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Originally Posted by Webstral
I think, too, that there is a popular mythology about the Revolution that tends to block out contravening information. Even intelligent people believe odd things, such as the idea that militias sprang into being in 1775 just in time for Lexington and Concord.
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I think this also gets worse the further in history the event was, for example the story of King Canute being so proud he thought he could command the waves is pretty common "knowledge". Whereas digging deeper, the rest of the story emerges of Canute rebuffing a belief that a King could command all within his domain including the seas, by the simple act of going down to the sea and proving that the waves did not obey him. Most people don't seem to want to do the extra research required to get at the real story.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Webstral
On a tangent, one of the things has always plagued me about my understanding of history is the number of people involved. There were perhaps 3 million people in the entirety of the American Colonies at the time of the American Revolution. On the scale of the individual, this is a lot of folks. On the scale of modern America, this is a rather small state. Iowa has about 3 million people. A small number of people had a huge impact on the future of a large nation.
Until the advent of the Internet, I struggled with the population issue regarding Greek and Roman history. How many Greeks are we talking about during the golden age of Athens? How many Romans were there during the various Punic Wars? The loss of 50,000 men on the battlefield meant something completely different to societies with 5 million people than the same loss would mean to us.
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And further to that, other factors such as travel times in that period are sometimes hard to grasp.
This really came home to me many years ago when I was describing to a friend in Europe that I would often travel 600km (approx 370 miles) from an outback town to the city, just to spend a weekend with mates. For them, that 600km was one and sometimes two other countries.
To me, those distances are nothing, a 5-6 hour trip by car but... if I had to do it on horse, it's about a week long trek.
This helped me to put some things into perspective particularly when they talk about moving armies around before the advent of steam vehicles let alone motor vehicles.
To me, this ably illustrates the need for a
well-trained militia to react to potential threats given that the regular army could be a half-week march away. Which is probably why the Minutemen are given such prominence. But, it does imply that such a militia
must have access to good training and be well disciplined if it is to act in a timely and effective manner, after all, it may be required to hold the line for several days to allow the main force to arrive.
However, it does appear that over the course of time, because this implication has not been overtly stated, most people have forgotten (or haven't bothered to read between the lines) this and now seem to think that a bunch of householders grabbed their guns and fought off an empire.