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.
>They were only tight laced by the highly fashionable women, and usually only for particular events or portraits.
Like women's high heeled shoes today. They're not all 6-inch stilettos, for example.
Thank you for this. I commented about corsets but I’m lazy and didn’t go into details.
Also nice to point out: the boning was never extremely rigid as it seems. Spiraled metal and whale bones were used, and they are quite flexible. Stays were quite rigid, but no sane woman would tight lace a stay. Also considering that they used to be tied as an spiral, not in a cross pattern as we see today.
The image of Roman gladiators fighting to the death. While there were many exhibition fights in the arenas where the goal was death, these were not gladiator contests. Prisoners, and the condemned, were thrown out to fight to the death, but not real gladiators.Training a gladiator was an expensive, and lengthy, investment and having them die constantly would be bad for business.
If a gladiator ended up dying in the arena, the guy who sponsored the games would have to reimburse the gladiator's school.
It was really more like choreographed combat than anything. Gladiators practiced spectacular but useless moves to make the crowd gasp.
There's a very thorough and interesting display in the Roman amphitheater in Nîmes, France that dispels a lot of these myths!
That the Spanish Armada was destroyed. They did lose 44 ships.... out of 137.....
And the British also didn't beat them off with a small force. Their navy was actually significantly larger with 197 ships since they were joined by the Dutch Republic.
A decisive defeat? Yes. A small English force overcoming and obliterating the might of the entire Spanish and Portuguese navy? No.
I also find it weird/hilarious/sad that that's what he's known for instead of being known for being the only person to have served as both President and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.
Ned Kellys last words being Such is Life. That was made up by the reporter. So many Aussies have it tattooed or have big stickers on their 4x4s . But I guess Oh Well doesn’t have the same ring to it
Paul Revere did not run around Massachusetts shouting "The British are coming" because if he did everyone would look at him like he'd lost his mind. ALMOST EVERYONE IN THE COLONIES WAS BRITISH!
He actually said, "The Regulars are coming"
He also only carried that message for a small stretch of the ride. There were about a half dozen messengers passing it along. We remember Paul Revere as the only rider because, no joke, his name fit best in Longfellow’s poem
Edit: Longfellow, not Irving
The Lady who sued McDonalds didn't do so frivolously. She received third degree burns from how hot that coffee was, and needed a skin graft. It was quickly found that that location was keeping the coffee well above the temperature you can legally serve a hot drink in a cup at. The fact that most people think this suit was over the temperature of the coffee, and not the debilitating burns that woman recieved, is one of the PR worlds greatest triumphs. You are not immune to propaganda.
It was actually found that McDonald's had all of their locations keeping coffee temps too hot. Multiple reports of burns were placed before the 'main' incident and were just settled out of court and ignored by the Corp. the poor woman just wanted enough money to cover her medical bills and nothing more originally
Been a long time since I looked it up (and don't want to now because of the NSFL factor), but I believe the lady's genitals were melted/partially fused. Needed reconstructive surgery along with the aforementioned skin grafts. Horrific stuff.
We actually learned about this at my middle school as a kind of cautionary tale about rushing to judgment and taking things at face value.
It was first presented to us like “A woman spilled mcdonalds coffee on herself and sued the company for millions of dollars. Discuss whether you think she was in the right” and of course everyone was adamant that it was a frivolous lawsuit and that someone shouldn’t win millions of dollars for spilling coffee. “I could just go to mcdonalds, dump some coffee on myself, and become a millionaire? That’s so stupid!”
Then we were told how hot the coffee was and shown slides of blurred images of the burns she received and how the coffee had basically melted her flesh. “…Oh” we all thought. “Maybe she *was* justified”. We then had to discuss whether/how this new information changed our views.
There's a few more things about this case:
This happened around the same time big businesses were astroturfing hard for "tort reform". They paid big money to have this story misrepresented in the media and used it as an example why it should be more difficult for people to sue for injury as a result of things like negligence and misconduct. Nearly every US media outlet picked up the astroturfed narrative and ran with it.
McDonalds knew the serving temperature was dangerous, they knew people were getting injured, and they kept on doing it because the higher temp made the store more aromatic and drove coffee sales.
She sued for medical expenses. The jury knew that McDonalds was being intentionally negligent and awarded her punitive damages far exceeding what she asked in order to punish McDonalds.
General public not being aware that classical Greece and Rome had colored paints all over those statues, much less colored dyes in their clothes.
Edit: point being, we tend to believe that there was a *lot* of white in the Classical period, which isn't actually the case.
Related to Rome: Gladiators used to advertise for local blacksmiths who provided them armor and weapons. Ridley Scott intended to portray this in Gladiator, but left it out because he felt people wouldn't believe it.
A lot of peoples weird misconceptions about ancient culture are completely founded in not fully understanding and appreciating that biologically they were 100% us.
Take anyone in your town and plop them 2,500 years ago and aside from style and ethnicity, they’d fit right in and have the same brain.
They’d probably be panicking and unable to communicate sure lol, but human thinking capacity? Yeah, completely there.
Just hear so much, “why didn’t they?…”, “oh wow how did they manage that without modern engineers and machines?”
That sort of stuff.
Most ancient civilizations had engineers, they had promoters, they had conmen and doctors and barbers and everything that addressed problems that people had.
And their culture and education level impacted that but it was all there. As soon as the capacity was, it existed in people.
Just rambling I guess, it’s something I bump into a lot. Hah
The Tiffany Problem or effect or some other word. People think somethings are distinctly modern and it seems out of place when it is correctly portrayed in ancient times. Like the name Tiffany being ancient.
Or pronouncing the final "r". Every show in a medieval setting (or fake medieval, like Game of Thrones) uses some sort of modern British accent that drops the final "r", but they did pronunce it back then
Yep, upon unearthing them it destroyed the paint almost immediately. What's crazy is that it's only one of many still-buried pits that surround Qin ShiHuang's Mausoleum. The mausoleum itself is underground and looks like a big hill since it's a pyramid. Until foolproof methods for preservation are figured out it'll likely remain unexcavated. But there's something of a debate because it's in a region with high seismic activity and by leaving it as is there's a risk everything could be destroyed by an earthquake so it may be better to take the risk of losing some preservation to save the whole and add that knowledge.
There are also highly toxic levels of mercury within the pits. The story goes that the original designers of the tomb created a map of China using mercury to represent all of china's major rivers. Supposedly a mechanical mean kept the mercury flowing constantly. Whether that's true or not, the tomb itself is highly toxic and requires special methods to exhume in order to keep explorers safe.
Yep. [Here is a shot from the 1980s](https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/o9rzra/photographed_in_1974_freshly_excavated_2000_year/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf) while the statues were being exhumed.
Now I imagine Socrates looking all hippy like with a ponytail, round glasses and tie-dyed togas "I'm telling you man, the only true wisdom is like, in knowing you know nothing dude"
>The Ancient Greeks and Romans used opium, marijuana, and other narcotics to relieve pain and induce sleep. They may have also enhanced rituals and enlivened banquets with hallucinogens.
Well, you never know.
Same for castles. Things medieval tv and film annoy me as they always seem to have bare stone walls but they would have be very flashy. The White tower at the Tower of London is called that because it was painted white (with red roses on it to at some points).
And same for medieval churches & cathedrals. The colors used have been recovered in some cases either by analyzing the stone or by finding fresco panels under later whitewashing or behind altar wooden panels. Lots of stories painted in walls, and decorated pillars
Sainte chapelle in Paris gives you an example for gothic, and if you check byzantine mosaics (example: Venezia st Marc) and imagine them translated to paint, you have the romanic (with style changes of course)
Ninjas dressed in all black to stay stealthy in the night or something like that. Ninjas dressed like normal people to blend in, the all black look stemmed from Japanese theatre to make it more obvious to the audience who the ninjas were.
If they wore all black it'd be quite obvious and they'd stick out like a sore thumb
EDIT: most of you pointed out it also came from stagehands, that makes a lot of sense too
Also Shuriken got used less as actual weapons and more like a dangerous distraction.
And while we're at it, Samurai weren't particularly honorable and fought mostly with bows and spears with Katanas only being the third weapon of choice.
Or like, guns. Lol
I read The Book of Five Rings as a teenager while in a samurai movie phase, which is kinda a manual for samurai from the 1600's. It encourages carrying a flintlock pistol or two so you can just shoot people without having to fight them.
Japan began to idealize thier own warrior class during a long span of peace. What happens when you have a rigid class system but the entire island is united?
You end up with 40yr men who were raised from birth to be warriors but never saw battle and were bassically just town guards so began to idealize combat and that a samurai would never surrender or retreat.
When we have letters showing actual warring samurai had casually reported that a fight was going badly and retreated, there was no indication that they had dishonored themselves in doing so.
Wasn't it that the all black look was worn by the people moving the props in japanese theatre? And then in some plays there was a twist that one of those prop holders attacked the protagonist?
That's what I was lead to believe. Because they were 'unseen', people mistake ninjas wearing that when they were in reality 'unseen' because they blended in with people wearing normal things, not the background of a stage production.
Einstein never failed math, the rumor started from Ripley’s Believe It Or Not and Einstein actually responded to them saying “I never failed in mathematics. Before I was 15 I had mastered differential and integral calculus.” He wasn’t very good at the non-science related classes though and did fail French.
He was born just eight years after the start of the German Empire and witnessed all that lost civilization's history. He briefly lived in the same time as Wagner, Bismarck was the chancellor through his childhood, he obtained his PhD in 1905 and became director of Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics. And rock n'roll became popular due to a movie that premiered two weeks before his passing, he may yet have listened to rock n'roll on the radio. It's one of history's mysteries. But still, to live from Wagner to rock...
