[Northkeep] History lessons
Marc Carlson
marccarlson20 at hotmail.com
Wed Apr 7 07:14:53 PDT 2004
>From: Kevinkeary at aol.com
>>I would submit that most modern Americans don't really have a clue who
>>Johnny Appleseed or Paul Bunyon were. They haven't done big screen
>> >>movies about either of them lately.
>Actually, my bet is that more people believed the -cherry- tree story in my
>father's generation than in mine or my children's,...
True - but they haven't done any movies about that incident either :)
>Paul Bunyan was a figure in Tall Tales with Pecos Bill and John Henry
>(Diarmaid didn't limit the discussion to -good- movies...), and Johnny
>Appleseed WAS a real figure from American History (John Chapman,
> 1775-1847), but like Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone, his legend exceeds
> his reality.
>Kevin
While you are correct that there was such a person, I (me, personally) tend
to differentiate between the guy who's feet were so tough a rattlesnake
couldn't bite him, and the historical person (although in his case,
admittedly the lines are really hard to trace). So I suppose yes, his
legend exceeded his reality :)
I'll be curious to see how the latest "Alamo" handles Crockett, although I
know a lot of people seem to be a bit unhappy at seeing him portrayed as
anything less than the legendary superhero [one curious note in modern
research of the Alamo has to do with whether he was killed fighting, or was
executed after the battle - as though there was something degrading about
being captured, when there are plenty of perfectly legitimate reasons for
being take prisoner that don't involve cowardace -- sorry, weird rant
topic].
Marc/Diarmaid
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