34 Times History Got Twisted And People Were Convinced To Believe False Facts, As Shared Online
Interview With Expert
People assume a lot of things. Always have. And while sometimes we get to feel very perceptive by getting things right, there are many occasions where we shoot right past the target.
Need some examples? Well, you’re in luck, because this Reddit thread comes with a whole list of popular historical myths that a lot of people claim to be true just because someone probably assumed it and spread the word around the town. Scroll down to learn all about them!
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That there was massive fraud in the 2020 election. When you lose 60 times in a row in federal court and fail to produce any evidence, it's time to hang it up.
The longer the right keeps up the whole stolen election lie and the more info that comes out with each new criminal and civil proceedings it's obvious why trump is so adamant about the "stolen" election. Him and his team did so much to cheat, lie, and steal the election and still lost that they believe that it had to be rigged. Instead of facing the obvious fact that people actually voted against trump instead of for Biden. It wouldn't have mattered who was on the democratic ballot in 2020 whoever it was was going to win. Because that's how horrible defendant trump ppl and his maga co-conspirators are.
No so much a single historical fact, but people tend to fall for fallacies of nature, and imply that we should go back to the way we did things “naturally”
But often times, this idea is extremely historically inaccurate. Many times, the way we did things “naturally” resulted in a lot of, you know. Death.
For example, “giving birth naturally.” Some people seem to think that before modern obstetrics, that we were all just a bunch of natural goddesses giving birth in the forest. But the reality was a lot more grotesque than that. If everyone gave birth the way we did in 1900, we would be seeing a lot more childbirth related death. We would also see a lot more women dealing with fistulas, and being ostracized
Same with vaccines. Letting “nature” take its course, killed us, sometimes at alarming rates (like with smallpox). Oh sure, they had natural immunity to a lot of things, just like we develop natural immunity to a lot of things - except some immunities are a lot safer to get naturally. You don’t just develop natural immunity to polio, you have to get polio and suffer the permanent *natural* consequences. But people have this idea that everyone used to walk around with better immune systems and they would drink elderberry
There’s a bunch of fake history facts circulating around us. We might not even know they’re not accurate as we’ve seen and heard them so many times it feels like they must be true.
Fortunately, some historians make it their mission to hunt these false claims down and debunk them for the whole world to see. One of these experts is Jo Hedwig Teeuwisse, who was glad to lend Bored Panda her expertise and answer some questions about this topic.
That ancient people thought the Earth was flat.
We have records from around 430BC where Greek philosophers spoke of the Earth being a sphere. In 240BC the Greek astronomer Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the Earth and was only about 2% out.
The Arabs found a more accurate version and calculated the length of an orbit (edit: fact checked myself sorry)
Never did Marie Antoinette say, "Let them eat cake" To be honest, history has demonized that poor child. She was married to a moron, she was in a foreign country, and she had no idea what she was doing.
Jo told us that she has been interested in history ever since she, as a little girl, first saw old photos of the street she lived on. The realization that there once were other people who lived where she did yet were surrounded by a quite different world ignited a spark of fascination in her.
Since then, she has spent much time learning and thinking about the past, leading her to work as a historical consultant for film, TV, museums, and similar places. But nowadays, Jo hunts for fake history facts and shares them with anyone interested online. She has a dedicated website and has recently released a very successful book featuring some of the most interesting fake history catches and their corrections.
There has never been a viking helmet found that had a horn attached to it.
There are horns on bronze age ceremonial helmets from Scandinavia, but that's thousands of years before the Vikings. 19th century opera gave us horned helmets.
I'm sick of curriculum materials teaching my fourth graders that the Spanish discovered Florida when they were looking for the Fountain of Youth. That lie was developed in the 1920s as a tourist gimmick. There's literally nothing in the historical record that supports it.
And if they had found the Fountain of Youth, Governor DeSantis would have had it banned.
Among all the funny fake history claims, like Vikings having horns on their helmets, Santa being created by Coca-Cola, and Napoleon shooting off the nose of the Sphinx, Jo finds it hard to pick a favorite one.