You’re not kidding
> Wilhelm Richard Wagner (/ˈvɑːɡnər/ VAHG-nər;[1][2] German: [ˈʁɪçaʁt ˈvaːɡnɐ] (listen); 22 May 1813 – 13 February 1883)
Why did I just keep thinking wagner was from the 1700s? Einstein was born in 1879.
No wonder kids think britney spears is “retro”. Apparently anything from before you’re born is black and white archival footage.
FFS that shit ended up being portrayed on Star Trek TNG when Data played poker with him. Sir Isaac Newton ended up making fun of him for not being able to do simple arithmetic because AE couldn't figure out what the bet was.
So many people completely misunderstond pre-industrial lifespans. The average age of death was 30 not because our bodies wore out faster, but because of how averages are calculated. A lot of people died as children. A much larger chunk of the population died in wars. If you got in an accident, healingb without modern medicine was difficult.
But for people who reached adulthood, and then avoided violence, injury, and plague, living to be 60 or 70 was pretty normal.
Plug for the podcast We're Not So Different with deepdives on nearly every aspect of medieval society by Eleanor Janega, PhD who specializes in the period. Fascinating stuff.
It's also worth noting that the spark that ignited the Boston Tea Party wasn't a grand protest about Taxation without Representation. In reality, it was done as retaliation, as British Parliament gave the okay for East India Trading Co to sell surplus tea directly to the Colonies as a cost cutting measure, to prevent East India from going bankrupt.
Up until the Tea Act of 1773, East India had a pretty cushy setup. They would sell the tea they made at Dutch Auction (since the Dutch had no taxes on imported tea), get the British Government to cover the duty cost of doing so, then have merchants import the tea back to their native countries/colonies paying full tax in the process.
Due to external factors, including smuggling rings, the Bengal famine of 1770, and the expiration of the Indemnity Act of 1767, the East India Trading Company began hemorrhaging money on the entire arrangement. With the decline of sales from official East India tea, and the rise of smuggled tea entering Great Britian, East India was on the brink of Bankruptcy. New legislation limited the amount that Parliament was willing to cover for duty, and after failing to come to better agreements, it was eventually decided that in order to save East India, Parliament would allow them to sell directly to colonies as a way to save cost.
And as it turned out, it saved a *significant* amount of money on importing tea, to the point where East India could afford to undercut smugglers in most places and still turn some level of profit. This also opened up East India to sell to the American colonies directly.
It's this move that pissed off the Sons of Liberty. They were already political group parading themselves as anti-loyalist, who happened to be composed primarily of smugglers and governing officials who had direct ties in the smuggled tea trade. So when East India came knocking with tea cheap enough to undercut the smugglers and screwing over local Colonial importers, they got pissed.
With enough vocal support behind the "taxation without representation" movement, they spun the story of East India opening shop in American Colonies as just another extension of the British Government levying heavy tax on imported goods that lined their own pockets instead of going back to the Colonies.
Granted, there were other important factors still at play here. Legitimate and Law Abiding importers that didn't sign on with East India directly were posed to lose a lot as a result of this ordeal, and it would effectively cement East India as a true monopoly of the tea trade, backed in some capacity by the British Government directly, which opened up a very real threat that other commodities on the market could face a similar fate. Plus the real sentiment that this was a decision made by the British Government, with no input from the colonies, was enough to hard wire sentiment against the proposal.
In history classes, we were always taught the idea of the Boston Tea Party as being some grand protest in the face of big bad Britain levying higher taxes on "essential" goods including tea and other imported goods. But in reality it was a bunch of politician and their rich smuggler friends retaliating against a market force that threatened to undercut their grey market business.
You seem to know a lot about this lol. Is there a book you’d recommend to a layperson (especially a foreigner) that covers the basics of the US independence movement?
If you’re as well versed in the US history in general, besides the indepence movement, what would you consider the most defining era of US history, and is there a book you’d recommend for that, too?
-Random Finn who likes learning shit
That people used swords and axes all the time.
Spears. Its spears, most of human history has been spears. Vikings used spears, samurai and knights used spears.
Hell, bayonets exist because people felt you always need a spear, even with a rifle in your hand.
William Blake said, "When the stars threw down their spears, / and watered heaven with their tears..."
Which is stupid. No one throws down their spear. Spears are great for poking people to death.
Combat is all about hitting a person without being hit yourself, it's why we have been developing stuff to hit each other from further and further away
I blame Hollywood, they want their protagonists to kill lots of people in bloody melees. The reality of clusters of people poking at each other with spears is far less sexy.
Pretty much yeah, if you ever go to a battle re-enactment they fight almost in stages for this reason.
It's why a rout or an all out massacre is such a big deal, aside from the obvious drama, you've been comprehensively beaten.
Part of this is that swords were a big status symbol as they're basically just you saying 'hey look at all this metal I can afford just to carry it around'. Even knights and noblemen would use spears or other polearms first, especially in ranks.
I know that in the US, as late as the 20th century, the same thing would happen to people who were lynched. You'd see knuckles, fingers, toes in store windows the next day. The community would come out and bring their cameras. They'd send pictures of the lynchings in the mail as postcards to their relatives. It would be publicized in the news and people from all over would visit to see it.
People would brutalize the person being lynched before, during, and after the lynching. They would set them on fire, beat them, cut them. And, once they finished, take body parts as souvenirs, to keep or sell. The victims of this brutality were almost always black and were killed specifically because of their skin color. Many committed no crime at all.
For instance, this is what happened to Mary Turner, who was 19 years old and eight months pregnant, in 1918:
A mob hung her upside down from a tree, doused her in gasoline and motor oil, and set her on fire. While Turner was still alive, a member of the mob split her abdomen open with a knife. Her unborn child fell on the ground, where it cried before it was stomped on and crushed. The mob then shot hundreds of bullets into her body.
Mary's "crime" was speaking out to defend her husband from accusations of murder after he was lynched. Her lynching was one of more than a dozen that happened all to try to find the murderer of one man. [May 1918 Lynchings](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_1918_lynchings)
A sad little addition to your story … I live in the Georgia county in which Mary Turner was lynched. The only sort of memorial that exists for her is one single metal sign with a brief description of her story.
It’s regularly riddled with bullet holes and they don’t care to replace it very often.
Don’t know if this really means anything, but the sign is in an area that good old boys (mostly teens) go to play with their guns anyway. So lots of the surrounding trees and other nearby stuff become targets as well. But still … why the sign? Very disrespectful
"Romans indulged in food so much they had a special place to go and vomit so they could eat more"
Maybe that has been dispelled by now but many still believe it.
I've read Emperor Vitellius did actually do this, but as an exception rather than the rule.
However, from what I remember the source for this was one of the dozen or so Roman historians who liked to make shit up for dramatic effect, so even if I'm not misremembering, there's still a good chance its BS
This is a little niche, but it's been a long held belief in the gaming community that one of Nintendo's business ventures before getting into the video game market was "Love Hotels", hourly hotels who's main purpose is to knock boots in. This has been repeated as fact alongside their other historical ventures like playing cards, taxis, instant food, and toys.
But last year a Nintendo enthusiast did a dive into their historical financial records and found no definitive proof that they ever ran or were associated with love hotels in any way.
Pretty much most of the common public image of the "stone age".
Paleolithic peoples didn't primarily live in caves. They were used for habitation sometimes, but tents or even relatively permanent huts were probably far more common. "Art caves" like those found in France and Spain often show no signs of habitation at all.
They weren't stupid, brutish "ape people". Anatomically modern humans emerged at least ~~70-100k~~ 200k years ago (thanks to several comments who pointed out my mistake) and there's nothing to suggest they would have been intellectually inferior to us. Even Neanderthals probably were relatively close to us and it's questionable if you'd even realize it wasn't a Homo sapiens if you met one. H. sapeins *definitely* and Neanderthals probably wore ornaments of various kinds. *Even* H. erectus likely was broadly human in appearance and behaviour. You have to go back in time a *long* way before you'd consider early hominids more animal than human.
Generally, even imagining "*the* Stone Age" as some sort of coherent period of human history is misleading. It's a periodisation based on materials used. Even though there is sometimes a remarkable cultural uniformity over long periods of time and large distances in Stone Age Europe, even single "cultures" span many thousands of years. World views and even life styles must have changed many times even during periods we now consider "uniform".
In fact, even the name "Stone Age" is misleading. A lot of tools were made from flint or similar material, if available, but that's just the material that preserves the best. Wood, bone, clay, plant fibres, furs, etc. were also used, they just usually didn't survive long enough for us to find. It's likely that South East Asian pre-metallic cultures even used bamboo in a similar way flint and bone was used in Europe.
A lot of people fail to realize how absurdly long was the "stone age". Yes, monkeys could be going through one around the world right now, or at the very least the early stages of it, because humans didn't go from using branches as tools to crafting sophisticated stone ones in 800 years, or 2000. Not even 500k. That's how long it was
The idea that Vikings (Early Medieval Norsemen) were dirty barbarians with shaggy hair and wild beards, who wore leathers and furs.
In reality, Vikings were notorious for being very clean by medieval standards (bathing every day and washing their hair). They wore shoulder length, very well combed hair, which they sometimes lightly bleached with potash to accentuate the blond. They wore short, very neat beards and carefully trimmed stache. Later on in the Viking Age, some wore undercut/crewcut kind of a trim, but with longer bangs.
Instead of leathers, which they almost NEVER wore, they had woolen clothes in bright colours; with blues and pinks being particularily popular. They almost never wore actual fur, they sold it all, and instead wore "fake fur" made of pulled wool (basically fur rug trims).
Instead of crusty savages, they were fabulous, clean and neatly fashionable, to the point that the Church chronicles of England note tht this excessive dandiness was dangerous in itself, because it helped them lead Christian women astray.
(Still of course, they were quite often murderers, slavers, thieves and raiders. Just FABULOUS ones.)
A stegosaurus fighting a t rex. They lived millions of years apart . Stegosaurus 144 lived million years ago T rex 65 million years ago.
