An account of American history during the Revolution focuses on the eve of and battle at Lexington and Concord—the subject of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “Paul Revere’s Ride.” By deconstructing the poem to look at what was accurate and what was poetic license, the engaging narrative delivers a lot of information about history, as well as how it’s remembered and revised. Each chapter starts with a poem fragment, usually a stanza, and talks about the actual history of the events described in the poem: what Longfellow got right and what he got wrong. It quickly becomes clear that Longfellow took a great deal of poetic license with some facts, and he completely omitted others. The final chapter reveals that the poem was actually written in 1860, as the Civil War loomed, and it was clearly designed to stir patriotic fervor, even if it meant playing with the facts. It was intended to remind people of the hard fight that had gone into creating our union, and it served as an inspirational call to arms in the north after Fort Sumter. Lantos concludes by discussing the outcome of the Civil War, and the brief period of change before the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and Black Codes that sought to continue to oppress Black people in the aftermath of the war.
(Age 11 and older)