Word: lexingtons
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...that account does not make for a very good legend, so the town goes with the Lexington spin...
Even the military history of the battle is shrouded in uncertainty. Accounts vary as to whether British regulars or the Lexington farmers fired the first shot. In the Patriots Day reenactment, a person dressed as neither a British regular nor a Minuteman fires the first shot from outside the Green. This recreated version of history certainly does not portray the way the battle actually began, but it is considered better than taking sides with either of the plausible possibilities...
This defense of Lexington’s historical significance often results in clashes with nearby Concord, that other town that (falsely, from the Lexington view) claims the shot heard round the world. In 1824, Concord resident Samuel Hoar claimed in a speech that his town had made the first “forcible resistance” to the British, offending Lexington’s town pride and sparking the appointment of a committee to collect evidence on the battles of Lexington and Concord. The 40-page pamphlet that resulted from the committee not surprisingly documented Lexington’s noble...
Lexingtonians are politically invested in the town’s history; pride in its Revolutionary role has come to define Lexington, and thus the town must defend that version of history...
...Lexington looks back into the past to find an identity for the community in the present. But without being able to obtain a clear, objective or complete picture of the past, we cannot attempt to reconstruct an accurate representation of it. The reenactments and the restored historic houses are not as much a glimpse into a past as a statement about the present, and the self-congratulatory selective memory that defines the culture of contemporary Lexington...