Concord usually gets attention for its past. Even Louisa May Alcott worried that her town was “degenerating into a museum of revolutionary relics.” She, of course, belonged to an intellectual event that gave a second chapter to Concord’s celebrated history, but the Concordian of today is liable to feel that everything great belongs to the past.
Brands thinks we get important facts backwards in regard to the loyalists. As he points out, historical retrospect leads us to treat the decision for independence as the default for Americans in the 1770s, but in fact the opposite was true.