By Alec<\/a><\/span> <\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Before I was old enough to watch The Patriot<\/em>, I got my American pseudohistory fix from Liberty’s Kids<\/em>. It’s a PBS animated series that offers a 40-part narrative of the American Revolution aimed at a younger audience. I think I’m better for it, because if anything can get kids excited about history, it’s a rap-infused theme song by Aaron Carter, not Mel Gibson tossing hatchets.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

The show’s four main characters are all fictional, and all in their tweens \u2013 except of course for Moses, the requisite freed slave. Oh, and they all work for Ben Franklin at the Pennsylvania Gazette<\/em>. Duh.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Apart from these four, all of the characters are real historical figures, and the cast of voice actors on board is actually nothing short of amazing. You’ve got Walter Cronkite as Ben Franklin, Ben Stiller as Thomas Jefferson (yeah\u2026), Sylvester Stallone as Paul Revere (yeah!!!), Arnold Schwarzenegger as Baron von Steuben, Dustin Hoffman as Benedict Arnold, Liam Neeson as John Paul Jones, and Whoopi Goldberg as Deborah Sampson. Whew.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

In the first episode, titled (spoilers) \u201cThe Boston Tea Party\u201d, we’re first introduced to Sarah Phillips, a bright British girl en route to America to search for her father. The show spares no time in establishing the importance of communication and communication technology during the Revolution, as the opening scene depicts Sarah scribbling a letter to her father below the ship’s deck.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

In fact, the show (or at least this episode) does an impressive job showcasing various modes of communication in use at the time, as well as the groups that used them. The second scene of the pilot takes place at Ben Franklin’s printing press, where we meet Moses and James (another of the fictional four) as they print the latest issue of the Gazette<\/em>. After some expository banter, the two are interrupted by the final main character, a little French dude named Henri, who brings a letter from Ben Franklin that sends the three of them to to Boston to meet up with Sarah. The next<\/em> scene has Sam Adams rallying a group of colonists in a tavern with the aid of a drawing of the Boston Massacre, and copies of the Sugar and Stamp Acts. Another shows James interviewing Sarah for the newspaper, and later on we meet Phillis Wheatley (a historical figure: the first published African-American woman) who talks of the challenges of circulating her poetry as an enslaved black woman. And so on. Nearly every scene has at least one character either interacting with or talking about communication.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

For all its value, Liberty’s Kids<\/em>‘ effort to make communication technology such a pervasive part of the show does lead it into some historical inaccuracies that could be misleading to the show’s target audience. In reality, Ben Franklin probably didn’t write letters to twelve year olds, and said twelve year olds probably didn’t run the Pennsylvania <\/em>Gazette<\/em> or get to attend the Boston Tea Party. I know, it’s a cartoon, not a documentary \u2013 but as Agresto writes in his reflection on public understandings of the Boston Massacre, the \u201c’distortion’ and the enchantment of art may often penetrate to the essence of an event more keenly than either \u2018factual’ accounts or rational discourse.\u201d (174). This idea ties in nicely to Avery’s<\/a> blog post from last week, where she writes, \u201ctechnology is animated by us.\u201d I would expand on her point by offering that narratives<\/em> of technology (and more generally, narratives of history) are animated by the people we place at their centers \u2013 where The Patriot<\/em> has Mel at its focal point, this show has a bunch of meddling kids.<\/p>\n

Works Cited<\/p>\n

Agresto, John. \u2018Art And Historical Truth: The Boston Massacre’. J Communication<\/i> 29.4 (1979): 170-174. Web.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/p>\n

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By Alec Before I was old enough to watch The Patriot, I got my American pseudohistory fix from Liberty’s Kids. It’s a PBS animated series that offers a 40-part narrative of the American Revolution aimed at a younger audience. I think I’m better for it, because if anything can get kids excited about history, it’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1470","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-private","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1470","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1470"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1470\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1470"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1470"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1470"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}