This while he badgers old veterans in the local tavern seeking confirmation of his personal views. Unfortunately, the ends often justify the means when writing history and thus the truth does not always out. The subject of 19 April and the Concord Fight could fill a college course especially if fact and fiction were both examined. The three to five minute encounter at North Bridge has taken on epoch proportions equal to Thermopylae in Greek history and like so many historical events, has been expanded, twisted, dissected and revised, incorporating fact with fiction in telling the truth of it. The noble purpose of such storytelling has often been to meet the needs of a people and nation in defining themselves and all too often to support glory, worth and importance of self being for towns, citizens and places.
History often reflects the time in which it is written as opposed to the time in which it occurred.
A name may reflect causes, values, politics, propaganda or personal views. Truth lost to Congress. History and memory are indelibly linked and thus the science of the latter must be understood. Depositions or writings may be accomplished days, months or years after an event and thus tainted by age, willful forgetting or purposeful remembering, memory loss, values of the recollector or construction versus recalling. There exists private or individual memory of an event and public or social, community, national remembrance, all of which can differ.