Bartlett Community Partnership School
Most Americans think they know the facts about Paul Revere, Sam Adams and Thomas Jefferson. Everyone has heard of the "shot heard 'round the world." If you asked people to name the battle that ended the American Revolution, most would say Yorktown. Ray Raphael debunks everything you think you know about the Revolution in his book, Founding Myths, and gives us the reasons why what we think we know is actually wrong.
The Revolution truly began months before the battles, when ordinary colonists deposed the Crown-appointed rulers and set up their own town meeting governments. Molly Pitcher was not a real person, but a conglomeration of different women from different points in history. The courageous winter the colonial army spent in Valley Forge, was actually mild compared to other winters and the "corageous" soldiers spent the winter demanding food and shelter from their officers. These and other stories, many embellished or made up after the fact, are detailed in Raphael's book.
Half of Raphael's book deals with debunking certain myths and the other half details how and why the original stories became "mythified." Raphael writes, "The United States has a clearly defined founding, the work of a single generation." By this he means the US was conceived of and set up very quickly, unlike other nations which had hundreds or thousands of years to develop their identity. The United States, on the other hand, was developed so quickly that it needed to take ordinary stories and make them into "creation myths." That is, we needed to give ourselves a history. This is how we ended up with our Founding Myths.