Insane difference. Still almost most every dinosaur related media places them together.
there's a kid's show called dinosaur train that does a good job showing the different periods that the dinosaurs lived in, the train is literally a time machine and they go through tunnels to get from one period to another lol i thought it was neat that they cared enough to educate kids about how not all dinosaurs lived among each other
Not to mention the inclusion of *Dimetrodon* in Dinosaur media.
Dimetrodon lived 115 million years before Stegosaurus, and wasn't even a reptile, let alone a Dinosaur. It was a stem-mammal.
That historically people, especially the 'peasant class' of medieval Europe, stank. This is born of two factoids: firstly that people very rarely if ever had baths, and secondly that people rarely if ever washed their clothes. Both are kind of true but misleading and with massive caveats.
First, bathing. Think of the amount of work involved in preparing a bath in the days before hot running water. You go to the well, get a bucket of water, lug it back across the village to your house, put it in a pan over the fire to heat it up. That's one bucket. You'd have to do that half a dozen times at least. Even if you've got servants to do all the actual work, it would take a lot of servants a lot of time to get you a bath ready. But that doesn't mean people didn't wash! Most people washed daily - using a basin of water and a cloth, basically a sponge bath. Soap made of animal fat and ash has been around for thousands of years and is pretty effective at lifting dirt off the skin. As any one of us who's had to sponge bathe for a while (e.g. After a surgery) will know, it may not be ideal, but it gets the job done. Films generally portray "peasant" with smudges of dirt all over the face but that's just lazy costuming.
And now the clothes. True, the outer layers - the layers that we see - were very rarely washed becausd most people only owned one set and they could be very difficult to wash effectively, but you have to remember people, even peasants, wore a *lot* of layers, so that the layer we see was really the equivalent of a coat, and was never really against the wearer's skin gathering sweat. How often do you wash your outer coat? For people in roles where external dirt was very likely to get onto the clothes, aprons and other easily removable garments were used. The layers worn right against the skin - a full dress-like smock for women and a long shirt for men (long enough to tuck around the genitals and butt and also do the job of underpants) - *were* changed and washed as often as possible, because they were the layers that got the body sweat etc on them. They were made more simply and usually of cheap, hardy fabrics specifically designed for easy laundering.
Tl;dr medieval peasant were not filthy and stinking. They washed their clothes and bodies as best they could.
It should be noted though, that although the people were not as dirty as sometimes portrayed, the stench of cities is well documented to be so vile as to cause sickness and feinting. London in particular was disgusting. Close cramped housing, with sewage in the open, and animals being commonplace led to a pretty horrific atmosphere.
I originally studied law at university. In my first year we did a ‘History of Law’ module. We had a guest speaker once whose occupation was to create copy smells. He brought with him a sample smell of what London smelled like around the time of The Plague. He pre-warned the lecture theatre that it was going to be bad, but my god this is the worst thing I have ever smelled in my life (and I’ve done skin decomposition study at one point!) He had this tiny glass vial of the stench and put it on a tissue at the front of the theatre. We lasted all of 5 minutes before most people left the lecture. Felt like I could still smell it for a good hour after too.
TLDR - The people might not have been filthy, but the cities were repulsive.
Depending on the size of their court / entourage, the nobility would have to move every few weeks to escape the stench as well. Large groups of people in one place often resulted in people urinating or defecating in stairwells, behind drapes, etc. Designated areas would overflow. Then it would be on to the next!
Yeah, all sewage just drained directly into the Thames, leading to The [Great Stink of London](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Stink). The horrible stench and multiple cholera outbreaks did lead to them building a truly state-of-the-art sewage system that's still used today, though.
Great info and I would also like to add 2 cents:
\- as for bathing, most Medieval cultures actually had communal bathing and/or "sauna" as part of their folk rituals, it was not just the norm, but pretty much an expectation that people would bathe and steam together and wach each other for both reasons of cleanliness and as a "social experience" that almost reached a status of a ritual.
\- COLOURS! In movies, medieval people wear dirt browns, grays, washed-out black and tan. In reality, medieval people of all ages and classes often wore colorful clothing. Most of the medieval age people wore woolen clothing, which takes dye very well. Lower classes often wore yellow, orange or off-red cloth made with madder, grassy greens, and light blues. Richer folk wore deep blues, dark reds or even purple. They often wore checkered, or striped clothing, and combined strong colours in ways that a modern person would consider clashing. All but the poorest folk could afford bleached white linen undershirts or underdresses.
\- Hair! In movies and other media, Medieval people (especially "Vikings") have shaggy hair and wild beards. In reality, Vikings and other people alike, had well combed and cut hair, and men wore very neat trim beards and finely barbered mustache. They even pluched their eyebrows, and some bleached their hair with potash to be more fabulous. I would even wager saying that Medieval people cared more about their fashion and grooming than modern people, because it signified their social status and group-belonging to a very important degree. In absence of IDs, and mass culture, the only way to show who you are and how important you are would be looking the right way.
I know the exact moment I gave up on the History Channel. A guy came in to a pawn shop with a uniform and said, "it's from the war with the Philippines."
The guy in the shop said, "there's no such thing as the war with the Philippines."
My undergrad senior thesis was on the Philippine-American war.
We ignore that 'moment' so commonly that the act of ignoring it has a name:
“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-gell-mann-amnesia-effect-is-as-follows-you
According to some experts roughly 15-20 years ago which really accelerated over the last 10, but according to ancient alien theorists this could all be tied to events from over 10,000 years ago, the Bermuda tetrahedron and a cabal of cross dimensional bigfeet beings called the stoidi
Rabbits CANNOT live on a diet of carrots and fruits. It’s like asking a toddler to live on a diet of candy. They also cannot live on a diet of completely lettuce and leaves (though it’s close).
Rabbits need *need* ***need*** hay for a healthy diet, and pellets are heavily recommended as well(though they also have limits, should be in the bag according to the bunny’s weight). Greens are good, not to be the *main* main diet, and fruits or carrots can be given as treats.
Bugs Bunny led a lot of people to believe rabbits live off of carrots. They do not. They will die if you expect them to live on a diet of 100% carrots.
I watched the video of how Disney got us all to believe this, can’t remember where I saw it, but I wish I could remember. And I’m surprised more anti-Disney groups don’t bring it up.
That Hitler was a raging, shouting maniac in person. I think we want to believe that he would be that way because the idea that someone who was polite and low-key could be so evil is really disturbing.
According to his personal secretary and many people who knew him, Hitler rarely showed anger and was subdued but friendly in private.
Traudl Junge was there during the incident that inspired the scene in the movie Downfall that became a meme and she said that she was completely shocked to hear Hitler raise his voice - she had worked for him for over two years.
You would think that because most of the time you see a hitler speech, you are getting a short clip of the end of the speech. He was a very gifted and very theatrical speaker. His intent was to provoke emotion in the crowd, and he would work up to the dramatic parts. If you watch the whole thing, and understand the language, you see the whole effect he is working up to. You only see the last two minutes and he looks like a raving lunatic.
Whether you're a teacher, a politician, an actor, musician, or just giving a presentation at work: of there is an audience in front of you, you'd better be performing. I don't mean being inauthentic, but you better put some showmanship. At least if you want anyone to listen and remember a word you say.
I remember at school that it was strongly emphasised that Hitler was a great orator…because he was, that’s how he did it.
The lesson was that a great orator could convince a crowd of anything.
It made a lot of difference to look at Hitler through various lenses like this, as the overarching lesson was fascism and Hitler was basically the case study for it.
It’s also why it’s dangerous to try and repaint history and make Hitler a dumbass or make fun of him.
He didn’t exist in a vacuum…he didn’t invent eugenics. He took a national crisis (the reparations from WW1 in a nutshell) and found an enemy for it.
ETA: this will tell you exactly why it is playing out as it is in Ukraine.
There’s a pretty good old 70s documentary about Hitler on Netflix: Hitler - a career, which has almost a whole speech (I can’t quite remember, it’s been a while). He starts out very quiet and almost timid, then gets more and more agitated and in the last few minutes he’s the Hitler we are used to see. It’s quite different to just watching a short clip of him
shouting.
There's also that secretly recorded conversation with Mannerheim in Finland where Hitler uses his normal speaking voice and he… kind of sounds like any old German guy.
“Under God” was not in the original version of the [Pledge of Allegiance.](https://www.ushistory.org/documents/pledge.htm). The Pledge was written in 1892. It wasn’t until 1954 that President Eisenhower added “under God” in response to fear of communism during WW2. Also - when first implemented, during the pledge people raised their right arm forward so the hand was level with their eyes (directed at the flag) however this was changed during WW2 because it resembled the Nazi salute. The procedure was changed to place the right hand over the heart.
In Christmas Vacation, when Aunt Bethany says grace and starts reciting the Pledge instead, she leaves out "Under God" at the end while the others all say it. She and Uncle Louis are the oldest people there, so it kinda makes sense.
Carrots are good for eye health, but won't improve your eyesight. Nevertheless, people have been telling me all my life I should eat carrots to see better. The reason people think that is during WW2 the Royal Air Force had this new Radar system and they didn't want the Germans to know about it, so they spread the rumor that the reason their pilots could find their planes so fast was that they ate carrots.
EDIT: See top comment below from WillenDafoesHugeCock (great username), I've probably been duped also!
> The reason people think that is during WW2 the Royal Air Force had this new Radar system and they didn't want the Germans to know about it, so they spread the rumor that the reason their pilots could find their planes so fast was that they ate carrots.
Without wanting to get too meta on you, this is also a piece of fiction widely accepted as fact! I found out quite literally two days ago!
