PROCEEDINGS 



OF THE 



AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY 



HELD AT PHILADELPHIA 

 FOR PROMOTING USEFUL KNOWLEDGE 



Vol. LI April-June, 1912 No. 204 



THE LEGENDARY AND MYTH-MAKING PROCESS IN 

 HISTORIES OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION. 



By SYDNEY G. FISHER. 



(Read April iS, 1912.) 



Having taken the trouble some years ago to examine the great 

 mass of original evidence relating to the American Revolution, the 

 contemporary documents, pamphlets, letters, memoirs, diaries, the 

 debates in parliament and the evidence obtained by its committees, 

 I found that very little use of it had been made in writing our 

 standard histories, works like those of Bancroft, Hildreth, Fiske, 

 which have been the general guides and from which school books 

 and other compilations, as well as public orations are prepared. 



Others have made the same discovery and have been over- 

 whelmed with the same astonishment. About fifteen years ago Mr. 

 Charles Kendall Adams, astonished at what he found in the original 

 evidence, wrote an article on the subject published in the Atlantic 

 Monthly (Vol. 82, page 174), ridiculing the standard histories for 

 having abandoned the actualities and the original evidence. Our 

 whole conception of the Revolution, he said, would have to be al- 

 tered and the history of it rewritten. Within the last year or two 

 Mr. Charles Francis Adams has made the same discovery and in 

 his recent volume " Studies Military and Diplomatic " has attacked 

 the historians with even greater severity and rewritten in his usual 



PROG. AMER. PHIL. SOC. LU. 204 A, PRINTED M-AY 21, I9I2. 



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