Paul Revere’s place in American history is firmly entrenched as the midnight rider alerting the countryside outside Boston of the advancing British troops aimed at capturing and destroying colonial militia supplies housed at Concord. His ride was the dramatic preface to the initial page of the Revolution, the battles of Lexington and Concord where the “shot heard round the world” was fired and the long road to independence had begun. Despite the prominence of the event, it may seem surprising to some that Revere’s name and his work as a messenger were almost absent from historian’s accounts decades after the war. When his story returned to American consciousness after Longfellow’s poem in 1861, it soon became a favorite national memory. One scholar even credits it with a unifying presence “The saga of the midnight ride is one of the many shared memories that make Americans one people.” (Fischer, 1994, p. xiii)