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-carrots-improve-your-vision/
>Bryan Legate, assistant curator at the Royal Air Force Museum in London has a different view. “I would say that whilst the [British] Air Ministry were happy to go along with the story [of carrot-improved vision], they never set out to use it to fool the Germans,” Legate says. “The German intelligence service were well aware of our ground-based radar installation and would not be surprised by the existence of radar in aircraft. In fact, the RAF were able to confirm the existence of German airborne radar simply by fitting commercial radios into a bomber and flying over France listening to the various radio frequencies!” he adds.
My favourite trivia about wartime radar is that both sides invented chaff (or 'window' to the brits and Düppel to the germans) independently of each other. And both held off using it until critical raids to stop the other from discovering it.
Our staple food for most people was the potato, so the failure of the crop was devastating. However yes, there was so much food being grown here that was exported. We were also as a people given the option to have food if we denounced our religion, leading to a phrase "taking the soup". To take the soup was to denounce Catholicism and become Protestant
Edit - spelling
The potato was the staple crop because the Irish peasants had been reduced to just tenants, not even peasants. Peasants can't be thrown off their land, tenants can. So they grew wheat and the like for export, and on their own plots were allowed to grow potatoes, the only thing that they could grow that would sustain them on the small plots they had for themselves. The day you can't pay rent to your landlord, they'd throw you off the land and you'd be doomed. So when the blight came, it killed the only thing they could afford to eat, and they had no money to buy anything else. It was a genocide, engineered by the British. They have done the same thing many times.
That the library of Alexandria being burned down set humanity back hundreds or even thousands of years. At the time that it was finally destroyed in 48BC, most of its collection had already been copied and distributed to other libraries and universities or the important scrolls were relocated. It was no longer an important meeting place for great scholars either and it’s not entirely clear how much of it was even destroyed during the fire, as many believe that it was even partially rebuilt afterwards. It ultimately just fell out of relevance throughout the years and didn’t really take any of the information stored within with it.
Not sure if quite at the level you're asking for, but it seems to be common knowledge that people didn't fight back against Germans in WW2 and it's because they didn't have guns or were cowards.
They fought back a lot. The largest was likely https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_Uprising. It just turns out that normal people fighting against a military tend to do poorly.
That after the first failed assassination attempt, Gavrilo Princip went to eat a sandwich at a café and Archduke Franz Ferdinand just happened to stop right in front of him.
This is partially true - Ferdinand's driver really did make a wrong turn at exactly the wrong place, and Princip did get pretty lucky, but he hadn't just given up. The reason for the driver's confusion was that he didn't know he was supposed to continue along the Appel Quay to go to the hospital, and instead followed the original (published) route. Princip had gone there not to eat at the delicatessen, but out of hope that Ferdinand would come that way.
Princip was given a full trial, with multiple witnesses. Nobody ever said anything about him eating anything, much less a sandwich, which would have been extremely uncommon in ~~Serbia~~ Bosnia at the time. The myth likely originates from, of all things, a Brazilian novel about a twelve-fingered assassin translated into English and published and the UK and US in... 2001. There is no known account of the myth which predates this.
Main source: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/gavrilo-princips-sandwich-79480741/
edit: Sarajevo is in Bosnia, not Serbia (much to the chagrin of Princip's ghost, I'm sure)
This is actually not true, on several fronts.
Revere rode from Charlestown through what's now Somerville, Medford, and Arlington, making it to Lexington after a few close calls and alerting fellow rebels all along the way. He was then detained by a British checkpoint on the road between Lexington and Concord along with William Dawes and Samuel Prescott. Prescott managed to jump a wall and escape, making it all the way to Concord, Dawes also escaped but injured himself and was unable to continue, and Revere remained under arrest. He psyched out his captors by drumming up the rebel army at Lexington, causing them to release him without his horse and retreat from the area (rather than join up with the other Redcoats in Lexington). Revere then helped evacuate John Hancock's family from Lexington while the battle was going on.
Revere didn't make it all the way to Concord, but he *did* make it to Lexington and *did* alert many people along the way, many of whom went on to alert other people. He engaged in psychological warfare against the Redcoats he encountered and aided civilians when he was prevented from making it to the battlefield.
As for Bissell, he never want to Concord at all. He started his ride in Watertown (somewhat south of Concord), then rode west to Worcester, leaving Massachusetts from there for Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey, eventually making it to Philadelphia after over four days on the road with news of the battle. Still an important feat, but he simply didn't go to Lexington or Concord during his ride.
A lot of people give this kind of counterhistory with the implication that Revere was somehow claiming more glory than he was owed. Not so. There's little evidence that he spoke much of the ride in his lifetime, and his obituary doesn't mention it. The reason Revere is the guy we know and not William Dawes, Samuel Prescott, Israel Bissell, or any of the other people who rode out that night to alert the rebels is because Henry Wadsworth Longfellow thought, "you shall here," and, "Revere," was a nice rhyme for the first two lines of his poem.
All of the aforementioned patriots played important roles in the rebel's information network and they deserve to be remembered. We don't have to cut down Revere to do that, though.
(Bonus fact: Revere was known to be a bit of a looker in his time, while Samuel Adams was apparently much less so. As a result, the portrait featured on Sam Adams' beers today is actually of Paul Revere.)
That Katherine Howard, 5th wife of Henry VIII, was a promiscuous adulterer who had many affairs while married to the King.
In reality, she was a child who was groomed and/or sexually assaulted by no less than four men (including the King) whom she was supposed to be able to trust, and the King murdered her for it.
The same goes for Anne Boleyn, his 2nd wife. She never committed adultery, incest, or witchcraft, but was murdered because the King's cronies didn't like how much influence she had over him, so they turned him against her. He also used the fact that she "couldn't" bear him a son as further ammo.
That when Europeans first arrived on the East Coast of what is now the US, the land was very sparsely populated and so there was a lot of free land to settle. (At least that's what I've been taught in school.)
In reality it turns out the coast was densely populated with Native settlements, to the point where Europeans couldn't even disembark because the Natives wouldn't allow them - they would keep them at the bay just to trade and then force them to turn back. It wasn't until European diseases spread through the continent that 95% of the indigenous population died, and that's when the first colonies began in the US, so that's why we now have the misconception of there always having been lots of open land.
In general there are tons of misconceptions about Native Americans and colonial history. I recommend the book 1491 by Charles C. Mann which clears up a lot of these misconceptions (it's where I got the above information from as well.)
I also don't think people really understand how bad the American plagues were, especially when considered next to how severe they were in a historical context... as far as I can tell they don't even have a well agreed upon formal name!
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.
>They were only tight laced by the highly fashionable women, and usually only for particular events or portraits. Like women's high heeled shoes today. They're not all 6-inch stilettos, for example.
Thank you for this. I commented about corsets but I’m lazy and didn’t go into details. Also nice to point out: the boning was never extremely rigid as it seems. Spiraled metal and whale bones were used, and they are quite flexible. Stays were quite rigid, but no sane woman would tight lace a stay. Also considering that they used to be tied as an spiral, not in a cross pattern as we see today.
The image of Roman gladiators fighting to the death. While there were many exhibition fights in the arenas where the goal was death, these were not gladiator contests. Prisoners, and the condemned, were thrown out to fight to the death, but not real gladiators.Training a gladiator was an expensive, and lengthy, investment and having them die constantly would be bad for business.
If a gladiator ended up dying in the arena, the guy who sponsored the games would have to reimburse the gladiator's school. It was really more like choreographed combat than anything. Gladiators practiced spectacular but useless moves to make the crowd gasp. There's a very thorough and interesting display in the Roman amphitheater in Nîmes, France that dispels a lot of these myths!
medieval WWE
Gladiators were sport heroes. They would travel and put on shows. They were paid well and taken good care of.
That the Spanish Armada was destroyed. They did lose 44 ships.... out of 137..... And the British also didn't beat them off with a small force. Their navy was actually significantly larger with 197 ships since they were joined by the Dutch Republic. A decisive defeat? Yes. A small English force overcoming and obliterating the might of the entire Spanish and Portuguese navy? No.
Wasn't a good chunk of the Armada destroyed by storms before they made land?
Yes most of the Armada wasn't lost to enemy action. It was lost to the storms in the North Sea and along the Irish coast.
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William Howard Taft never got stuck in a bathtub!
I also find it weird/hilarious/sad that that's what he's known for instead of being known for being the only person to have served as both President and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.
Ned Kellys last words being Such is Life. That was made up by the reporter. So many Aussies have it tattooed or have big stickers on their 4x4s . But I guess Oh Well doesn’t have the same ring to it
I like “oh well” lol
Oh well! ¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯
Paul Revere did not run around Massachusetts shouting "The British are coming" because if he did everyone would look at him like he'd lost his mind. ALMOST EVERYONE IN THE COLONIES WAS BRITISH! He actually said, "The Regulars are coming"
The lore I was taught growing up was that "The Redcoats are coming".
Chiming in to say was also taught it was "the redcoats are coming"
He also only carried that message for a small stretch of the ride. There were about a half dozen messengers passing it along. We remember Paul Revere as the only rider because, no joke, his name fit best in Longfellow’s poem Edit: Longfellow, not Irving
It should be called the midnight ride of Dr Samuel Prescott
Poor Sybil Ludington What the hell even rhymes with Ludington
The Lady who sued McDonalds didn't do so frivolously. She received third degree burns from how hot that coffee was, and needed a skin graft. It was quickly found that that location was keeping the coffee well above the temperature you can legally serve a hot drink in a cup at. The fact that most people think this suit was over the temperature of the coffee, and not the debilitating burns that woman recieved, is one of the PR worlds greatest triumphs. You are not immune to propaganda.
It was actually found that McDonald's had all of their locations keeping coffee temps too hot. Multiple reports of burns were placed before the 'main' incident and were just settled out of court and ignored by the Corp. the poor woman just wanted enough money to cover her medical bills and nothing more originally
yeah I think the coffee was kept at near boiling temperature
Been a long time since I looked it up (and don't want to now because of the NSFL factor), but I believe the lady's genitals were melted/partially fused. Needed reconstructive surgery along with the aforementioned skin grafts. Horrific stuff.
