Photo#1: American Revolution Photo#2: Civil War
- People's opinions and memories of the past are shaped by many factors (such as speeches, monuments, written descriptions etc) which do not always equate with the actual events, or may not give all of the events equal importance.
- Paintings from the revolutionary war never show any battles, they "sanitized" the war, whereas pictures from the civil war show bodies strewn everywhere.
- Most if not all speeches, and paintings about the civil war are centered around how horrific the battles were. Whereas those about the revolutionary war focus on the spirit and courage of the revolutionaries, not the casualties and violence.
- "Some 10 million people in the generation of 1914 died in what they fittingly called the Great War. But when 60 million died in the next war a generation later, the Great War not only was eclipsed by a greater war, but many forgot how terrible World War I, as it thereafter came to be known, had truly been. Something like that happened to the Revolutionary War. Six times as many perished in the Civil War as in the War of Independence-just as sixfold more died in World War II than in its predecessor-causing many, perhaps unconsciously, to downplay the magnitude of suffering in the revolutionary War." Since a war closely following it had greater casualties, people's memory assumed that the revolutionary war wasn't as bad as it seemed.
- Suffering during the American revolutionary war was over-the-top appalling (starvation, no clothes during freezing winters, wounded and left to die on the battlefield, murdered after surrender by the enemy etc).
Photo#3: Three Mile island was a partial nuclear meltdown in the United States on March 28,1979
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