27 Incorrect Bits of History We’ve All Been Taught

‘George Washington did not cut down his fathers cherry tree’
27 Incorrect Bits of History We’ve All Been Taught
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The history I was taught as part of the famously stellar American education system, wrong? Inconceivable! Rolled eyes aside, it turns out there’s big chunks of history that the public generally accepts that, well, didn’t happen. Or at least, didn’t happen the way we were told.

Sometimes, it’s nothing more than the failings of an eras-long game of telephone. Other times, it might be a little bit more calculated, especially by the empires that usually end up writing the books. Either way, thanks to Reddit, we have a list of things you may well believe that are thorough and utter bullshit. 

Scroll down and make sure you’ve got your facts straight.

joystick95 . 2mo ago Columbus discovered America lol ok
IPostSwords 2mo ago Edited 2mo ago True damascus steel is not a lost art in any sense of the word even if people constantly repeat that myth. Not only did people write down recipes from as far back and al kindi and before (zosimos, for example gives a vague but not inaccurate description), to as recent as eyewitness accounts from 1903 (Ananda Coomaraswamy), but production continued as late as that and resumed as soon as people had the material testing equipment to get the composition right (see Wadsworth through to Verhoeven). It's also not folded or layered. These days plenty
Maleficent-Bad3755 . 2mo ago paul revere never completed his midnight run - he was arrested sybil luddington's ride was more successful than revere
Pink-Barbie99 2mo ago That Medieval people only lived to 30, which is wrong, average life expectancy was low due to infant mortality, but adults have been living long life
DatBeardedguy82 . 2mo ago People in Columbus' day didnt think the earth was flat we knew it was a sphere since around 500BC
RiverHarris 2mo ago Claudette Colvin, a 15 year old black girl, was actually the first to not give up her seat on the bus for a white passenger. It was 9 months before Rosa Parks. The NAACP (and others) decided Parks was a better person to use as a figurehead because she was an adult. So, it's true what Rosa Parks did. But Colvin did it first.
prove it 2mo ago While the Founding Fathers were pro-business they were NOT pro-corporation. They were all for sole proprietorships and partnerships but were adamantly against corporations (having just one the first, anti corporate war). The Founding Fathers were so suspicious and concerned about corporations that they required them to apply for state-controlled charters and had to prove that the corporation would serve the public good (like building a railroad or a dam). No value to society? So sorry, no corporate protections. Of course, ever since, we've evolved a 180° turn from that to, now, you CANNOT have a social
Artificial-Human 2mo ago I grew up in Kansas about three hours from Tulsa, Oklahoma. There was a brief mention of a race riot in the Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa in 1921 and that a few people died. It wasn't until I was in my 30's that I learned the truth about the Tulsa Massacre. The event wasn't just scrubbed from history books, in most cases it was never included at all.
top-legolas . 2mo ago That the burning of the Library of Alexandria set humanity back: all official knowledge lost. No. it was the Library of Congress back in its day: the information inside was a copy, as it was believed that having a copy of texts and other items was a good idea.
poopysuitastronaut23 . 2mo ago That Thomas Edison was a great inventor. Не really just tweaked other people's inventions and patented/sold them.
Heavy_Front_3712 2mo ago So I grew up in Alabama and as part of our history, we were taught that only rich landowners owned slaves. Most people with small farms did not....however, I was looking for information about something in my area and looked at the census records for the time. Yes, there were large landowners with slaves, some had over 100 enslaved people, but there were also a whole bunch of people who owned 1-3 slaves. So it really wasn't true what we were taught. I don't know how it was anywhere else, but in my county at least, a
AlbiTheDargon . 2mo ago As a kid in the USA | remember always being glad that the good guys won every war they taught us about.
Maleficent-Bad3755 . 2mo ago george washington did not cut down his fathers cherry tree- it was made up by a biographer (weems)
JordanTheOP 2mo ago The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people, former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman told Harper's writer Dan Baum for the April cover story published Tuesday. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities, Ehrlichman said. We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up
GreedyNovel 2mo ago Honest Abe Lincoln was a politician most modern pols would recognize. Не was perfectly willing to lie, cheat and steal. And also hassle the press corps of the time. It wasn't that uncommon for journalists back then to get thrown in jail briefly for writing articles favoring the Confederacy. Of course that technically violated the Constitution so would be let out fairly quickly but the point was made. George Washington was by all historical accounts not a good field general. Не was mostly good at raising an army that didn't completely desert under fire (pretty important) but
3BlindMonks 2mo ago In the very early 1960s, a viking settlement was discovered in Nova Scotia. This should've ended the Christopher Columbus narrative of being the first European to set foot on the continent, but instead the farce continued via public education.
Vivid_Ice_2755 . 2mo ago There was no famine in Ireland. There was a potato blight. There was ship loads of food leaving the country for Britain every day .
conspiracysoldiers . 2mo ago Ben Franklin discovered electricity
Heroic-Forger 2mo ago That dinosaurs became extinct because they were lumbering, stupid savages with brains the size of peanuts who were failures of evolution and were replaced by the superior modern animals. They just got unlucky, they were doing fine for almost 150 million years until a random space rock showed up. Not bad for a supposed failure given that modern Homo sapiens has existed for less than one million years.
Capable_Afternoon216 . 2mo ago George Washington never won an election, he was appointed by Congress. Not so much a lie as it is just never talked about in the first place.
Poiretpants . 2mo ago That corsets were instruments of death imposed on women by men.
SixButterflies 2mo ago The second amendment, and the belief of the founding fathers that it was critically important for civilians to keep and bear arms, is intrinsically and undeniably linked to their deep And profound belief that the U.S. should NEVER have a standing army. When you understand that the founding fathers firmly opposed the very existence of a standing army, the first sentence of the second amendment suddenly makes much more sense.
Defnotabotok . 2mo ago That bíblical Jews were slaves in Egypt and wandered the desert for a hundred years. My whole life I thought this was true (I went Catholic schools) but there's absolutely no evidence of it.
Wilgrove 2mo ago As a lifelong resident of North Carolina, we're about 95-98% sure what happened to the lost Roanoke colony. We're this sure because a few years later, after the colony was abandoned by the settlers. Some of the children born in nearby Native American tribes were born with blonde hair and/or blue eyes. It's obvious that the Roanoke colonist either abandoned the settlement and the local tribes took them in, or the local tribes saw how fucked these colonist were and rescued them.
LauraPa almer 2mo ago That men were hunters and women stayed in the cave and tended to the children, and the fire, and gathered berries. Reality - evidence shows that women were hunters as well.
rodroidrx 2mo ago The early Filipinos before the Spanish / Americans were brute savages with no culture. Europeans had to civilize them. Categorically false. They were an advanced Hindu-Buddhist (and Islamic) society who built ocean faring ships and had lots of gold and resources. They were part of the extensive Maritime Silk Road and had integral ports crucial to the cultural and wealth exchange of the trade route.
MontrealCalling2 . 2mo ago A classic one, but USA, UK, France and the other Western Allies teamed up to defeat Germany in WW2. In reality, the war was primarily fought between USSR and Germany.

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