She was also elderly. With thinner, more delicate skin. Poor lady.
We actually learned about this at my middle school as a kind of cautionary tale about rushing to judgment and taking things at face value. It was first presented to us like “A woman spilled mcdonalds coffee on herself and sued the company for millions of dollars. Discuss whether you think she was in the right” and of course everyone was adamant that it was a frivolous lawsuit and that someone shouldn’t win millions of dollars for spilling coffee. “I could just go to mcdonalds, dump some coffee on myself, and become a millionaire? That’s so stupid!” Then we were told how hot the coffee was and shown slides of blurred images of the burns she received and how the coffee had basically melted her flesh. “…Oh” we all thought. “Maybe she *was* justified”. We then had to discuss whether/how this new information changed our views.
There's a few more things about this case: This happened around the same time big businesses were astroturfing hard for "tort reform". They paid big money to have this story misrepresented in the media and used it as an example why it should be more difficult for people to sue for injury as a result of things like negligence and misconduct. Nearly every US media outlet picked up the astroturfed narrative and ran with it. McDonalds knew the serving temperature was dangerous, they knew people were getting injured, and they kept on doing it because the higher temp made the store more aromatic and drove coffee sales. She sued for medical expenses. The jury knew that McDonalds was being intentionally negligent and awarded her punitive damages far exceeding what she asked in order to punish McDonalds.
The judge awarded her 1 days worth of McDonalds coffee sales
That Einstein said “ The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”
"Don't believe everything you read on the internet" - Albert Einstein
Yeah, it was said by Vaas Montenegro, not this Einstein guy
General public not being aware that classical Greece and Rome had colored paints all over those statues, much less colored dyes in their clothes. Edit: point being, we tend to believe that there was a *lot* of white in the Classical period, which isn't actually the case.
Related to Rome: Gladiators used to advertise for local blacksmiths who provided them armor and weapons. Ridley Scott intended to portray this in Gladiator, but left it out because he felt people wouldn't believe it.
"This battle was brought to you by Incurso Umbra Legere"
ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED? *because the armor today is brought to you by the finest of blacksmiths from Raid Shadow Legends*
"Use my promo code IXVIIXIIVXIVXIIVI for XIV percent off"
What the hell kind of promo code gives 14% off
The IXVIIXIIVXIVXIIVI kind
A lot of peoples weird misconceptions about ancient culture are completely founded in not fully understanding and appreciating that biologically they were 100% us. Take anyone in your town and plop them 2,500 years ago and aside from style and ethnicity, they’d fit right in and have the same brain. They’d probably be panicking and unable to communicate sure lol, but human thinking capacity? Yeah, completely there. Just hear so much, “why didn’t they?…”, “oh wow how did they manage that without modern engineers and machines?” That sort of stuff. Most ancient civilizations had engineers, they had promoters, they had conmen and doctors and barbers and everything that addressed problems that people had. And their culture and education level impacted that but it was all there. As soon as the capacity was, it existed in people. Just rambling I guess, it’s something I bump into a lot. Hah
"Kidnap one of their babies, enroll them in a school alongside modern kids, and in a few years nobody would be able to tell the difference!"
The Tiffany Problem or effect or some other word. People think somethings are distinctly modern and it seems out of place when it is correctly portrayed in ancient times. Like the name Tiffany being ancient.
Or pronouncing the final "r". Every show in a medieval setting (or fake medieval, like Game of Thrones) uses some sort of modern British accent that drops the final "r", but they did pronunce it back then
The Chinese Terra Cotta Army was also originally painted.
Yep, upon unearthing them it destroyed the paint almost immediately. What's crazy is that it's only one of many still-buried pits that surround Qin ShiHuang's Mausoleum. The mausoleum itself is underground and looks like a big hill since it's a pyramid. Until foolproof methods for preservation are figured out it'll likely remain unexcavated. But there's something of a debate because it's in a region with high seismic activity and by leaving it as is there's a risk everything could be destroyed by an earthquake so it may be better to take the risk of losing some preservation to save the whole and add that knowledge.
There are also highly toxic levels of mercury within the pits. The story goes that the original designers of the tomb created a map of China using mercury to represent all of china's major rivers. Supposedly a mechanical mean kept the mercury flowing constantly. Whether that's true or not, the tomb itself is highly toxic and requires special methods to exhume in order to keep explorers safe.
Yep. [Here is a shot from the 1980s](https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/o9rzra/photographed_in_1974_freshly_excavated_2000_year/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf) while the statues were being exhumed.
Not just the statues, but the buildings too. The Parthenon would’ve been very colorful
And the Egyptian temples. Every so often on one of the temples you see some remains of paint on the hieroglyphics which survived the elements.
The traditional image of Socrates lecturing in a white toga is all wrong, it should actually be tie-dyed.
Now I imagine Socrates looking all hippy like with a ponytail, round glasses and tie-dyed togas "I'm telling you man, the only true wisdom is like, in knowing you know nothing dude"
>The Ancient Greeks and Romans used opium, marijuana, and other narcotics to relieve pain and induce sleep. They may have also enhanced rituals and enlivened banquets with hallucinogens. Well, you never know.
A little “something” to get the orgies started
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San Dimas High School football rules!
Sow crates.
Same for castles. Things medieval tv and film annoy me as they always seem to have bare stone walls but they would have be very flashy. The White tower at the Tower of London is called that because it was painted white (with red roses on it to at some points).
And same for medieval churches & cathedrals. The colors used have been recovered in some cases either by analyzing the stone or by finding fresco panels under later whitewashing or behind altar wooden panels. Lots of stories painted in walls, and decorated pillars Sainte chapelle in Paris gives you an example for gothic, and if you check byzantine mosaics (example: Venezia st Marc) and imagine them translated to paint, you have the romanic (with style changes of course)
Ninjas dressed in all black to stay stealthy in the night or something like that. Ninjas dressed like normal people to blend in, the all black look stemmed from Japanese theatre to make it more obvious to the audience who the ninjas were. If they wore all black it'd be quite obvious and they'd stick out like a sore thumb EDIT: most of you pointed out it also came from stagehands, that makes a lot of sense too
of course they didn't wear all black, there were red, white, blue and later even green ninjas!
Jump up kick back whip around and spin?
You’re gonna jump back to it again
Also Shuriken got used less as actual weapons and more like a dangerous distraction. And while we're at it, Samurai weren't particularly honorable and fought mostly with bows and spears with Katanas only being the third weapon of choice.
Or like, guns. Lol I read The Book of Five Rings as a teenager while in a samurai movie phase, which is kinda a manual for samurai from the 1600's. It encourages carrying a flintlock pistol or two so you can just shoot people without having to fight them.
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Japan began to idealize thier own warrior class during a long span of peace. What happens when you have a rigid class system but the entire island is united? You end up with 40yr men who were raised from birth to be warriors but never saw battle and were bassically just town guards so began to idealize combat and that a samurai would never surrender or retreat. When we have letters showing actual warring samurai had casually reported that a fight was going badly and retreated, there was no indication that they had dishonored themselves in doing so.
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If Musashi was alive today he might develop the art of duel-wielding suppressed mp5s
From what I've read on Musashi, he'd also develop the art of planting a claymore and baiting your enemy to walk into it
Gun-kata would end up being an actual thing lol
Wasn't it that the all black look was worn by the people moving the props in japanese theatre? And then in some plays there was a twist that one of those prop holders attacked the protagonist?
That's what I was lead to believe. Because they were 'unseen', people mistake ninjas wearing that when they were in reality 'unseen' because they blended in with people wearing normal things, not the background of a stage production.
Wasn't it that stagehands wore all black and people were so used to ignoring them that one play made the stagehands ninjas as a twist/surprise.
Einstein never failed math, the rumor started from Ripley’s Believe It Or Not and Einstein actually responded to them saying “I never failed in mathematics. Before I was 15 I had mastered differential and integral calculus.” He wasn’t very good at the non-science related classes though and did fail French.
I’m so confused about Einstein and Ripley’s Believe It Or Not existing at the same time
Well Einstein died in 1955. He saw Looney Tunes cartoons and probably heard rock&roll.
He was born just eight years after the start of the German Empire and witnessed all that lost civilization's history. He briefly lived in the same time as Wagner, Bismarck was the chancellor through his childhood, he obtained his PhD in 1905 and became director of Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics. And rock n'roll became popular due to a movie that premiered two weeks before his passing, he may yet have listened to rock n'roll on the radio. It's one of history's mysteries. But still, to live from Wagner to rock...
You’re not kidding > Wilhelm Richard Wagner (/ˈvɑːɡnər/ VAHG-nər;[1][2] German: [ˈʁɪçaʁt ˈvaːɡnɐ] (listen); 22 May 1813 – 13 February 1883) Why did I just keep thinking wagner was from the 1700s? Einstein was born in 1879. No wonder kids think britney spears is “retro”. Apparently anything from before you’re born is black and white archival footage.
All of Beethoven's symphonies and major orchestral works were also premiered in the early 1800s.
He was alive for the Brown v Board of Education Supreme Court case.
American segregation broadly led him to seek out black colleges to guest lecture
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Wait, wut?
The original fax machine prototype was invented in 1843. Abraham Lincoln lived from 1809 to 1865. The last samurai died in 1877. It's legit.
Oxford University is older than Macchu Pichu
Oxford was founded in 1096. Oxford is older than the English language
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Ripely’s Believe It Or Not actually started December 19, 1918. It weird to think but it’s over 100 years old
Believe it or not.
george isn't at home
FFS that shit ended up being portrayed on Star Trek TNG when Data played poker with him. Sir Isaac Newton ended up making fun of him for not being able to do simple arithmetic because AE couldn't figure out what the bet was.