“The myths regarding the Middle Ages are the most rewarding for me to deal with because, to me, that era is so interesting, and it irks me that so many people still think it was a backward, ignorant time,” said the Fake History Hunter, adding that films and TV keep reinforcing these negative images.
Calling the American Civil War "the war of Northern Aggression"
B***h you literally shot first.
Edit: "I'm from the south and I've never heard this" the f**k you haven't!
Young Earth Creationism is NOT the historically believed position of the Early Christian Church or the Ancient Church. It's a fairly recent theological position initially proported by 7th Day Adventist, but quickly became popular with Fundamentalists due to backlash over evolution becoming mainstream.
Before that, most people saw the Creation narrative in Genesis as a narrative myth and was not meant to be read as scientific fact.
lol one of my wife's best friends believes that dinosaurs are fake and that humanity is only 2000 years old. She went to the same school as the rest of us and got good grades lol
When asked where these myths come from, the historian answered that they’re usually born in a few different ways. It may be a case of picking assumptions over research, wrong things being taught at school, and people wanting to believe something and looking for proof, a.k.a. confirmation bias.
Of course, there are also those people who simply spread misinformation on purpose for online popularity. “But usually, at the birth of fake history, you’ll find that ignorance and laziness are the parents of the myth,” said Jo.
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.
That the Pyramids were built by Jewish slaves. The Egyptians were good at record keeping and none of their records say anything about slaves being used for the construction of the Pyramids.
Beyond just the pyramids, there’s no evidence that there was ever a large population of Jews in Egypt, enslaved or otherwise. Coincidentally, I just watched a Nova rerun episode detailing the archaeological investigations into the construction of the Great Pyramid. Their conclusion was that much of the work was done during the flood season, by farmers and farm laborers who would otherwise have been idled by their workplaces being underwater. They were reasonably paid, well treated, and well fed. No evidence of slave quarters in the semi-temporary city where they lived.
While most of these claims are relatively harmless and only really annoy the historians trying to correct them, sometimes, false history can be as harmful as fake news. As an example, the historian used the case of Covid-19, which is something all of us are painfully familiar with. “Old photos of the 1918–1920 flu pandemic and even incorrect stories about the medieval Black Death were shared to get people to either wear a mask or refuse to wear one.”
The Fake History Hunter added that this type of misinformation can also be used for other unethical purposes, fueling hate against people who look, act, or think differently to make them appear inadequate and inferior.
The claim Mormons make that the Book of Mormon is a historical record of a group of ancient white Hebrew people who lived on the pre-Colombian American continent and were cursed with brown skin for disobeying God and those are the people who became the Native Americans. Yeah right…
Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, was a con man, a shyster, and just a terrible person in general. He made up the principles of Mormonism in order to get what he wanted.
That the American Civil War wasn't about slavery and was started by the Union.
Both of these are wildly wrong, but various groups hold to them like an emotional support blanket so they can rationalize their chosen side lost.
Just like with fake news, the best way to avoid falling for fake historical claims is to learn to think critically and fact-check things properly. “Learn how to stop believing articles with no sources or references, ask people more often to prove what they are saying, but also find out how you yourself can use search engines & archives properly to figure out the truth,” said Jo, adding that a good way to start is by checking out her book.
Einstein being a low-level student (his grades were average to top tier of the class, and he was pretty damn good academically)
There's a pretty simple explanation as to how this false fact came to be: Einstein was born in Germany and went to school there for a few years. Later, in his youth, he moved to switzerland. Germany and Switzerland have the same grading system, that goes from 1 to 6 with halfes and sometimes quarters. The thing is, the scales are inverted: In Switzerland 6 is the best grade and in Germany it's 1. So when he had ones or grades close to one, it would look like he failed math horribly in school, if you didn't know that he went to school in Germany.
Marilyn Monroe never said "...if you can't handle me at my worst, you don't deserve me at my best"
There is literally no documented proof she ever said that.
