Abstract:
It took one television movie to initiate this research on Benedict Arnold. However, it took four years of college history classes to come to a decision about why people "invent" certain versions of historical events and turn them into "facts". The A&E movie, A Question of Honor, served as the springboard for my research, and this paper offers a detailed exploration of why people choose to promote certain "truths" in the pursuit of patriotism and historical pride.This analysis was based on my interpretation of eighteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first century sources. I used the immediate eighteenth century reactions of Arnold's treason, as well as poems, plays, and novels by such authors as Benjamin Young Prime, William Dunlap, and Mason Locke Weems. Twentieth and twenty-first century children's books, biographies, and film have also been incorporated to get a more modern perspective on Arnold's treason. Included in the research are primary sources from such authors as biographers James Kirby Martin and William Sterne, as well as children's books by Clarence Lindsey Alderman and Ann Rinaldi. I have also relied on the works of Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, Margaret Jacobs, and Eric Hobsbawm in order to get the theory and method of how the American identity was created.Using these sources I have developed my own interpretation of how the American identity was created through Benedict Arnold's actions. There was a need for Americans to create a symbol that would show what it meant to be "un-American." Arnold provided the symbolism that the American people needed to educate others on what it means not only to be "un-American," but also what it meant to be "American," a symbolism that has lived on in years of representations.