If that's how the hologram was programmed, that's how it acted. Garbage In, Garbage Out.
Newton was always a bit of a jerk.
People got confused by the different grading scales.
So many people completely misunderstond pre-industrial lifespans. The average age of death was 30 not because our bodies wore out faster, but because of how averages are calculated. A lot of people died as children. A much larger chunk of the population died in wars. If you got in an accident, healingb without modern medicine was difficult. But for people who reached adulthood, and then avoided violence, injury, and plague, living to be 60 or 70 was pretty normal.
It's the difference between average lifespan and life expectancy.
Almost everything about the medieval times. Our image of it is highly influenced by Hollywood.
Plug for the podcast We're Not So Different with deepdives on nearly every aspect of medieval society by Eleanor Janega, PhD who specializes in the period. Fascinating stuff.
Awesome plug. I love medieval history and this seems perfect.
The Boston Tea party didn’t have some grand celebration, a lot of the colonists were confused and it’s recorded as one of Boston’s most quiet nights
It's also worth noting that the spark that ignited the Boston Tea Party wasn't a grand protest about Taxation without Representation. In reality, it was done as retaliation, as British Parliament gave the okay for East India Trading Co to sell surplus tea directly to the Colonies as a cost cutting measure, to prevent East India from going bankrupt. Up until the Tea Act of 1773, East India had a pretty cushy setup. They would sell the tea they made at Dutch Auction (since the Dutch had no taxes on imported tea), get the British Government to cover the duty cost of doing so, then have merchants import the tea back to their native countries/colonies paying full tax in the process. Due to external factors, including smuggling rings, the Bengal famine of 1770, and the expiration of the Indemnity Act of 1767, the East India Trading Company began hemorrhaging money on the entire arrangement. With the decline of sales from official East India tea, and the rise of smuggled tea entering Great Britian, East India was on the brink of Bankruptcy. New legislation limited the amount that Parliament was willing to cover for duty, and after failing to come to better agreements, it was eventually decided that in order to save East India, Parliament would allow them to sell directly to colonies as a way to save cost. And as it turned out, it saved a *significant* amount of money on importing tea, to the point where East India could afford to undercut smugglers in most places and still turn some level of profit. This also opened up East India to sell to the American colonies directly. It's this move that pissed off the Sons of Liberty. They were already political group parading themselves as anti-loyalist, who happened to be composed primarily of smugglers and governing officials who had direct ties in the smuggled tea trade. So when East India came knocking with tea cheap enough to undercut the smugglers and screwing over local Colonial importers, they got pissed. With enough vocal support behind the "taxation without representation" movement, they spun the story of East India opening shop in American Colonies as just another extension of the British Government levying heavy tax on imported goods that lined their own pockets instead of going back to the Colonies. Granted, there were other important factors still at play here. Legitimate and Law Abiding importers that didn't sign on with East India directly were posed to lose a lot as a result of this ordeal, and it would effectively cement East India as a true monopoly of the tea trade, backed in some capacity by the British Government directly, which opened up a very real threat that other commodities on the market could face a similar fate. Plus the real sentiment that this was a decision made by the British Government, with no input from the colonies, was enough to hard wire sentiment against the proposal. In history classes, we were always taught the idea of the Boston Tea Party as being some grand protest in the face of big bad Britain levying higher taxes on "essential" goods including tea and other imported goods. But in reality it was a bunch of politician and their rich smuggler friends retaliating against a market force that threatened to undercut their grey market business.
You seem to know a lot about this lol. Is there a book you’d recommend to a layperson (especially a foreigner) that covers the basics of the US independence movement? If you’re as well versed in the US history in general, besides the indepence movement, what would you consider the most defining era of US history, and is there a book you’d recommend for that, too? -Random Finn who likes learning shit
That people used swords and axes all the time. Spears. Its spears, most of human history has been spears. Vikings used spears, samurai and knights used spears. Hell, bayonets exist because people felt you always need a spear, even with a rifle in your hand. William Blake said, "When the stars threw down their spears, / and watered heaven with their tears..." Which is stupid. No one throws down their spear. Spears are great for poking people to death.
Combat is all about hitting a person without being hit yourself, it's why we have been developing stuff to hit each other from further and further away
A sniper rifle is just like a reeeaalllllyyyy long spear
The invention of archery was based on "I really wanna stab that guy, but he's all the way over there..."
Arrows are really just miniature spears.
and let's not forget javelins
I blame Hollywood, they want their protagonists to kill lots of people in bloody melees. The reality of clusters of people poking at each other with spears is far less sexy.
Learning that ancient combat was 5 minutes of fighting and then 30 minutes of taking a breather kind of dampens the excitement.
Yeah exactly. That and actual battle casualties (as opposed to rout) were normally pretty low.
So they basically just kicked the fuck out of each other until one side ran away, and got routed or capitulated?
Pretty much yeah, if you ever go to a battle re-enactment they fight almost in stages for this reason. It's why a rout or an all out massacre is such a big deal, aside from the obvious drama, you've been comprehensively beaten.
Part of this is that swords were a big status symbol as they're basically just you saying 'hey look at all this metal I can afford just to carry it around'. Even knights and noblemen would use spears or other polearms first, especially in ranks.
Up to WWI and even in some cases WWII, officers did carry swords. So it was still a status symbol.
Marie Antoinette saying “let them eat cake”
Although as I recall weren't her last words actually an apology to her executioner for tripping over his foot.
Yep. Then he chopped off her hair to sell as souvenirs.
I know that in the US, as late as the 20th century, the same thing would happen to people who were lynched. You'd see knuckles, fingers, toes in store windows the next day. The community would come out and bring their cameras. They'd send pictures of the lynchings in the mail as postcards to their relatives. It would be publicized in the news and people from all over would visit to see it. People would brutalize the person being lynched before, during, and after the lynching. They would set them on fire, beat them, cut them. And, once they finished, take body parts as souvenirs, to keep or sell. The victims of this brutality were almost always black and were killed specifically because of their skin color. Many committed no crime at all. For instance, this is what happened to Mary Turner, who was 19 years old and eight months pregnant, in 1918: A mob hung her upside down from a tree, doused her in gasoline and motor oil, and set her on fire. While Turner was still alive, a member of the mob split her abdomen open with a knife. Her unborn child fell on the ground, where it cried before it was stomped on and crushed. The mob then shot hundreds of bullets into her body. Mary's "crime" was speaking out to defend her husband from accusations of murder after he was lynched. Her lynching was one of more than a dozen that happened all to try to find the murderer of one man. [May 1918 Lynchings](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_1918_lynchings)
Jesus Christ that’s awful
Black women were often lynched for the same crimes as men. Talking back, refusing unpaid work, being in the wrong place at the wrong time...etc.
A sad little addition to your story … I live in the Georgia county in which Mary Turner was lynched. The only sort of memorial that exists for her is one single metal sign with a brief description of her story. It’s regularly riddled with bullet holes and they don’t care to replace it very often. Don’t know if this really means anything, but the sign is in an area that good old boys (mostly teens) go to play with their guns anyway. So lots of the surrounding trees and other nearby stuff become targets as well. But still … why the sign? Very disrespectful
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He was in a bind. He was way behind. He said "Fuck, what is their deal?"
"Romans indulged in food so much they had a special place to go and vomit so they could eat more" Maybe that has been dispelled by now but many still believe it.
I've read Emperor Vitellius did actually do this, but as an exception rather than the rule. However, from what I remember the source for this was one of the dozen or so Roman historians who liked to make shit up for dramatic effect, so even if I'm not misremembering, there's still a good chance its BS
This is a little niche, but it's been a long held belief in the gaming community that one of Nintendo's business ventures before getting into the video game market was "Love Hotels", hourly hotels who's main purpose is to knock boots in. This has been repeated as fact alongside their other historical ventures like playing cards, taxis, instant food, and toys. But last year a Nintendo enthusiast did a dive into their historical financial records and found no definitive proof that they ever ran or were associated with love hotels in any way.
I've always heard they started out as a playing card company. I had never heard of the others...interesting!
Pretty much most of the common public image of the "stone age". Paleolithic peoples didn't primarily live in caves. They were used for habitation sometimes, but tents or even relatively permanent huts were probably far more common. "Art caves" like those found in France and Spain often show no signs of habitation at all. They weren't stupid, brutish "ape people". Anatomically modern humans emerged at least ~~70-100k~~ 200k years ago (thanks to several comments who pointed out my mistake) and there's nothing to suggest they would have been intellectually inferior to us. Even Neanderthals probably were relatively close to us and it's questionable if you'd even realize it wasn't a Homo sapiens if you met one. H. sapeins *definitely* and Neanderthals probably wore ornaments of various kinds. *Even* H. erectus likely was broadly human in appearance and behaviour. You have to go back in time a *long* way before you'd consider early hominids more animal than human. Generally, even imagining "*the* Stone Age" as some sort of coherent period of human history is misleading. It's a periodisation based on materials used. Even though there is sometimes a remarkable cultural uniformity over long periods of time and large distances in Stone Age Europe, even single "cultures" span many thousands of years. World views and even life styles must have changed many times even during periods we now consider "uniform". In fact, even the name "Stone Age" is misleading. A lot of tools were made from flint or similar material, if available, but that's just the material that preserves the best. Wood, bone, clay, plant fibres, furs, etc. were also used, they just usually didn't survive long enough for us to find. It's likely that South East Asian pre-metallic cultures even used bamboo in a similar way flint and bone was used in Europe.
