30 People Share What Historical Facts Many People Believe To Be True Are Actually 100% Fake
History is the study of the past, but as we all know, not everyone remembers stories the same way. Accounts aren’t always documented accurately, and over time, tales can be exaggerated or changed through word of mouth and desires to make them sound more exciting or palatable. Governments can tweak history to place their own nations on the “right side” of it, and readers are prone to believing everything that’s written in a history book.
Unfortunately, however, you can’t always trust the fun facts and stories you’ve been taught about the past. Sometimes, historical fallacies spread even more rapidly than the truth. One curious Reddit user started a conversation earlier this week about untrue parts of history that are widely considered to be facts, and many readers chimed in to dispel these rumors that you might have been taught as well.
Keep reading to also find an interview with Susan and Beckett, co-hosts of The History Chicks podcast, and be sure to upvote the responses that you would have appreciated hearing in history class. Then, if you’re interested in reading a Bored Panda article featuring fallacies that are widely believed, look no further than right here!
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The idea that Vikings (Early Medieval Norsemen) were dirty barbarians with shaggy hair and wild beards, who wore leathers and furs.
In reality, Vikings were notorious for being very clean by medieval standards (bathing every day and washing their hair). They wore shoulder length, very well combed hair, which they sometimes lightly bleached with potash to accentuate the blond. They wore short, very neat beards and carefully trimmed stache. Later on in the Viking Age, some wore undercut/crewcut kind of a trim, but with longer bangs.
Instead of leathers, which they almost NEVER wore, they had woolen clothes in bright colours; with blues and pinks being particularily popular. They almost never wore actual fur, they sold it all, and instead wore "fake fur" made of pulled wool (basically fur rug trims).
Instead of crusty savages, they were fabulous, clean and neatly fashionable, to the point that the Church chronicles of England note tht this excessive dandiness was dangerous in itself, because it helped them lead Christian women astray.
(Still of course, they were quite often murderers, slavers, thieves and raiders. Just FABULOUS ones.)
To learn more about some of the commonly spread historical myths, we reached out to two history buffs: Susan and Beckett, co-hosts of The History Chicks podcast, which shines a light on some of the most fascinating women in history. First, we wanted to hear what inspired these ladies to start The History Chicks and what they love most about studying history. "We launched the show in 2011 after Beckett realized there were not only no podcasts on a subject she wanted to learn about (Gilded Age Heiresses), but there were none about Women's History in general," the co-hosts told Bored Panda. "Uttering, 'How hard could it be?' she contacted Susan. 12 years later, we laugh because we knew the answer to her question was, 'Pretty darn hard, starting with a nearly vertical learning curve'."
"Our favorite part of studying history is discovering the interconnectivity of it all," Susan and Beckett shared. "That people in history aren't all that different from us, they just lived in different times and those times (and people) connect all the way through to modern-day in the most interesting ways."
The Lady who sued McDonalds didn't do so frivolously. She received third degree burns from how hot that coffee was, and needed a skin graft. It was quickly found that that location was keeping the coffee well above the temperature you can legally serve a hot drink in a cup at. The fact that most people think this suit was over the temperature of the coffee, and not the debilitating burns that woman recieved, is one of the PR worlds greatest triumphs. You are not immune to propaganda.
That when Europeans first arrived on the East Coast of what is now the US, the land was very sparsely populated and so there was a lot of free land to settle. (At least that's what I've been taught in school.)
In reality it turns out the coast was densely populated with Native settlements, to the point where Europeans couldn't even disembark because the Natives wouldn't allow them - they would keep them at the bay just to trade and then force them to turn back. It wasn't until European diseases spread through the continent that 95% of the indigenous population died, and that's when the first colonies began in the US, so that's why we now have the misconception of there always having been lots of open land.
In general there are tons of misconceptions about Native Americans and colonial history. I recommend the book 1491 by Charles C. Mann which clears up a lot of these misconceptions (it's where I got the above information from as well.)
Well the Vikings arrived in what we know call Canada around the year 1000. So "the europeans" were far behind.... Read about "Leif den lykkelige"
We also asked Susan and Beckett if they could share some of the most widely spread fallacies that they were taught or have heard. "For starters people who did Big Things, usually didn't do them alone," they noted. "Paul Revere, for example, wasn't the only one traveling with a message that night (and he didn't shout 'the British are coming' because people would have just thought he was coming from a pub since everyone in the Colonies was British.)"
