Within a year, 30,000 flags had been sold. Our calculators tell us that comes out to $300,000, which was a lot more impressive a sum in 1892. The man who actually wrote the pledge was a former minister named Francis Bellamy. He was a Socialist (aka, a dirty commie) whose stated mission was to create in America's youth a habit of automatic reverence and utter loyalty to the country. He even came up with an original salute for children to give while reciting the pledge...

Things got awkward around '41.

The decision to add "under God" was made at the height of America's brief flirtation with paranoid schizophrenia, otherwise known as McCarthyism. Congress felt the pledge, like most people at the time, just wasn't American enough. How were these children standing around the American flag, pledging "allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands" to know that they weren't in the Godless Soviet Union? Thus, Congress added God to the pledge, and every generation who passed through a public school after 1954 was transferred into a flawless vessel of patriotism.

The Tradition:

For centuries, the samurai and their spiritual descendants followed "the way of the warrior," living lives governed by its tenets of honor, strict devotion to one's master and, above all, self sacrifice. This ancient tradition helped make World War II a hell of a lot scarier, since, according to the Internet, "Kamikaze pilots used the samurai and their code for inspiration ... Just like the samurai, kamikaze pilots had no fear of death, and were honorable men that were loyal to their country."

How Old It Actually Is:

The idea that samurai are either loyal to their country or eager to die in battle is approximately as old as Walt Disney. Bushido as a coherent ideology only dates back to 1905.

Who Made It Up?

The whole thing started with an honest, if pretty stupid mistake by a historian named Nitobe Inazo, who based his 1905 book Bushido: The Spirit of Japan on rules written for samurai. This is the equivalent of reading a high school handbook and determining that teenagers live by a strict code of attending class, and turning weed dealers in to the cops.

According to Karl Firday, professor of history at the University of Georgia and author of a bunch of really smart books on Japan, aside from laws that they were told to follow, the history of the samurai is notable for a complete lack of evidence that they were any more happy to die in battle and even a little bit loyal. It's entirely possible that a warrior sacrificing his life was seen as noble, but that's no different than the European code of chivalry which also made room for honorable suicide. In fact, the evidence paints a picture of samurai that looks more like a modern professional athlete than what we see in our martial arts films. They'd fight and kill for you as long as the money was right. When it wasn't, they'd switch sides, and slice the word "for" clean out of the previous sentence.

So if Japan was one big game of "fuck your buddy with a sword" and Europe was the land of the noble warrior falling on his, how did a bunch of Japanese pilots find themselves swan diving at air craft carriers while saying prayers to the medieval equivalent of Terrell Owens?

As it turns out, our modern concept of Bushido developed as a method of social control. The Emperor and the Imperial Army and Navy wanted something that would boost their men's fighting spirit. When Nitobe Inazo sucked at his job badly enough to write that "the way of the warrior is to die," they all just sort of nodded and said, "Yep, that's the way of the warrior alright!"

Psyche!

The antiquated practices many Westerners associate with modern Islam are actually a relatively recent development. Reporting from Saudi Arabia for The New Yorker, Lawrence Wright interviewed an older Saudi man who reminisced about the good old days when men and women used to be able to celebrate weddings together. While it might seem weird to Westerners used to hearing stories of ankle length hemlines following the words "Back in my day... ," in the Middle East, when grandparents miss the good old days, they're often talking about a place that was far less up its own ass.

"We had books. And the orgies! Don't get me started on the orgies ...

It wasn't until the 1950s that fundamentalist Islam started gaining influence, and outdated, dying traditions like the veil saw a spike in popularity. That's when followers of a fringe 18th century scholar Mohammed Al Wahab began to take Islam back to basics, which in this case meant an imaginary past where women were treated like shit and all the pesky "progress" of the last 1400 years never happened. During his lifetime, Wahab was taken about as seriously as Pat Robertson is taken today in the West. But in the 1950s, Wahabi Muslim thinkers like Sayyid Qutb started to urge total separation between Islam and the West, arguing that the outside world had "nothing else to give humanity."