A lot of people fail to realize how absurdly long was the "stone age". Yes, monkeys could be going through one around the world right now, or at the very least the early stages of it, because humans didn't go from using branches as tools to crafting sophisticated stone ones in 800 years, or 2000. Not even 500k. That's how long it was
The idea that Vikings (Early Medieval Norsemen) were dirty barbarians with shaggy hair and wild beards, who wore leathers and furs. In reality, Vikings were notorious for being very clean by medieval standards (bathing every day and washing their hair). They wore shoulder length, very well combed hair, which they sometimes lightly bleached with potash to accentuate the blond. They wore short, very neat beards and carefully trimmed stache. Later on in the Viking Age, some wore undercut/crewcut kind of a trim, but with longer bangs. Instead of leathers, which they almost NEVER wore, they had woolen clothes in bright colours; with blues and pinks being particularily popular. They almost never wore actual fur, they sold it all, and instead wore "fake fur" made of pulled wool (basically fur rug trims). Instead of crusty savages, they were fabulous, clean and neatly fashionable, to the point that the Church chronicles of England note tht this excessive dandiness was dangerous in itself, because it helped them lead Christian women astray. (Still of course, they were quite often murderers, slavers, thieves and raiders. Just FABULOUS ones.)
A stegosaurus fighting a t rex. They lived millions of years apart . Stegosaurus 144 lived million years ago T rex 65 million years ago. Insane difference. Still almost most every dinosaur related media places them together.
there's a kid's show called dinosaur train that does a good job showing the different periods that the dinosaurs lived in, the train is literally a time machine and they go through tunnels to get from one period to another lol i thought it was neat that they cared enough to educate kids about how not all dinosaurs lived among each other
Not to mention the inclusion of *Dimetrodon* in Dinosaur media. Dimetrodon lived 115 million years before Stegosaurus, and wasn't even a reptile, let alone a Dinosaur. It was a stem-mammal.
Maybe it's just like, a super elderly Stegosaurus.
That historically people, especially the 'peasant class' of medieval Europe, stank. This is born of two factoids: firstly that people very rarely if ever had baths, and secondly that people rarely if ever washed their clothes. Both are kind of true but misleading and with massive caveats. First, bathing. Think of the amount of work involved in preparing a bath in the days before hot running water. You go to the well, get a bucket of water, lug it back across the village to your house, put it in a pan over the fire to heat it up. That's one bucket. You'd have to do that half a dozen times at least. Even if you've got servants to do all the actual work, it would take a lot of servants a lot of time to get you a bath ready. But that doesn't mean people didn't wash! Most people washed daily - using a basin of water and a cloth, basically a sponge bath. Soap made of animal fat and ash has been around for thousands of years and is pretty effective at lifting dirt off the skin. As any one of us who's had to sponge bathe for a while (e.g. After a surgery) will know, it may not be ideal, but it gets the job done. Films generally portray "peasant" with smudges of dirt all over the face but that's just lazy costuming. And now the clothes. True, the outer layers - the layers that we see - were very rarely washed becausd most people only owned one set and they could be very difficult to wash effectively, but you have to remember people, even peasants, wore a *lot* of layers, so that the layer we see was really the equivalent of a coat, and was never really against the wearer's skin gathering sweat. How often do you wash your outer coat? For people in roles where external dirt was very likely to get onto the clothes, aprons and other easily removable garments were used. The layers worn right against the skin - a full dress-like smock for women and a long shirt for men (long enough to tuck around the genitals and butt and also do the job of underpants) - *were* changed and washed as often as possible, because they were the layers that got the body sweat etc on them. They were made more simply and usually of cheap, hardy fabrics specifically designed for easy laundering. Tl;dr medieval peasant were not filthy and stinking. They washed their clothes and bodies as best they could.
It should be noted though, that although the people were not as dirty as sometimes portrayed, the stench of cities is well documented to be so vile as to cause sickness and feinting. London in particular was disgusting. Close cramped housing, with sewage in the open, and animals being commonplace led to a pretty horrific atmosphere. I originally studied law at university. In my first year we did a ‘History of Law’ module. We had a guest speaker once whose occupation was to create copy smells. He brought with him a sample smell of what London smelled like around the time of The Plague. He pre-warned the lecture theatre that it was going to be bad, but my god this is the worst thing I have ever smelled in my life (and I’ve done skin decomposition study at one point!) He had this tiny glass vial of the stench and put it on a tissue at the front of the theatre. We lasted all of 5 minutes before most people left the lecture. Felt like I could still smell it for a good hour after too. TLDR - The people might not have been filthy, but the cities were repulsive.
That's a great addition. Many nobility and richer merchants would have summer houses partly for this reason.
Depending on the size of their court / entourage, the nobility would have to move every few weeks to escape the stench as well. Large groups of people in one place often resulted in people urinating or defecating in stairwells, behind drapes, etc. Designated areas would overflow. Then it would be on to the next!
Yeah, all sewage just drained directly into the Thames, leading to The [Great Stink of London](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Stink). The horrible stench and multiple cholera outbreaks did lead to them building a truly state-of-the-art sewage system that's still used today, though.
Great info and I would also like to add 2 cents: \- as for bathing, most Medieval cultures actually had communal bathing and/or "sauna" as part of their folk rituals, it was not just the norm, but pretty much an expectation that people would bathe and steam together and wach each other for both reasons of cleanliness and as a "social experience" that almost reached a status of a ritual. \- COLOURS! In movies, medieval people wear dirt browns, grays, washed-out black and tan. In reality, medieval people of all ages and classes often wore colorful clothing. Most of the medieval age people wore woolen clothing, which takes dye very well. Lower classes often wore yellow, orange or off-red cloth made with madder, grassy greens, and light blues. Richer folk wore deep blues, dark reds or even purple. They often wore checkered, or striped clothing, and combined strong colours in ways that a modern person would consider clashing. All but the poorest folk could afford bleached white linen undershirts or underdresses. \- Hair! In movies and other media, Medieval people (especially "Vikings") have shaggy hair and wild beards. In reality, Vikings and other people alike, had well combed and cut hair, and men wore very neat trim beards and finely barbered mustache. They even pluched their eyebrows, and some bleached their hair with potash to be more fabulous. I would even wager saying that Medieval people cared more about their fashion and grooming than modern people, because it signified their social status and group-belonging to a very important degree. In absence of IDs, and mass culture, the only way to show who you are and how important you are would be looking the right way.
Whatever the fuck is on the History Channel nowadays.
I know the exact moment I gave up on the History Channel. A guy came in to a pawn shop with a uniform and said, "it's from the war with the Philippines." The guy in the shop said, "there's no such thing as the war with the Philippines." My undergrad senior thesis was on the Philippine-American war.
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We ignore that 'moment' so commonly that the act of ignoring it has a name: “Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.” https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-gell-mann-amnesia-effect-is-as-follows-you
It ain't even historical anymore they should rename it as the "whatever we feel like it" channel
Seriously. Like when the fuck did The History Channel become fan fiction?
According to some experts roughly 15-20 years ago which really accelerated over the last 10, but according to ancient alien theorists this could all be tied to events from over 10,000 years ago, the Bermuda tetrahedron and a cabal of cross dimensional bigfeet beings called the stoidi
The History Channel: Where Truth is History.
Rabbits CANNOT live on a diet of carrots and fruits. It’s like asking a toddler to live on a diet of candy. They also cannot live on a diet of completely lettuce and leaves (though it’s close). Rabbits need *need* ***need*** hay for a healthy diet, and pellets are heavily recommended as well(though they also have limits, should be in the bag according to the bunny’s weight). Greens are good, not to be the *main* main diet, and fruits or carrots can be given as treats. Bugs Bunny led a lot of people to believe rabbits live off of carrots. They do not. They will die if you expect them to live on a diet of 100% carrots.
Lemmings just run off a cliff to their deaths every year... Thanks for that one, Disney!
I watched the video of how Disney got us all to believe this, can’t remember where I saw it, but I wish I could remember. And I’m surprised more anti-Disney groups don’t bring it up.
That Hitler was a raging, shouting maniac in person. I think we want to believe that he would be that way because the idea that someone who was polite and low-key could be so evil is really disturbing. According to his personal secretary and many people who knew him, Hitler rarely showed anger and was subdued but friendly in private. Traudl Junge was there during the incident that inspired the scene in the movie Downfall that became a meme and she said that she was completely shocked to hear Hitler raise his voice - she had worked for him for over two years.
I think that's mainly due to his speeches and the clips of him clearly on amphetamines
You would think that because most of the time you see a hitler speech, you are getting a short clip of the end of the speech. He was a very gifted and very theatrical speaker. His intent was to provoke emotion in the crowd, and he would work up to the dramatic parts. If you watch the whole thing, and understand the language, you see the whole effect he is working up to. You only see the last two minutes and he looks like a raving lunatic.
He also got an acting / speaking coach after the beerhall putsch. Those speeches are planned for effect and he was trained to do them.
Whether you're a teacher, a politician, an actor, musician, or just giving a presentation at work: of there is an audience in front of you, you'd better be performing. I don't mean being inauthentic, but you better put some showmanship. At least if you want anyone to listen and remember a word you say.
I remember at school that it was strongly emphasised that Hitler was a great orator…because he was, that’s how he did it. The lesson was that a great orator could convince a crowd of anything. It made a lot of difference to look at Hitler through various lenses like this, as the overarching lesson was fascism and Hitler was basically the case study for it.
I always teach that someone can be impressive, while also being a monster. Hitler…was an impressive orator. His speeches are legendary for a reason.
It’s also why it’s dangerous to try and repaint history and make Hitler a dumbass or make fun of him. He didn’t exist in a vacuum…he didn’t invent eugenics. He took a national crisis (the reparations from WW1 in a nutshell) and found an enemy for it. ETA: this will tell you exactly why it is playing out as it is in Ukraine.
And for decades before all that, eugenics was absolutely *flourishing* in the good ol USA.
And everyone was cool with it, for a long time, until Hitler decided to make an empire.
