20 Historical Misconceptions Everybody Still Has

Voltaire didn’t say that
20 Historical Misconceptions Everybody Still Has

We’ve tried. We really have. For more years than we want to think about, we’ve been correcting your historical misconceptions. Debunking the myths you were taught in history class. Cataloging only the most mind-blowing lies you still believe about history. Frankly, it’s been exhausting. We’re going gray over here explaining that Marie Antoinette didn’t go gray overnight.

Somehow, though, it hasn’t been enough. Despite all of our work, according to the historians of Reddit, there are still tons of falsehoods about history that tons of people still believe. And when user teol6 asked r/AskReddit, “Historians of Reddit, what commonly accepted historical inaccuracies drive you crazy?” they told us exactly which ones.

Motha_Effin_Kitty_Yo 11y ago That Napoleon was tiny. Не was actually above average height.
Hypersapien 11y ago The idea that Columbus was trying to prove that the Earth was round, or that anyone in that time period even believed that the Earth was flat.
gregtavian 11y ago that Paul Revere actually staged a midnight ride and was the only one who did so. Не actually went from lodge to lodge warning people then got his ass arrested. And then escaped later on in the night.
adityapstar 11y ago Albert Einstein did not fail mathematics in school, as is commonly believed. Upon being shown a column making this claim, Einstein said I never failed in mathematics... Before I was fifteen I had mastered differential and integral calculus.
chopp3r 11y ago That people in the Middle Ages used spices to mask the flavor of meat that had gone bad. If you could afford spices that were traded from far-off lands at great expense, you could well afford fresh meat.
molly356 . 11y ago Edited 11y ago That Rosa Parks just decided one day to not move from her seat on the bus because she was tired. She actually had years of training with the NAACP leading up to that action.
Kamikazekramer 11y ago My biggest pet peeve about historical inaccuracy is cowboys always appearing as white in popular media. While there were white cowboys, the majority were Hispanic, black, or Native American.
Echo_Blade . 11y ago Vomitoriums, contrary to popular belief, were not rooms that Romans went to to induce vomiting. The vomitorium is the covered opening part in an arena or teater that from which people pour out from. We still have these in modern stadiums.
Thoarxius 11y ago Unfortunately this is going to get burried but I'll write it down anyway. Croissants are not French. Everyone, including the French, associates them with France, but really the croissant is Austrian.
chazzy_cat 11y ago Probably the notion of the French loving to surrender. France has one of the most impressive military histories of any nation on Earth. Not to mention, the US would probably not even be a country if they didn't help us out big time in the revolutionary war.
GHookey 11y ago The common American myth that Jesse James was an American Robin Hood. Jesse James was a firery rebel who killed unarmed and innocent people who posed no threat to him and robbed southern as well northern banks and trains Jesse's murderer is frequently referred to as the coward Robert Ford. While Ford did shoot him while facing his back, Jesse James once shot an innocent man named John Sheets who was merely filling out a bank slip. Jesse James never gave any money back to people who needed it or really had any chilvarous qualities other than
EIGuapo50 11y ago That people lump The Founding Fathers together under one label, set of ideals or opinions. I hear it all the time. The men most responsible for the formation of this country had wildly different ideas about the size and scope of the federal government, power granted to an executive, the creation of a federal bank, the accumulation of debt, taxation, state powers, foreign policy, how to interpret the Constitution that they had just created, etc etc etc. From Hamilton to Patrick Henry to John Adams to James Madison, these guys were wildly varied in their political opinions.
mglongman 11y ago That australia was settled by criminals. Australia was populated by disenfranchised peasant farmers. They were kicked-off lands that they had been using for subsistence farming for hundreds of years during the feudal period, and then, when they no longer had any way to make a living, english legislators passed laws (called the poor laws) criminalizing poverty. This allowed them to ship all the farmers off to penal colonies and use them as free labor in the process of colonizing the australian continent. Australians love to act as though they are the spawn of hardened criminals from the
TheDhakkan 11y ago The most oft-cited Voltaire quotation is apocryphal. Не is incorrectly credited with writing, I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it. These were not his words, but rather those of Evelyn Beatrice Hall, written under the pseudonym S. G. Tallentyre in her 1906 biographical book The Friends of Voltaire. Hall intended to summarize in her own words Voltaire's attitude towards Claude Adrien Helvétius and his controversial book De l'esprit, but her first-person expression was mistaken for an actual quotation from Voltaire.
Die_Sonne 11y ago That there were 300 Spartans at Thermopalye. There was pretty much every other Greek city state there at the time, Sparta fielded one of the smallest armies there and reluctantly went to war because they initially wanted to stay behind on their little peninsula. Even after shit hit the fan and the rest of the Greeks retreated, there were still 700 Thespians and 400 Thebans as well as the 300 Spartans that fought to the last. What really rustles my jimmies about it is that the Spartans couldn't be seen retreating, they had to fight by the
kyosuifa . 11y ago That people who lived before modern medicine lived much shorter lives. When we say that the average life expectancy of an individual in say the year 1100 was 35, it does not mean that most people lived to around 35 and then suddenly died. It means that mainly due to high childhood mortality and death during childbirth rates, the average age of death was driven down. If you survived childhood and pregnancy, you had a fairly good chance to live well into your sixties or seventies. Of course, people died more often from diseases and malnutrition,
phantomganonftw . 11y ago There's a very prevalent myth about a famous speech given by John F. Kennedy in Berin. The story goes that his statement, Ich bin ein Berliner, translates to I am a jelly doughnut. While berliner is a word for a type of jelly-filled pastry, no one at the time thought that's what Kennedy meant. The general story is that Kennedy should have said Ich bin Berliner, rather than Ich bin ein Berliner. People claim that adding the indefinite article ein is the problem. While ein does give nuance to the statement, it didn't make anyone at
Freezinglce 11y ago The Vikings never wore horns on their helmets. The only reason we believe that is because of poems and tales of the Vikings saying they did so. We found remains of Vikings and non- horned helmets after the idea that they had horns on their helmets was popularized. Just think about it, aren't horns on a helmet a little impractical and inconvenient? You would never use them, and it would make a great handle for the enemy to drag your head to the floor.
jacquelinesarah 11y ago Edited 11y ago The ye in ye olde is actually abbreviated as an Early Modern English letter called thorn that was pronounced like th. So it's pronounced more like our the olde than anything else.
11y ago Edited 11y ago Pabst Blue Ribbon beer claims that it got the name by winning the blue ribbon for best beer at the World's Columbian Exposition, the Chicago World's Fair of 1893. There were no blue ribbons awarded at that fair.

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