Paul Revere -- Yet another thing we learned from Bill Bryson

In a previous post I made a remark about M. Gladwell's book Tipping point. In his book, Gladwell also writes about the inspiration that Paul Revere created by his night ride (warning about the colonial forces arriving and calling men on arms, presumably). In fact, the myth about Revere's ride was created by Longfellow in 1863, and his impact to the revolution was more or less unknown before Longfellow's semi-fictional account (Bryson: Made in America, p. 48).