It's also not a good one. I'd rather say "If you can handle my worst, you also deserve my best." We all can't always be sunshine and rainbows, but if someone sticks with us through it all, they deserve that we also give our best for them <3
Most false historical and current-time claims spread online, and they do it fast. With fake news being all around us, it’s essential to know how to protect yourself from it properly. And for that reason, Arizona State University shares a few quick tips on improving ourselves in this field.
First off, pay attention to where your news comes from. Consider its background, who could benefit from this, and what the underlying source material is. If you’re getting your news from social media, it pays to find the original source and ensure its credibility.
The idea that medieval/early modern people (especially peasants) were filthy/had poor hygiene and never left their villages. Medieval people cleaned themselves and their clothes fairly regularly. They even cleaned their teeth by chewing split twigs. Also, it was fairly common even for peasants to travel to pilgrimage sites on holy days/periods.
Same goes for the idea that they were "old" at 30, and died by 40. The average lifespan, is calculated by adding up all of the ages of death, then dividing by the number of people. Yes, there was high infant mortality, but if they survived childhood, there was a good chance they'd reach their 60s or 70s.
Catherine the Great did not do that with a horse.
When you consider the moron (Petr III) she was married to, it doesn't surprise me that she had lovers, but the rumors about being hyper-sexed were started by people who couldn't handle a powerful woman ruler, because it upset their gravy train. Weak Emperors left all sorts of room for nobility graft.
Don’t limit yourself to the headlines for the actual reading, as those may often be misleading. At the same time, examine the sources from which the article takes its information and see how they’re included.
When it comes to news sources, loyalty is not something to care about. Instead, you should seek to get your news from a variety of sources to get the fullest picture and be able to confirm the information. And if you hear your friends and family share misinformation, don’t shy away from correcting them, too.
Well, for starters, the claim that Napoleon was short is just not backed by historical facts. The guy was average height for his time. It's like saying your 5'8" friend is a giant because he hangs out with a bunch of kindergartners.
One of the problems was the translation between French units, and UK units. 5'4" (French) is roughly 5'8" (English) or 1.72m, But the most significant part was propaganda - Napoleon was satirised as being short; it fitted the propaganda of his enemies to depict him as a silly little man with ideas above his station in life.
China does not own the South China Sea, no matter how badly it wants to believe it with its nine dash line.
In the end, there is a lot of misinformation out there. Whether it’s relatively harmless false historical claims or seriously ill-intended fake news, it’s wise to be vigilant and ensure that whatever information you’re getting is accurate. And this task is up to us because only we can choose what we believe in.
What did you think of this story? What are some historically unproven claims that you’d like to share? Type it all up in the comments below!
[Note, I am a Christian, however] The Nativity Story: there was no census, and even ancient texts don't mention it until it gets a nod in two of the gospels written decades after His death. Also a census of that scale back then would take *years and years* if there was one, due to the distances and logistics. The reason cited in the oldest texts was that Jesus needed to be born in David's City to be really the King of Kings, so a story was refined over centuries to get him to Bethlehem. Virgin Mary wasn't even "virgin" until about the 6th Century CE (Constantinople). Obviously the bible has a *slew* of historical issues, but it's Christmas time. Merry Christmas y'all!
There’s no evidence that biblical Jesus ever existed at all, and plenty of reasons to think it extremely unlikely. The total absence in Roman historical record of someone who is portrayed as an epic spit disturber and massive thorn in the hide of the Roman rulers of Judea being the most obvious one.
Vomitoria were passages designed to accommodate large crowds, not rooms for actual vomiting (“vomit” comes from Latin for “spew forth”).
TIL There's such thing as a vomitoria, and it is not used for vomiting
Claim: Republican administrations in the USA reduce government spending while Democrat administrations increase government spending.
