1901.

She fell nearly 160 feet, hurtling toward the caldron of rocks and raging water below, all in hope of landing in a far richer future.