tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28102666.post9113374623335975743..comments2024-03-14T13:25:20.613-05:00Comments on Boston 1775: Making Meaning of Major PitcairnUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28102666.post-34442587844690719622009-05-21T00:13:48.737-05:002009-05-21T00:13:48.737-05:00Another thought: there are many references of how ...Another thought: there are many references of how dusty it was in the redoubt, not to mention of the gunsmoke...makes you wonder if they some would report they had to feel their way out of the redoubt, how they could clearly see that it was they who shot Pitcairn.Derek "A Staunch Whig" Beckhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16966961365623936407noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28102666.post-42955925862765935442009-05-20T16:45:25.806-05:002009-05-20T16:45:25.806-05:00Great thread and nice conclusion.Great thread and nice conclusion.Derek "A Staunch Whig" Beckhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16966961365623936407noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28102666.post-7693417405369496622009-02-17T11:01:00.000-05:002009-02-17T11:01:00.000-05:00Improved weaponry could indeed be a factor in how ...Improved weaponry could indeed be a factor in how people misremembered the war. <BR/><BR/>Another factor, I bet, is that in the early 1800s most New Englanders hadn’t seen war. (The War of 1812 was so unpopular in the region that a relatively small number of men participated.) Thus, fewer people remembered the chaos of a large battle, and it was easier to imagine that you could tell where all the bullets went.J. L. Bellhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15405157000473731801noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28102666.post-50678535341775092962009-02-17T10:54:00.000-05:002009-02-17T10:54:00.000-05:00While in no way denying that individual soldiers d...While in no way denying that individual soldiers did aim at particular people and did sometimes hit the people they aimed at during the 1770s, I wonder if some of the ways in which people conceived events like this by, say, the 1830s, were influenced by improvements in technology. It's much easier to imagine, in the 1830s, that a single rifleman could have reliably hit an individual target, that it would have been for an actual musketeer of the 1770s to have really done so. The "lone gunman" theory becomes (retrospectively) more plausible to people over time as guns improve.Robert J.https://www.blogger.com/profile/12937384579138400443noreply@blogger.com