Republicans claiming Democrats only “tax and spend”, and republicans are “fiscally conservative”. What a bunch of horseshit. Republicans spend and spend like shopaholics, yet vastly reduce the amount of incoming tax revenue by letting their billionaire one-percenter huge corporation owning puppet masters/a*****e buddies off the hook to pay their fair share of taxes, and passing the burden of supporting the entire country on the middle class for forty years. Every time there’s a republican majority, the deficit grows by leaps and bounds. It takes a Democratic majority to clean up the republicans’ mess and get the budget balanced—-and even in surplus!—-once more. Of course Democrats increase taxes. They HAVE to, in order to have enough revenue collected to keep the government, and therefore the country, running the way it’s supposed to, after the republicans raid the treasury to finance their bacchanalia, and spend like there’s no tomorrow. Oh, and fight needless wars (not the necessary and declared wars like WWII, but the needless undeclared “wars”, like Iraq and Vietnam—-anyone remember Reagan unnecessarily sending troops to invade Grenada to get some American medical students out of the country, even though they weren’t in any kind of danger?). that further bankrupt the country, usually to deflect from the looming scandals about their dirty backroom dealings and make themselves look like heroes, when they’re actually just petty thieves.
That every women in the Middle ages married at 12 or 13 and started having babies immediately. And they did not love and mourn their children as much as we do.
That people in the Middle ages thought the earth was flat
Only the very rich married as teens, usually ally for alliances, or money. If they were too young, they'd generally wait a few years before consummation. (I'm sorry, but Henry VIIs father, was a pedo) The poor would usually marry in their 20s or 30s. After, they had saved up money for their own household. The peasants were lucky, in a way. At least, they could marry someone they actually knew, and liked.
That binary numbers were first used by Leibniz. Most computer histories make this claim.
But there's an existing manuscript page by the English mathematician Thomas Harriot that includes binary numbers and binary multiplication that was written around 1605, forty years before Leibniz was born.
The sugar merchant Hermann Bahlsen created a butter cookie in 1891. He named the product »Leibniz Cakes« in honor of the most famous citizen of his home town, Hanover ➡️ Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz...
That knowledge and science in Western Europe were wiped out during the Dark Ages because of the Church. In fact, the Medieval church was one of the only places in Europe keeping knowledge alive, as monks transcribed and copied ancient sources. For example, everything the ancient Greeks knew about the science of sound and acoustics was transmitted down via church sources.
Not saying the Church hasn't done awful things. But the usual narrative about its function in the Middle Ages is completely opposite from reality.
Heck, while we're at it, the so-called Dark Ages didn't really exist at all.
The reason they’re called dark is because of the lack of written documentation of the times, so we don’t know a lot about life back then, except for whatever the few literate people of the time may have set down on paper, and that would most likely only happen in the case of a huge event, like a war or a plague. Anything else written down would have been poetry or fiction, and even that would have to be spun to please whatever monarch was on the throne in your country that particular day. So not a whole lot that tells us what everyday life was like. Remember, this was pre-Gutenberg and his printing press, so books were made by hand, mostly by monks with a talent for writing and art, since many pages were highly illustrated. That meant books, and therefore education, was only affordable by the very very tiny upper crust wealthy percentage of the population, who apparently thought it was a sacrilege to take that knowledge and pass it on to the masses. Because the uneducated are easier to fool into thinking they can’t have any better life than whatever “his lordship” doles out to them. There could have been parish schools set up for the children of the lower classes, but there weren’t—-there never could, and still never can be today, if it depended solely on the benevolence of a wealthy patron to fund them. Privatization of public institutions never ever works.
Executioners/hangman didn't wear hoods. People knew who they were. There are even several instances where the job gets passed from father to son like a family business.
They were paid okay but also made side money from selling stuff used for the execution like bits of rope and fabric and stuff.
Edit: There's a book called Lord High Executioner by Howard Engel that goes into the history of it and it's fascinating.
Yes, people knew who they were, but also they were usually seen as "unclean" and, for example, weren't allowed to live within the city walls and when they died they had to be burried separately, etc. This, of course, varied by region and era.
