The tale of Paul Reveres Ride remains very much worth telling 250 years later

The iconic Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem, “Paul Revere’s Ride,” begins, “Listen, my children…”And, sure enough, we have long told our kids and ourselves of the cinematic events in April, 1775, when the famous silversmith warned the countryside of approaching British troops and the American Revolution kicked off in earnest. Like all legendary events, Paul Revere’s Ride and the Battles of Lexington and Concord have been encrusted with myth.It’s almost certainly not the case that Revere yelled, “The British are coming!” (we still considered ourselves British); Revere didn’t ride alone, and he didn’t even make it to Concord (the British briefly captured him); and the role of the celebrated Minutemen, the best of the militia units, tends to be exaggerated in the popular understanding (most of the colonial forces were regular militia).Such minutiae aside, that day 250 years ago, April 19, 1775, still deserves to be celebrated in prose and poetry, and is every bit as extraordinary as you might have learned when you were a child, before we decided we didn’t like our own history and heroes so much anymore. Hoping to maintain operational secrecy, the British sent a contingent out at night from Boston to capture reputed stores of weapons in Concord.They were immediately noticed — the “one if by sea, two if by land” lanterns in the Old North Church were a real thing — and the race was on. It is really one of the most dramatic episodes in American history: Paul Revere and others rushing to warn the countryside, and the British troops marching through the night, not briefed on their mission, hearing guns and bells sounding the alarm all around them. Lexington was on the way.

The militia mustered as a show of force, not seeking a fight.No one knows who fired “the shot heard around the world”; it may have been an inadvertent discharge.But the British then fired volleys and charged with bayonets, killing eight.Concord was now fully on al...