"Sybil Ludington did a similar ride in Connecticut, truly alone, all on a horse, and remained uncaptured, and she was only a teenager at the time," Susan and Beckett told Bored Panda. "It's a way cooler story, but history often only remembers the people with the sizzle, or the louder mouths or, like in Paul's case, their names rhyme with enough words for Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to write a poem about him nearly 100 years after the fact."
The Irish famine wasn’t just a natural disaster - there was plenty of food in Ireland, it was just exported to Britain
Very true. Only the potato crop failed which also happened in many other countries, however it was the only crop the native Irish had access to, all more valuable crops were under the control of British landlords or their agents who continued to export.
That historically people, especially the 'peasant class' of medieval Europe, stank. This is born of two factoids: firstly that people very rarely if ever had baths, and secondly that people rarely if ever washed their clothes. Both are kind of true but misleading and with massive caveats.
First, bathing. Think of the amount of work involved in preparing a bath in the days before hot running water. You go to the well, get a bucket of water, lug it back across the village to your house, put it in a pan over the fire to heat it up. That's one bucket. You'd have to do that half a dozen times at least. Even if you've got servants to do all the actual work, it would take a lot of servants a lot of time to get you a bath ready. But that doesn't mean people didn't wash! Most people washed daily - using a basin of water and a cloth, basically a sponge bath. Soap made of animal fat and ash has been around for thousands of years and is pretty effective at lifting dirt off the skin. As any one of us who's had to sponge bathe for a while (e.g. After a surgery) will know, it may not be ideal, but it gets the job done. Films generally portray "peasant" with smudges of dirt all over the face but that's just lazy costuming.
And now the clothes. True, the outer layers - the layers that we see - were very rarely washed becausd most people only owned one set and they could be very difficult to wash effectively, but you have to remember people, even peasants, wore a *lot* of layers, so that the layer we see was really the equivalent of a coat, and was never really against the wearer's skin gathering sweat. How often do you wash your outer coat? For people in roles where external dirt was very likely to get onto the clothes, aprons and other easily removable garments were used. The layers worn right against the skin - a full dress-like smock for women and a long shirt for men (long enough to tuck around the genitals and butt and also do the job of underpants) - *were* changed and washed as often as possible, because they were the layers that got the body sweat etc on them. They were made more simply and usually of cheap, hardy fabrics specifically designed for easy laundering.
Tl;dr medieval peasant were not filthy and stinking. They washed their clothes and bodies as best they could.
THIS! There is a lot of imagery showing people in public baths, and washed undergarments drying on lines or spread out on the ground. We sometimes seem to think that people in earlier times didn't understand hygiene - it wouldn't stand up to today's standards, but people kept themselves and their clothes and homes clean.
"Sometimes embellished (or truly fake) stories are remembered because they are convenient or romantic, and telling them sweetly and simply allows people to accept the behavior," the co-hosts explained. "It makes the story less messy, and also, less true, like the story of Pocahontas. There was no romance with John Smith. He was a scoundrel, for starters, and she was a kid when their paths crossed. She also was later kidnapped by the British, forced to change her identity, ignore her Powhatan heritage, and marry a white man, but those facts are often omitted."
"Sometimes propaganda justifies mistreatment," Susan and Beckett pointed out. "By making someone sound of worse character than they actually were, it lets us think, 'They deserved what they had coming.' Dismissing them with a catchy, oft-repeated, and fabricated phrase like, 'Let them eat cake,' which Marie Antoinette never said, is very effective in reshaping history to fit a purpose."
Jesus being white
Well, Jesus existing at all is disputed. There are no contemporary accounts, and the only reference to his existence outside of the Bible is in a document -Flavius Josephus "Antiquities on the Jews"- dated a century later, but preserved only with IV, IX and XI century modifications, and the few words about Jesus are never referenced in any commentary before the XII century. Mind that in the decades around year 30 a lot of the most famous latin historians were alive, active and documenting even minor political events... but not a major kerfuffle in Galilee? The gospels have been proven to be written over nine decades after the "facts", and are contradictory so cannot be taken as a witnesses accounts. The geographical names are not accurate for the names used at the times, and the documents about Herod Antipas' reign make no mention of him.
