Scott, Dumas, Sienkiewicz and Tolstoy understood that history was their friend but not their absolute master. And occasionally they played for the other team in non-fiction: one of Scott's later productions was a multi-volume biography of Napoleon Bonaparte.
Tangental to your main point, where I went to college, the James-Younger gang met their end (1876). They killed the college treasurer (a Union veteran) because he refused to open a bank safe. As you may know, the local farmers shot them up and the gang survivors fled. But it isn't common knowledge that they burned a dozen grain mills as they fled. Also I've heard that they picked one of the banks there to rob because a Union general was one of the owners. It seems like they were continuing the war, or maybe having revenge. Jesse and Frank James escaped but the others did not. When I was a student there, you could buy at the supermarket period photographs on postcards of their bullet-ridden corpses. Your main point is our human need for outlaws, symbols and story-carriers of resistance to the bureaucratic One State, and I agree. This can co-exist in fiction, song and myth, with a dislike of real criminals and murderers. There may be an inconsistency there but that's okay, an irritant can help the story, tell it all.
Scott, Dumas, Sienkiewicz and Tolstoy understood that history was their friend but not their absolute master. And occasionally they played for the other team in non-fiction: one of Scott's later productions was a multi-volume biography of Napoleon Bonaparte.
Tangental to your main point, where I went to college, the James-Younger gang met their end (1876). They killed the college treasurer (a Union veteran) because he refused to open a bank safe. As you may know, the local farmers shot them up and the gang survivors fled. But it isn't common knowledge that they burned a dozen grain mills as they fled. Also I've heard that they picked one of the banks there to rob because a Union general was one of the owners. It seems like they were continuing the war, or maybe having revenge. Jesse and Frank James escaped but the others did not. When I was a student there, you could buy at the supermarket period photographs on postcards of their bullet-ridden corpses. Your main point is our human need for outlaws, symbols and story-carriers of resistance to the bureaucratic One State, and I agree. This can co-exist in fiction, song and myth, with a dislike of real criminals and murderers. There may be an inconsistency there but that's okay, an irritant can help the story, tell it all.