Blog #4: "Rethinking the Revolution" by John Ferling

 

Five things I learned after reading “Rethinking the Revolution” by John Ferling:

1. I learned while reading this article that the Civil War was known to some historians as the first modern war. This is because this war was the first war where cameras were available to take pictures and record events that happened in the war by the pictures that were taken which gave historians a much better look into this war than the previous ones. Although in Newspapers they still sketched out scenes from the battles to illustrate the paper.
2. Another reason why the Revolution is not as well remembered as the Civil war is because the all the army generals and every member of the revolutionary generation was gone from Congress so the important memories of the American Revolution were left to those who did not live through it to remember.
3. The civilian leaders of the American Revolution are much better remembered for the Revolution than the actual soldiers and generals that fought the battles which is opposite from the Civil War because the great war generals were greatly remembered for that war.
4. The Revolutionary War soldiers did not have as advanced weapons as those in the Civil War but the fighting styles were still very brutal because of this. The soldiers had to get so close to each other when they were fighting that sometimes the battles ended up in the soldiers having to resort to hand to hand combat as their weapon.
5. The conditions the American soldiers had to endure during the winter of the Revolutionary War, before the attack on Trenton, was so brutal that the soldiers had to resort to eating their shoes and melted candles along with bark and even dogs. The British barely ever had to face conditions as terrible as that.