11 Myths We Were Taught About the United States

Nothing’s quite so American as apple pie and mythologizing our country. From The American Revolution to our presidents to the Wild West, most of everything we’ve learned at school or through movies is a lie. Or at the very least, an oversimplification. Sometimes these little white lies can be fun trivia (did you know cowboys didn’t wear cowboy hats?) but sometimes they become fixtures in American culture that warp our perception of politics and identity. 

We’ve made demigods of the Founding Fathers…even though we’re not quite sure who we’re even talking about. Depending on which historian you talk to, the group can be between 99 to 7 people. How often do we hear pundits or politicians talking about “what the Founding Fathers would have wanted” as if they were a monolith and not a group of people who made a lot of compromises and had a bunch of disagreements? Read about this and others below…