Video Killed the Radio Star

Lepore’s idea that words and wounds win wars has stuck with me since we first read her quote on the syllabus. I am intrigued by this idea of communication shaping war just as much as injuries shape a war. The number of dead or injured bodies, houses burned, and temples ransacked can be counted. It seems obvious that these things affect the outcome of a war but words are a little more abstract. How can they be quantified? And now that we are reading these reviews of Heimert’s work I am thinking once again about how words shape wars, but this time about the engagement of a war rather than the outcome.

It has been debated and will probably continue to be debated whether the emotional words of a preacher firing up his congregation several years earlier caused the thirteen colonies to rebel. Alan Heimert brought this idea to light and his goal was to determine not what was said but what was meant and he used language to do that and, according to Morgan, sometimes he would draw the conclusion that the author meant differently than what he said. Morgan refuted that stream of thinking by stating, “sometimes it requires more than assertion to establish that words…mean the opposite of what they seem to mean.” Regardless of how we interpret it, human communication – whether written or spoken or portrayed through rituals acts – is what war rallies around. Communication is how wars are started, it is how they end, but can it also be how they are avoided?

As communication becomes easier in our world of social media, video, and skype this can become an even more important question than it was to the revivalists and the patriots. 

Murrin creates a fictitious world where the Awakening did not happen but the Revolution still did. I would like to create a world where an “Awakening” happens, but no wars ever do. (Sorry, I know that ending was corny, but I had to throw it in there.)