Article created by: Monika Pašukonytė
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!
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.
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
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.
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.
There has never been a viking helmet found that had a horn attached to it.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
Catherine the Great did not do that with a horse.
China does not own the South China Sea, no matter how badly it wants to believe it with its nine dash line.
That ancient humans were dumb
Vomitoria were passages designed to accommodate large crowds, not rooms for actual vomiting (“vomit” comes from Latin for “spew forth”).
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
That binary numbers were first used by Leibniz. Most computer histories make this claim. But there's an existing by the English mathematician Thomas Harriot that includes binary numbers and binary multiplication that was written around 1605, forty years before Leibniz was born.
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.
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.
The earth has only exists for a few thousand years.
The pyramids being built by aliens
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.
Witch burning were daily occurances in the middle age, I blame da Vinci code
Abner Doubleday inventing baseball in Cooperstown, NY.