Oh really, Qutb?

Qutb and his fundamentalist contemporaries inspired a new generation of radical thinkers, who took this "fuck the West" mentality a few steps further, resulting in a Middle East that is far less progressive than the Dark Ages they're supposedly stuck in.

Some people shouldn't be encouraged to "shoot for the stars."

See, as tempting as it might be to divide history into the bad guys and the good guys, civilizations tend to evolve more like the Batman franchise, kicking ass part of the time, and reaching unspeakable, ass backwards lows that would embarrass their ancestors at others. Muslim people were doing algebra while we were burning women for having funny birthmarks on their face. They just happen to be going through their Batman and Robin phase.

All of the traditional foods and pageantry we associate with Thanksgiving are the invention of one pushy broad named Sarah Hale. She finally nagged Abe Lincoln into creating a new holiday in 1863.

The food at the original Thanksgiving was a motley assortment of fowl (possibly not even turkey), cod, corn and venison. Mrs. Hale, editor of Godey's Lady's Book (the Cracked Magazine of its day) realized that history would need to be jazzed up a bit if Thanksgiving was to have a future. She put together a massive recipe book that included many treats we still enjoy today, as well as batshit crazy heart-murdering foods like "ham soaked in cider for three weeks, stuffed with sweet potatoes and baked in maple syrup."

Mrs. Hale was convinced that, if she could just get enough families to sit down for Thanksgiving dinner, she could avert the Civil War. Obviously, she failed, but President Lincoln thought the idea had enough merit that he tried it anyway.

Some things are beyond even the power of cider-drenched ham.

For the first half of the 20th century, Thanksgiving was celebrated mainly by the rich and wannabe rich, since no one else could afford to waste the money. In 1939, FDR decided to change the date in order to give retailers more time to get ready for Christmas. For two years, people celebrated Thanksgiving on different days depending on their political orientation. It wasn't until 1941 that Congress set the date we still use today.

How Old It Actually Is:

The kilt was invented in 1725, otherwise known as 400 years after William Wallace died.

Which dates back about as far as the first orthodontic braces.

Who Made It Up?

Prior to 1725, but well after the invention of pants, Scottish highlanders were wearing a robe-like proto-kilt called a plaid. So to be fair, the Scots were covering their unmentionables with ridiculous plaid clothing long before the kilt. An English iron-master named Thomas Rawlinson noticed that robes, while great for receiving commandments from God on a mountaintop, were somewhat "cumbrous, and unwieldy" for the Scots he employed to work over an iron furnace all day. Knowing that Scots' would not tolerate cloth between their scrotum and the ground, he invented a skirted plaid, and the kilt was born.

"Hi, I'm Mel Gibson. My hobbies include anti-semitism and taking great, steaming green shits on history."

Well at least the patterns on their "plaids" have always had a unique tie to ones ancestral identity, right? Actually, that apparently didn't happen for another hundred years, and this time instead of saving Scottish balls from being melted, it was capitalism, plain and simple.

Once the kilt had been invented, outlawed and then reinvented as a sort of hipster retro look, a cadre of textile manufacturers sprouted up to cater to the needs of the Highland regiments. One firm named William Wilson and Son of Bannockburn noticed that many wealthy, fashionable young Scotsmen had taken to wearing kilts. Some had even formed clubs around the trendy garment. There's even an ad from the 1700s claiming a 'great choice of tartans, the newest patterns,' which either means the Scottish switched families based on the hottest new fashion trends, or the Tartan thing is bullshit.

Mr. Wilson and Son may go down in history as the first designers to exploit gullible hipsters for money. They allied with the Highland Society of London and put together a key pattern book of all the clan tartans in 1819. The society matched clans to patterns and passed the whole sham off as an attempt to reconnect the people of Scotland with their ancient history.