Book Descriptions
for Why Longfellow Lied by Jeff Lantos
From Cooperative Children's Book Center (CCBC)
An account of American history during the Revolution focuses on the eve of and battle at Lexington and Concord—the subject of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “Paul Revere’s Ride.” By deconstructing the poem to look at what was accurate and what was poetic license, the engaging narrative delivers a lot of information about history, as well as how it’s remembered and revised. Each chapter starts with a poem fragment, usually a stanza, and talks about the actual history of the events described in the poem: what Longfellow got right and what he got wrong. It quickly becomes clear that Longfellow took a great deal of poetic license with some facts, and he completely omitted others. The final chapter reveals that the poem was actually written in 1860, as the Civil War loomed, and it was clearly designed to stir patriotic fervor, even if it meant playing with the facts. It was intended to remind people of the hard fight that had gone into creating our union, and it served as an inspirational call to arms in the north after Fort Sumter. Lantos concludes by discussing the outcome of the Civil War, and the brief period of change before the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and Black Codes that sought to continue to oppress Black people in the aftermath of the war.
(Age 11 and older)
(Age 11 and older)
CCBC Choices 2022. © Cooperative Children's Book Center, Univ. of Wisconsin - Madison, 2022. Used with permission.
From the Publisher
Paul Revere's daring midnight ride made him an instant celebrity, right? Wrong! At first, no one in Boston even wanted to mention it. Jeff Lantos pulls apart Longfellow's famous poem "Paul Revere's Ride" to unravel how and why he twisted historical facts.
Do you know how historically inaccurate "Paul Revere's Ride" is? And do you know why? Author Jeff Lantos pulls apart Longfellow's poem, tells the real story about Paul Revere's historic ride, and sets the record right. Not only that, he lays out when and why Longfellow wrote his poem and explains how without it, many of us wouldn't know much about Revere at all. This is Steve Sheinkin for the younger set, complete with an American mystery and a look at two important moments in the history of our country.
A 2022 ILA Children's and Young Adults' Book Awards Honor recipient
Do you know how historically inaccurate "Paul Revere's Ride" is? And do you know why? Author Jeff Lantos pulls apart Longfellow's poem, tells the real story about Paul Revere's historic ride, and sets the record right. Not only that, he lays out when and why Longfellow wrote his poem and explains how without it, many of us wouldn't know much about Revere at all. This is Steve Sheinkin for the younger set, complete with an American mystery and a look at two important moments in the history of our country.
A 2022 ILA Children's and Young Adults' Book Awards Honor recipient
Publisher description retrieved from Google Books.
