Student Question
Why did Fischer write Paul Revere's Ride and did he achieve his goal?
Quick answer:
David Hackett Fischer's Paul Revere's Ride is an attempt to do two things. Fischer attempts to uncover the historical importance of Revere, a figure sometimes dismissed as essentially legendary. He also wants to make an argument for the role of historical narrative in explaining the reasons specific events developed as they did.
David Hackett Fischer notes that the story of Paul Revere is deeply imbedded in American popular culture and memory of the American Revolution. Despite that, his legendary ride has received very little scholarly attention, nor has his life itself. As he writes in his introduction, the purpose of Paul Revere's Ride is to examine the events surrounding the British march to Lexington and Concord, focusing in particular on the actions of Paul Revere and British General Thomas Gage, the two central actors in the crisis that emerged in Boston in the spring of 1775. On the one hand, Fischer's purpose is to situate Paul Revere in the events of his time, and in so doing, demonstrate how important he was to the outbreak of the War of the Revolution. This is a departure from previous historians who have tended to minimize Revere's significance. In addition to this, Fischer wants to...
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use Revere (and Gage) to reassert the importance of historical narrative. He claims that modern historians, more interested in "social structures, intellectual systems, and material processes," have ignored stories like Revere's. He observes that this focus on deep causes of events has obscured the contingency of the events themselves. His study of Paul Revere's ride and the events in Revolutionary-era Boston demonstrates how individual decisions and simple luck are important historical causes in their own right.
References
Why did Fischer write "Paul Revere's Ride," and did he achieve his goal?
In his historical narrative Paul Revere's Ride, David Hackett Fischer sets out to describe the role of Revere at the beginning of the American Revolution. Fischer attempts to place Revere squarely in the context of Boston in the years and days leading up to the Battle of Lexington and Concord. Revere is presented as more than just the nighttime messenger who sounded the alarm. Fischer shows Revere to have been an influential and well-connected man who knew how to work successfully behind the scenes. The author succeeds in this by describing Paul Revere as a much more dynamic person than he commonly is in many other histories. Fischer shows that Revere was at the center of many major events, even if he was not at the forefront. As such, the reader learns about his world and his influential place in it.
Another overarching goal of this book goes beyond simply describing the life of Paul Revere. Fischer portrays the New England revolutionaries in a different light than they are in the common historical narrative. When colonists stood up to the British regulars at Lexington and Concord, they were not trying to establish a new nation built on new liberal principles. They were not seeking to end monarchies and usher in a new age of liberty. Rather, they were fighting to restore the traditional freedoms that they had enjoyed as English subjects in North America for generations. They were concerned that these liberties were being eroded by recent oversteps by Parliament and the King. Fischer describes their motives as reactionary rather than progressive. He is successful in showing this through his in-depth description of New England society and values in the late eighteenth century.