Reimagining Revolution: Later Lives of the Narrative of Joseph Plumb Martin in Children’s Literature

Abstract

Examining children’s versions of Joseph Plumb Martin’s 1830 memoir of his years as an adolescent Revolutionary War soldier— Yankee Doodle Boy (1964), A Young Patriot (1996), and The Diary of Joseph Plumb Martin (2001)—this essay shows how some excisions radically change the text’s activist goals to preserve national mythology.