LAD#4: Revolution Article

Five things I learned from reading "Rethinking the Revolution":

• The author is shockingly correct; personally I never really thought about the Revolutionary War as incredibly bloody or violent. I didn't think that it wasn't, but I just never thought about it that way. Instead I think about it as an almost glorious (for lack of a better word) revolution that brought the United States into existence.
• The Revolution was America's longest declared war - eight years - and 1 in 4 Continental Army soldiers died, compared with 1 in 5 during the Civil War and 1 in 40 in WWII.
• Images shape the way we remember history; a lot of Revolutionary images are very Romantic in style, and don't actually show much battle, merely the supposed honor and dignity in it. Whereas in the Civil War, when photographs were first being taken, obviously more realistic and thus gruesome images were captured.
• With a few exceptions, we tend to remember military leaders from the Civil War [Robert E Lee, Ulysses S Grant, Stonewall Jackson etc.] and civil leaders from the Revolutionary War [Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson etc.].
• The reason the Revolutionary War it self isn't remembered as such a horrible conflict was because it was overshadowed by other things; namely, it was sandwiched between the American Revolution and the Constitutional Convention. Also, six times as many people died in the Civil War, causing many to unintentionally downplay the seriousness of the Revolutionary War.