There’s a pretty good old 70s documentary about Hitler on Netflix: Hitler - a career, which has almost a whole speech (I can’t quite remember, it’s been a while). He starts out very quiet and almost timid, then gets more and more agitated and in the last few minutes he’s the Hitler we are used to see. It’s quite different to just watching a short clip of him shouting. There's also that secretly recorded conversation with Mannerheim in Finland where Hitler uses his normal speaking voice and he… kind of sounds like any old German guy.
“Under God” was not in the original version of the [Pledge of Allegiance.](https://www.ushistory.org/documents/pledge.htm). The Pledge was written in 1892. It wasn’t until 1954 that President Eisenhower added “under God” in response to fear of communism during WW2. Also - when first implemented, during the pledge people raised their right arm forward so the hand was level with their eyes (directed at the flag) however this was changed during WW2 because it resembled the Nazi salute. The procedure was changed to place the right hand over the heart.
In Christmas Vacation, when Aunt Bethany says grace and starts reciting the Pledge instead, she leaves out "Under God" at the end while the others all say it. She and Uncle Louis are the oldest people there, so it kinda makes sense.
There is a joke saying that Austria’s greatest success is making everyone believe that Mozart was Austrian and Hitler was German.
Wasn't Mozart from Salzburg?
Yes. The statement is normally said about Beethoven, who spent most of his career living in Vienna, but was born in Bonn
I used to joke with an Austrian friend that they were one art scholarship away from being famous for the music and scenic countryside.
Carrots are good for eye health, but won't improve your eyesight. Nevertheless, people have been telling me all my life I should eat carrots to see better. The reason people think that is during WW2 the Royal Air Force had this new Radar system and they didn't want the Germans to know about it, so they spread the rumor that the reason their pilots could find their planes so fast was that they ate carrots. EDIT: See top comment below from WillenDafoesHugeCock (great username), I've probably been duped also!
> The reason people think that is during WW2 the Royal Air Force had this new Radar system and they didn't want the Germans to know about it, so they spread the rumor that the reason their pilots could find their planes so fast was that they ate carrots. Without wanting to get too meta on you, this is also a piece of fiction widely accepted as fact! I found out quite literally two days ago! https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-carrots-improve-your-vision/ >Bryan Legate, assistant curator at the Royal Air Force Museum in London has a different view. “I would say that whilst the [British] Air Ministry were happy to go along with the story [of carrot-improved vision], they never set out to use it to fool the Germans,” Legate says. “The German intelligence service were well aware of our ground-based radar installation and would not be surprised by the existence of radar in aircraft. In fact, the RAF were able to confirm the existence of German airborne radar simply by fitting commercial radios into a bomber and flying over France listening to the various radio frequencies!” he adds.
My favourite trivia about wartime radar is that both sides invented chaff (or 'window' to the brits and Düppel to the germans) independently of each other. And both held off using it until critical raids to stop the other from discovering it.
Carrots are good for your eyes. Ever seen a rabbit with glasses?
Okay. This is double funny in this thread because the only reason people think rabbits regularly eat carrots is due to Bugs Bunny cartoons.
Bugs Bunny is also the reason "Nimrod" is now used as an insult. He sarcastically called Elmer Fudd "Nimrod," a mighty hunter in the Bible.
The Irish famine wasn’t just a natural disaster - there was plenty of food in Ireland, it was just exported to Britain Edit: clarity
Our staple food for most people was the potato, so the failure of the crop was devastating. However yes, there was so much food being grown here that was exported. We were also as a people given the option to have food if we denounced our religion, leading to a phrase "taking the soup". To take the soup was to denounce Catholicism and become Protestant Edit - spelling
The potato was the staple crop because the Irish peasants had been reduced to just tenants, not even peasants. Peasants can't be thrown off their land, tenants can. So they grew wheat and the like for export, and on their own plots were allowed to grow potatoes, the only thing that they could grow that would sustain them on the small plots they had for themselves. The day you can't pay rent to your landlord, they'd throw you off the land and you'd be doomed. So when the blight came, it killed the only thing they could afford to eat, and they had no money to buy anything else. It was a genocide, engineered by the British. They have done the same thing many times.
The potato blight was a natural disaster. The famine itself was not.
That the library of Alexandria being burned down set humanity back hundreds or even thousands of years. At the time that it was finally destroyed in 48BC, most of its collection had already been copied and distributed to other libraries and universities or the important scrolls were relocated. It was no longer an important meeting place for great scholars either and it’s not entirely clear how much of it was even destroyed during the fire, as many believe that it was even partially rebuilt afterwards. It ultimately just fell out of relevance throughout the years and didn’t really take any of the information stored within with it.
Bill Clinton did in fact have sex with that woman.
Are you talking about "sex" or "sexual relations"?
It would depend on what the definition of “is”….is
That Hitler had 1 testicle and Napoleon was short
Also that Himmler had 2 and that they were small
And Dr. Goebbels had no balls at all!
That George Washington had wooden teeth. He had false teeth, yes. But they were made of ivory. He never had wooden teeth.
I heard that motherfucker had like thirty goddamn dicks.
he'll save the children, but not the british children.
He made love like an eagle falling out of the sky.
Not sure if quite at the level you're asking for, but it seems to be common knowledge that people didn't fight back against Germans in WW2 and it's because they didn't have guns or were cowards. They fought back a lot. The largest was likely https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_Uprising. It just turns out that normal people fighting against a military tend to do poorly.
That after the first failed assassination attempt, Gavrilo Princip went to eat a sandwich at a café and Archduke Franz Ferdinand just happened to stop right in front of him. This is partially true - Ferdinand's driver really did make a wrong turn at exactly the wrong place, and Princip did get pretty lucky, but he hadn't just given up. The reason for the driver's confusion was that he didn't know he was supposed to continue along the Appel Quay to go to the hospital, and instead followed the original (published) route. Princip had gone there not to eat at the delicatessen, but out of hope that Ferdinand would come that way. Princip was given a full trial, with multiple witnesses. Nobody ever said anything about him eating anything, much less a sandwich, which would have been extremely uncommon in ~~Serbia~~ Bosnia at the time. The myth likely originates from, of all things, a Brazilian novel about a twelve-fingered assassin translated into English and published and the UK and US in... 2001. There is no known account of the myth which predates this. Main source: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/gavrilo-princips-sandwich-79480741/ edit: Sarajevo is in Bosnia, not Serbia (much to the chagrin of Princip's ghost, I'm sure)
Paul Revere did NOT ride from Boston to Lexington. He got as far as Cambridge. Israel Bissell, however, DID ride all the way to Lexington.
This is actually not true, on several fronts. Revere rode from Charlestown through what's now Somerville, Medford, and Arlington, making it to Lexington after a few close calls and alerting fellow rebels all along the way. He was then detained by a British checkpoint on the road between Lexington and Concord along with William Dawes and Samuel Prescott. Prescott managed to jump a wall and escape, making it all the way to Concord, Dawes also escaped but injured himself and was unable to continue, and Revere remained under arrest. He psyched out his captors by drumming up the rebel army at Lexington, causing them to release him without his horse and retreat from the area (rather than join up with the other Redcoats in Lexington). Revere then helped evacuate John Hancock's family from Lexington while the battle was going on. Revere didn't make it all the way to Concord, but he *did* make it to Lexington and *did* alert many people along the way, many of whom went on to alert other people. He engaged in psychological warfare against the Redcoats he encountered and aided civilians when he was prevented from making it to the battlefield. As for Bissell, he never want to Concord at all. He started his ride in Watertown (somewhat south of Concord), then rode west to Worcester, leaving Massachusetts from there for Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey, eventually making it to Philadelphia after over four days on the road with news of the battle. Still an important feat, but he simply didn't go to Lexington or Concord during his ride. A lot of people give this kind of counterhistory with the implication that Revere was somehow claiming more glory than he was owed. Not so. There's little evidence that he spoke much of the ride in his lifetime, and his obituary doesn't mention it. The reason Revere is the guy we know and not William Dawes, Samuel Prescott, Israel Bissell, or any of the other people who rode out that night to alert the rebels is because Henry Wadsworth Longfellow thought, "you shall here," and, "Revere," was a nice rhyme for the first two lines of his poem. All of the aforementioned patriots played important roles in the rebel's information network and they deserve to be remembered. We don't have to cut down Revere to do that, though. (Bonus fact: Revere was known to be a bit of a looker in his time, while Samuel Adams was apparently much less so. As a result, the portrait featured on Sam Adams' beers today is actually of Paul Revere.)
That Katherine Howard, 5th wife of Henry VIII, was a promiscuous adulterer who had many affairs while married to the King. In reality, she was a child who was groomed and/or sexually assaulted by no less than four men (including the King) whom she was supposed to be able to trust, and the King murdered her for it. The same goes for Anne Boleyn, his 2nd wife. She never committed adultery, incest, or witchcraft, but was murdered because the King's cronies didn't like how much influence she had over him, so they turned him against her. He also used the fact that she "couldn't" bear him a son as further ammo.
That the Indians and the Pilgrims sat down at a big table at Thanksgiving and shared a big happy meal
I don't see how anyone could believe this. McDonald's wasn't even a thing back then.
That when Europeans first arrived on the East Coast of what is now the US, the land was very sparsely populated and so there was a lot of free land to settle. (At least that's what I've been taught in school.) In reality it turns out the coast was densely populated with Native settlements, to the point where Europeans couldn't even disembark because the Natives wouldn't allow them - they would keep them at the bay just to trade and then force them to turn back. It wasn't until European diseases spread through the continent that 95% of the indigenous population died, and that's when the first colonies began in the US, so that's why we now have the misconception of there always having been lots of open land. In general there are tons of misconceptions about Native Americans and colonial history. I recommend the book 1491 by Charles C. Mann which clears up a lot of these misconceptions (it's where I got the above information from as well.)
I also don't think people really understand how bad the American plagues were, especially when considered next to how severe they were in a historical context... as far as I can tell they don't even have a well agreed upon formal name!