A women's place has always been in the home.
For thousands of years women did basically whatever her husband did whether that be farming, baking, brewing alcohol, sewing clothes, or selling things in the market, sometimes the man would take the stuff to the market while the woman stayed on the farm to tend to the animals or crops and vise versa. The only professions women did not take part in were, law, politics, and military work, and even this was only kind of true as women influenced their husbands politics, and were expected to help during sieges (which happened a lot.)
The idea that a women's place is taking care of the house and not working is a 19th century idea that came about after the industrial revolution.
An even then you are only talking about certain cultures. That stereotype doesn't exist everywhere.
So why is it important to learn history accurately? "It's important so that we don't perpetuate half-truths, misconceptions, and downright lies," the History Chicks told Bored Panda. "To understand history, we have to see the whole story, not just the soundbites of history. If we just repeat an oversimplified version lacking perspective and context, we only think we know the whole story, but we're not even close. And here's a riddle: Can history repeat itself if the history we're repeating is wrong and incomplete?"
So many people completely misunderstond pre-industrial lifespans. The average age of death was 30 not because our bodies wore out faster, but because of how averages are calculated. A lot of people died as children. A much larger chunk of the population died in wars. If you got in an accident, healingb without modern medicine was difficult.
But for people who reached adulthood, and then avoided violence, injury, and plague, living to be 60 or 70 was pretty normal.
For people "who avoided violence inury or plague", so people who lived to 60 or 70 because other causes hadnt killed them.... that's the same in any society. It's the prevalence of violence injury or plague/illness that reduces the life expectancy. Life expectancy for a ten yr old in 1850s was about 55. Much less if you were a man, and a manual worker.
Einstein never failed math, the rumor started from Ripley’s Believe It Or Not and Einstein actually responded to them saying “I never failed in mathematics. Before I was 15 I had mastered differential and integral calculus.” He wasn’t very good at the non-science related classes though and did fail French.
And if you're looking to further your history studies and correct any false tales you've been taught, Susan and Beckett say that, "The greatest resource available to anyone is a library card. It gives you access to passionate advocates for knowledge (commonly known as 'librarians') and to apps like, Libby, which are packed with digital resources you can access from any place you have an internet connection."
"We think a great place to start learning history is small: with one person," the co-hosts shared. "Learn about that person, and you will understand their times, their limitations, their societal challenges, their geography... Their world. Learning about that world will always lead you to another."
If you'd like to learn stories about some of the world's most fascinating women (who you might have never even heard of!), be sure to check out Susan and Beckett's podcast The History Chicks right here.
General public not being aware that classical Greece and Rome had colored paints all over those statues, much less colored dyes in their clothes.
Edit: point being, we tend to believe that there was a *lot* of white in the Classical period, which isn't actually the case.
Surely all was in black and white before for TV was invented? Edit; Sorry before colour TV was invented.
The image of Roman gladiators fighting to the death. While there were many exhibition fights in the arenas where the goal was death, these were not gladiator contests. Prisoners, and the condemned, were thrown out to fight to the death, but not real gladiators.Training a gladiator was an expensive, and lengthy, investment and having them die constantly would be bad for business.
Having gladiators fight to the death was expensive, and their owners had to be compensated. It was generally for special occasions only.
Whatever the f**k is on the History Channel nowadays.
Paul Revere did not run around Massachusetts shouting "The British are coming" because if he did everyone would look at him like he'd lost his mind. ALMOST EVERYONE IN THE COLONIES WAS BRITISH!
He actually said, "The Regulars are coming"
Ninjas dressed in all black to stay stealthy in the night or something like that. Ninjas dressed like normal people to blend in, the all black look stemmed from Japanese theatre to make it more obvious to the audience who the ninjas were.
