Talk:John Newton (soldier)

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John Newton was an important enough national figure in the United States for the citizens of Georgia, Indiana, Missouri, and Texas to name counties after him, as well as towns of indeterminate number. I got 747 Google hits for the combination John Newton" and "Francis Marion", the American revolutionary war general that he served under.

Perhaps we need to find out more about this man. --Marcusscotus1 03:12, 24 October 2005 (UTC)

I've gathered up a little more.

Place names allow people long dead to vote on the importance of a person. Newton and Jasper were enlisted men in the Revolutionary War. Their names almost always occur as a pair of place names. A lot of people must have held them in high regard to have named so many places for them.

M dorothy 05:30, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] fiction vs. history

It's nice to find here more people who've noticed and been interested in the Jasper-Newton-Marion coincidence. I have done most of my searching on-line (as that's so easy now) but, over the years, I've never been able to find any better investigations, of the Parson Weems connection to fictionalizing the stories of these characters, than the half-a-century-old American Heritage article (although there must be plenty of still non-indexed material in general off-line.) And, yes, I've read the actual piece rather than just relying on the on-line version. Thanks for creating these pages in the first place. It's entertaining reading all the happy claims by people in Newtons totally oblivious to the real background. But then I've been told flat-out, by people running historical societies and historical museums, that 1) history is boring, while historical fiction is interesting, and 2) that truth & accuracy don't matter; colorful stories are all that's important. Yet I'm still in several (other) historical societies. IanHistor 18:57, 3 July 2006 (UTC)

Feel free to add details to the story, and please add the reference to the article you found.M dorothy 21:23, 3 July 2006 (UTC)

I added it as the footnote. I figured that was the way I should do it, from my looking over and trying to soak up the various systems on the various Tutorial, Help, etc pages. I should have added the American Heritage link as a separate reference, too? I'm just slowly absorbing how to do various things here on Wiki. IanHistor 23:27, 3 July 2006 (UTC)

This is a good place to start writing. This is a short article about soething that not many people are interested in. If part of the story is legend of doubtful truth, I think the legend would be itself would be of historical importance since this is what people believed back then, although it should be labled as legend.M dorothy 04:27, 4 July 2006 (UTC)

Yes. You don't see the article as it currently stands as doing that? I guess it could be fleshed out some more but all that I know about the matter would come from the one American Heritage article and the on-line Parson Weems book. Simply rewriting the American Heritage article doesn't seem right, and, as Wikipedia doesn't allow original, primary research or original interpretation/analysis, I don't see how much could be said about how so many American place names honor a legend rather than the facts behind the historical events, as interesting as the matter is. Do you see a way around this? This is a nice topic for some historical society but it doesn't seem, to me, to be what Wikipedia wants. No? IanHistor 04:09, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

So? It's a good place to start. Don't try to start out by re-writing the history of Lincoln. I got to this article after deciding that there ought to be an article about everybody with a county named after them. The hard ones had to do with the Northwest Indian War of the 1790's. There's a lot of work that needs done there.M dorothy 04:17, 5 July 2006 (UTC)