I heard recently that the reason Columbus had trouble finding funding for his voyages had nothing to do with the powers that be believing the earth was flat. In fact, it was pretty well accepted by that point that it was spherical. However, they believed it was much bigger than Columbus believed it was and that there would be nothing but ocean for thousands of miles. They thought the journey would cost much more than he was trying to say. He was wrong, and the fact that he ran into the Americas was just luck for him.
He never made it to America, he just sailed around the Caribbean islands looking for non-existent gold and persecuting natives. It was Washington Irving who wrote up all the lies about him.
The earth has only exists for a few thousand years.
Archbishop Ussher counted up all the "begats" in the Old Testament to come up with the 4,000 year figure. Very silly. https://www.irishtimes.com/news/how-an-archbishop-calculated-the-creation-1.378556
The White Star Line saying the Titanic was unsinkable. It was actually a shipping magazine that first called the Olympic class unsinkable.
In a similar note the RMS Britannic being called Gigantic. The name only Gigantic only appears once on an order for an anchor. Every other piece of documentation refers to the Britannic as the Britannic.
It was "unsinkable" because of the watertight rooms, but there was only 4 at the forward and 4 at the aft and they were useless because the huge tear was above those levels.
Witch burning were daily occurances in the middle age, I blame da Vinci code
The Inquisition was real and there were much worse things than witch burnings going on, the slaughter of the Cathars and the burning of so many of the Temple Knights are just 2 that don't get much air time, there were many villages and church groups that were persecuted en masse at that time.
Abner Doubleday inventing baseball in Cooperstown, NY.
Blackbeard's privateer transport, Sovereign Anne's Vengeance, was certainly not a tremendously immense Vessel, however really a light and deft frigate.
The Sovereign Anne's Vengeance was truly flexibility and quick. Very much like the way in which Somalian privateers use dinghies against freight ships
Is this written by AI? The name of the ship was "Queen Anne's Revenge", so why would someone substitute synonims, especialy while also making weird gramattical errors? "Sovereign Anne's Vengeance" sounds like a cheaper off-brand store version...
The people in Medieval times would empty pots of s**t and p**s right out their window. If you stop and think about it for like two seconds this idea is so f*****g bizarre that it is surprising it became such a popular myth. I remember clearly being told this as fact by my 4th grade history teacher.
Something isn't a myth just because you think it sounds odd. Houses were built without plumbing, and in manly places the only drain was in the street itself. People back then were just as lazy as now, so living on the upper floors of a tenement with a full pot, it was the easy action. You can find ordinances in many cities trying to clamp down on it
I have one that isn't mentioned here. I occasionally hear people say "I wish they still built cars like they used to." Cars now last much longer, and need less frequent repairs than they did when I first started driving almost 50 years ago. Also, when people complain about the large amount of damage to a car caused by a relatively minor accident, they should be grateful instead. Cars are engineered with crumple zones to absorb energy in a collision. I don't care how high the body shop bill is, it's less than the hospital bill would have been if the crumple zones weren't there.
I think the context to that is usually cars USED to be fairly easy to work on for the mechanically inclined. That's how I learned wrenching as a young man. These days I have little clue -- and I think that's the lament nostalgically referred to.
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it's just sad, because helmets with horns are really cool and Vikings should have had them.
The nice thing is: we can have them if we want and no one can stop us!
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I have one that isn't mentioned here. I occasionally hear people say "I wish they still built cars like they used to." Cars now last much longer, and need less frequent repairs than they did when I first started driving almost 50 years ago. Also, when people complain about the large amount of damage to a car caused by a relatively minor accident, they should be grateful instead. Cars are engineered with crumple zones to absorb energy in a collision. I don't care how high the body shop bill is, it's less than the hospital bill would have been if the crumple zones weren't there.
I think the context to that is usually cars USED to be fairly easy to work on for the mechanically inclined. That's how I learned wrenching as a young man. These days I have little clue -- and I think that's the lament nostalgically referred to.
Load More Replies... it's just sad, because helmets with horns are really cool and Vikings should have had them.
The nice thing is: we can have them if we want and no one can stop us!
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