Everyone knows the story. At least, a version of it.
Sitting cross-legged on matted classroom rugs, elementary school students each year are read the famous opening lines of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem: “Listen, my children, and you shall hear of the midnight ride of Paul Revere.”
They learn of the lone rider galloping through the moonlit suburbs of Boston, across cobblestones and dirt paths, on a misty April morning in 1775, risking his life to warn his fellow citizens of the British army’s impending attack. Revere, they hear, was the voice of alarm preparing the country for the first battles of America’s War for Independence.
The truth of the story is murkier. Revere was far from alone that evening. He was one man in a complex network of riders, lamplighters, farmers and minutemen whose actions, woven together, sparked a revolution.
Yet, Longfellow, at the dawn of the Civil War, wrote of Revere’s journey as a call to arms, a rallying cry aimed at stirring patriotic sentiment among Northerners and a reminder that action by a single individual can matter.
“He’s trying to tell the story of a man who does what’s right despite it all,” Greg Schofield, an interpreter at the Paul Revere House, said of Longfellow’s poem on a during an interview in October. “He sees in this ride of Paul Revere, in the actions of all of these people that day, a story of freedom and a story of change.”
As we mark the nation’s 250th anniversary, USA TODAY Network retraced Revere’s ride as part of a project aimed at revisiting journeys that have defined America, and the way we tell our country’s story.
The myth of Revere, the individual hero, the consummate voice of warning rising up against the odds, has become ingrained in the American zeitgeist, twisting its way through social movements, pop songs and marketing campaigns for more than a century.
