"When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."
Background:
This is a quote from the 1962 John Ford picture, "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" recently popularized by Robert Wuhl in the HBO Special "Assume the Position." It basically explains how certain stories came to be commonly accepted in popular culture, despite their, sometimes amazingly, loose connections with the truth.
Examples include "Columbus discovering the world was round" in 1492, the same year the Globe was invented, some 2000 years after scientists first theorized that the world was round. Also, at the beginning of the Revolutionary War, a young man from Boston rode a horse through Massachusetts and down to Philadelphia to warn people that the British were coming. His name? Israel Bissell. Paul Revere gets credit because of the poem written 40 years after his death.
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