Welcome to the American Story. Stories about what it is that makes America beautiful.

Heartbreaking, funny, inspiring, and endlessly interesting.

This is Chris Flannery with the Claremont Institute.

I call this one Paul Revere's Ride.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was the most popular poet in American history.

When Longfellow wrote, few Americans remained who had a living memory of the American Revolution.

With his poem Paul Revere's ride, he succeeded in preserving part of that heroic American

memory in verse for many generations to come, the way Homer did for ancient

Greeks, or Shakespeare for Englishmen in more recent times.

But it wasn't just for future generations that Longfellow wrote.

His own generation faced the coming of the country's great crisis, the Civil War.

All his readers would have heard in this poem,

the appeal to the courage and spirit of the revolution,

which America always calls on when a crisis comes.

Millions of Americans still know lines of the poem by heart.

It does us good to know them.

Let us pass them on to our children and grandchildren.

Here is Paul Revere's ride.

Listen, my children, and you shall hear of the midnight ride of Paul Revere on the 18th of April in 75.

Hardly a man is now alive who remembers that famous day and year.

He said to his friend,

if the British march by land or sea from the town to night,

...