If they wore all black it'd be quite obvious and they'd stick out like a sore thumb
EDIT: most of you pointed out it also came from stagehands, that makes a lot of sense too
In Japanese theater many of the stagehands were, in fact, on stage during the action dressed in all black 'costumes'. They'd manipulate scenery and props, etc. People would very quickly learn to ignore them, and they became 'invisible'. When plays about ninjas came out and wanted to portray them as invisible, super human killers, they'd dress them basically as stage hands. They'd disappear from the audience's perception, and thus it would be very startling when they suddenly directly interacted with the play. The modern idea of the 'ninja' is the equivalent of thinking that James Bond is an accurate representation of British spies.
A stegosaurus fighting a t rex. They lived millions of years apart . Stegosaurus 144 lived million years ago T rex 65 million years ago.
Insane difference. Still almost most every dinosaur related media places them together.
Corsets were not typically tight laced. They were only tight laced by the highly fashionable women, and usually only for particular events or portraits. Corsets were designed to be comfortable. Women wore a cotton layer underneath the corset, so it didn't rub against the skin. The corset was more like a bra, bit instead of using the shoulders to support it used the whole torso. Some people claim they are much more comfortable than modern bras. The intense proportions of the past were achieved with Corsets AND padding. Tight lacing was uncommon, but layers of petticoats or hoops or bum rolls or whatever else at the time was very common to give women the trendy body shape at the time.
Bernadette Banner and Karolina Zebrowska (amongst others) have some entertaining videos on this point, where they debunk the myths around corset-wearing.
Lemmings just run off a cliff to their deaths every year... Thanks for that one, Disney!
There is a joke saying that Austria’s greatest success is making everyone believe that Mozart was Austrian and Hitler was German.
Historian from Austria here: Yes, Salzburg wasn't part of Austria (or what is now known as Austria). Salzburg was an independent territory, which means it wasn't part of Bavaria as well. And while he lived most of his live in "Austria", he always said he was a "Salzburger" (person from Salzburg). But, funfact: The joke is also told with Beethoven, who was born in what is now Germany. Beethoven lived - just like Mozart - in Vienna for a long time. Both died there, though only Beethoven's grave is still known. So one can argue, that they spent so many years there - did it really matter where they were born? TIL: Neither Beethoven or Mozart were born in Austria, but lived there for a very long time and died in Vienna.
That everything in Australia is trying to kill you.
Everything here CAN kill you, but most likely won’t because killing you is an awful lot of effort and aussies are generally just too laid back to put in that much effort.
Interesting. I mean, Steve Irwin professionally irritated crocodiles for many years and never got seriously bitten, so there's that. My only other source of information is Crocodile Dundee, and Mick and Sue got into quite a few wildlife-related scrapes, but neither died. In fact, they lived happily ever after. So based purely on that information, there seems to be little chance of you being killed and a pretty good chance of you meeting an attractive and witty life partner. So, book me a flight, I guess.
That the past was some idyllic wholesome time. Any nostalgia really. I grew up in the 80s and loved it. I have happy memories of my youth. And like many would love to go back to those days. But I also am very cognizant of how memory is vastly unreliable and inaccurate. And that we romanticize and cleanse our nostalgic recollections. And in many many cases, fabricate memories that never even occurred.
I was born in 1971 and I remember me being happy most of the time during my childhood. But - in retrospective my youth was full terrible things. Terrorism, the Chernobyl desaster, air-pollution, acid rain, the cold war, my homeland (Germany) still seperated ... and the list goes on.
“Under God” was not in the original version of the [Pledge of Allegiance.](https://www.ushistory.org/documents/pledge.htm). The Pledge was written in 1892. It wasn’t until 1954 that President Eisenhower added “under God” in response to fear of communism during WW2. Also - when first implemented, during the pledge people raised their right arm forward so the hand was level with their eyes (directed at the flag) however this was changed during WW2 because it resembled the Nazi salute. The procedure was changed to place the right hand over the heart.
Ok, I am not a US citizen, but still... isn't it time to throw out this 'under God'?
Carrots are good for eye health, but won't improve your eyesight. Nevertheless, people have been telling me all my life I should eat carrots to see better. The reason people think that is during WW2 the Royal Air Force had this new Radar system and they didn't want the Germans to know about it, so they spread the rumor that the reason their pilots could find their planes so fast was that they ate carrots.
This is similar to how for decades people thought spinach contained a massive amount of iron (which led to Popeye), because someone misplaced a decimal point in the 1930’s.
