30 of the Most Wildly Overrated Historical Figures

God, there’s a lot of history. History, after all, is full of people, and all of them were doing stuff for their entire lives. It’s pretty much impossible to absorb all the information and full context for, well, the entirety of human existence. That means certain people or events obviously get overlooked. Other historical figures, however, benefit from the fact that there’s only so many pages in a history textbook. 

They might get to enjoy a long reign of unearned importance, just because we found their mummy first, or they had a great photographer, or they were European and white. Once you delve a little deeper into everything that’s ever happened, you realize they might not have been the centerpiece of that century, after all. 

Historians on Reddit were all too happy to volunteer their opinions on some of the most overrated people in history, and you can enjoy their historical badmouthing below.