"Listen, My Children, and You Shall Hear"

"Meanwhile, historians have pointed out from the start that Longfellow’s poem is, as history, rotten. (Longfellow wouldn’t have cared. 'Nor let the Historian blame the Poet here, / If he perchance misdate the day or year.' ) Before Longfellow wrote his poem about how Revere rode from Boston, warning Massachusetts minutemen that the redcoats were coming, Revere wasn’t known for his ride (his obituary didn’t even mention it). Also, he never reached Concord, and he didn’t ride alone. Longfellow, in other words, got almost every detail of what happened that night wrong."

Jill Lepore in The American Scholar argues that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's 1861 poem "Paul Revere's Ride" was "less about liberty and Paul Revere, and more about slavery and John Brown."