Not sure if quite at the level you're asking for, but it seems to be common knowledge that people didn't fight back against Germans in WW2 and it's because they didn't have guns or were cowards.
They fought back a lot. The largest was likely https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_Uprising. It just turns out that normal people fighting against a military tend to do poorly.
Almost everything about the medieval times. Our image of it is highly influenced by Hollywood.
Pretty much most of the common public image of the "stone age".
Paleolithic peoples didn't primarily live in caves. They were used for habitation sometimes, but tents or even relatively permanent huts were probably far more common. "Art caves" like those found in France and Spain often show no signs of habitation at all.
They weren't stupid, brutish "ape people". Anatomically modern humans emerged at least ~~70-100k~~ 200k years ago (thanks to several comments who pointed out my mistake) and there's nothing to suggest they would have been intellectually inferior to us. Even Neanderthals probably were relatively close to us and it's questionable if you'd even realize it wasn't a Homo sapiens if you met one. H. sapeins *definitely* and Neanderthals probably wore ornaments of various kinds. *Even* H. erectus likely was broadly human in appearance and behaviour. You have to go back in time a *long* way before you'd consider early hominids more animal than human.
Generally, even imagining "*the* Stone Age" as some sort of coherent period of human history is misleading. It's a periodisation based on materials used. Even though there is sometimes a remarkable cultural uniformity over long periods of time and large distances in Stone Age Europe, even single "cultures" span many thousands of years. World views and even life styles must have changed many times even during periods we now consider "uniform".
In fact, even the name "Stone Age" is misleading. A lot of tools were made from flint or similar material, if available, but that's just the material that preserves the best. Wood, bone, clay, plant fibres, furs, etc. were also used, they just usually didn't survive long enough for us to find. It's likely that South East Asian pre-metallic cultures even used bamboo in a similar way flint and bone was used in Europe.
When I was watching "Walking With Beasts" and humans showed up in one of the last episodes, I actually cheered. The episode showed our ancestors living in tents propped up by mammoth tusks and using good old human cunning and team-work to hunt, and the final shot of the final episode is modern day humans looking at mammoth skeletons in a museum. I actually felt some honest to goodness species pride and said to my pet rat who was snuggling with me in front of the screen, "Look that's my ancestors! We've come a long way, baby."
That George Washington had wooden teeth. He had false teeth, yes. But they were made of ivory. He never had wooden teeth.
Wooden teeth were a thing, but never super popular worldwide. Other people’s teeth - well, when the demand for that starting growing (after sugar became a common ingredient) it just brought out the best in humanity again /s
"Romans indulged in food so much they had a special place to go and vomit so they could eat more"
Maybe that has been dispelled by now but many still believe it.
It comes from a misunderstanding of the meaning of the word 'vomitorium' which was a sort of exit passage. I was taught it was for throwing up in.
Note: this post originally had 54 images. It’s been shortened to the top 30 images based on user votes.
Me too! I especially like running a fact check on them, since most of the posters didn't provide references.
Load More Replies... I have a fact that most ppl get wrong! In Denmark during the occupation by Germany (2ww) people thought it was illegal to listen to English radio and they thought it was something the Germans had decided. But in reality it was never illegal. People still think it was illegal but it wasn't. I know for a fact that historians who have done their research perfectly well and write in their books that the Germans didn't care if Danes listened to English radio, these historians are sometimes threatened because people hold on to this idea about how the Germans liked to censor us. There are other things about 2ww that is still a bit risky for historians to write in their books and say in their talks about the occupation of Denmark.
Me too! I especially like running a fact check on them, since most of the posters didn't provide references.
Load More Replies... I have a fact that most ppl get wrong! In Denmark during the occupation by Germany (2ww) people thought it was illegal to listen to English radio and they thought it was something the Germans had decided. But in reality it was never illegal. People still think it was illegal but it wasn't. I know for a fact that historians who have done their research perfectly well and write in their books that the Germans didn't care if Danes listened to English radio, these historians are sometimes threatened because people hold on to this idea about how the Germans liked to censor us. There are other things about 2ww that is still a bit risky for historians to write in their books and say in their talks about the occupation of Denmark.
