Paul Revere's Ride

By: David Hackett Fischer

Narrated by: Paul Boehmer

Paul Revere's midnight ride looms as an almost mythical event in American history - yet it has been largely ignored by scholars and left to patriotic writers and debunkers. In Paul Revere's Ride, David Hackett Fischer fashions an exciting narrative that offers deep insight into the outbreak of revolution and the emergence of the American republic. Beginning in the years before the eruption of war, Fischer illuminates the figure of Paul Revere, a man far more complex than the simple artisan and messenger of tradition. When the alarm riders took to the streets, they did not cry, "The British are coming", for most of them still believed they were British. Within a day many began to think differently. For George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Thomas Paine, the news of Lexington was their revolutionary Rubicon.

Paul Revere's Ride returns Paul Revere to center stage in these critical events, capturing both the drama and the underlying developments in a triumphant return to narrative history at its finest.

©1994 David Hackett Fischer (P)2017 Tantor

Highly recommended!

It’s refreshing to have an analytical presentation without an obvious slant. I especially appreciated the presenting of others’ past works on the subject for review as to accuracy.

awesome

such a great depiction of those historic moments and how tyranny is fought so inspirational

Revere's ride and April 19 in context

I consumed this book in its Audible version which leads to my one quibble: the narrator tries to mimic the speech of Rever and his contemporaries. Not having been there, I can't say that I know what they sounded like, but Paul Boehmer's attempts to mimic the speech made me cringe. I have yet to find a narrator whose attempts to mimic speech patterns fails to make me wince.
But that one quibble aside, I enjoyed this book mightily. I read the book when it came out and still have it, so I was able to enjoy the maps and illustrations that Hackett had provided for the print version. (So but the print version and get the maps while missing the mimicry.) Hackett's early focus on Paul Revere and British general Thomas Gage illustrates the different mindsets of the two, and two cultures that are drifting farther and farther apart. Hackett takes the time to discuss the powder raids on Charleston, Portsmouth, and Salem, not to mention the fiasco of two British officers scouting Worcester while thinking they were incognito, By doing so, we can the raid on Concord as part of a patter of action by Gage, and reaction by the Massachusetts colonials.
The last two chapters were a delight for me as they showed the representation of paul Revere through time. This historiography relates how the myth of Paul Revere constantly changed to fit the politics and culture of the age that the myth was dpromoted (or debunked) in.Makes me wonder where Hackett's book will be placed in another fifty years. For now, its place is in my library.

Very good

Excellent if you wanna know the details of this man, you will get everything you want here

An excellent book

An excellent listen. Very thorough and well written. My only hang up, being from Massachusetts, was the way the narrator tried to pull off the Boston accent and mispronounced town names.