It’s gotten to the point that most people aren’t surprised anymore to learn that most of the stories they absorbed in school about national and world history are, well, less than totally accurate. Books like Lies My Teacher Told Me and A People’s History of the United States offer a starting point for those looking to get a little more perspective and complexity in their historical accounts. It would be interesting if the popularity of these myths had something to do with an international conspiracy, but life is not a Jerry Bruckheimer movie, and if these stories have trumped the truth, it’s because they’re just better stories. Misleading, misguided, and misinformed, yeah, but at least they’ve been entertaining. Here are a few things you need to unlearn:

  1. Nero fiddled while Rome burned: Nero was indeed the emperor of Rome during the Great Fire of 64 A.D., but that’s pretty much where the legend and the truth part ways. Fiddles weren’t even invented for another thousand years, so the instrument in question was likely a lyre. But that’s just a technicality. The bigger issue is that some accounts don’t even place Nero in Rome during the fire but in Antium, and modern scholars feel confident that this was the case. The story sprang up and became a legend as a way to implicate Nero in the fire and turn him into a scapegoat, with critics saying that Nero arranged for the fire to clear space for a palace expansion, but the fire started in a different location. What’s more, Nero’s own palace was damaged in the fire, which would seem to run counter to his desire to improve his buildings. It’s an intriguing theory, but not a very plausible one.
  2. George Washington had wooden teeth: George Washington is understandably the focus of quite a few historical myths, like coming clean about chopping down that cherry tree. This lie is, like many, related to the truth. Washington did have terrible teeth, losing his first adult tooth at age 22. By the time he became president, he only had one real tooth left, probably caused by the use of mercury oxide to treat illness. As a result, he had several sets of false teeth made of varying materials, including hippo and elephant ivory with real teeth from humans and horses. That actually sounds pretty disgusting, all things considered, and not that much better than wood, but he never had a set of wooden chompers. Don’t believe the hype.
  3. Lady Godiva rode naked through town: Godiva was an Anglo-Saxon noblewoman remembered for riding naked on her horse through town to protest the taxes her husband was levying against his tenants. It’s easy to see the appeal of the myth: rebellion, power, naked women. The problem is that the story seems to have been created years after the possible journey. Rather than being the seed of a story grown wild with time, the entire affair was cooked up almost a century after her death in 1080. Without original or reliable sources, the story’s just that: a tale concocted to pass the time.
  4. Christopher Columbus thought the Earth was flat: Everyone knows that in 1492, Christopher Columbus set sail from Spain to prove that the Earth was round. Except, he didn’t. By the time he made his voyage, the planet’s globe shape was accepted as fact by pretty much every learned and powerful member of society. The truth was that Columbus thought the world was round, just a whole lot smaller than it turned out to be, and he figured it wouldn’t take long to sail around the edge and wind up in the Asia. The fake version of the story started spreading with the publication of Washington Irving’s best-seller A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, which took no small amount of liberties with the truth. The author constructed the story to fit his needs, the story became a hit, and teachers started conflating facts with publicity.
  5. The 1929 market crash sent brokers leaping to their deaths: Immediately following the Wall Street crash of October 1929, stories began to spread about distraught businessmen, bankers, and investors killing themselves by jumping out of office windows, unable to deal with the stress and terror of the crash. Yet those stories are urban legends ginned up in the wake of the crash and nothing more. Did people commit suicide in the fall of 1929? Yes. But of the 100 instances recorded in The New York Times, only four were tied to the crash, and only two happened on Wall Street. The rumors began to gather steam thanks to the gallows humor many comedians at the time were using to talk about the crash, most notably Will Rogers in his joke that so many people wanted to jump to their doom that “you had to stand in line to get a window to jump out of.” The deaths weren’t an epidemic, merely two dark instances that provided enough fuel for decades of rumors.
  6. Women burned their bras in feminist protest: After a while, you start to see a pattern with these myths: they’re usually based on true happenings, and they tend to combine separate events into one massive one. That’s what happened with the stories of women in the 1960s burning their bras as a sign of protest against older patriarchal norms and a desire to embrace equality and progress. It’s a powerful image, but totally fake. There aren’t any documented accounts of bra-burning as the movement gained traction, merely anecdotal tales that are hard to corroborate or seem born of a desire to imitate the earlier (and fictional) protests. The most likely explanation is that members of the media saw two things happen at different or even concurrent events: women throwing their bras into trash cans, and men burning draft cards in similar bins. Easy mistake to make, impossible myth to correct.
  7. People thought The War of the Worlds was real: Before his film career, Orson Welles became a household name for directing and narrating a radio adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds in October 1938. The program was inventive for the way it played with the nature of reality and programming itself, presenting the fictional narrative of an alien invasion with a mix of straight-ahead, newsy reporting. Pop culture legend has it that many listeners, if not most, mistook the program for a real bulletin and prepared for an invasion by arming themselves, stocking up food, and alerting neighbors. Yet this story is almost assuredly a media creation itself, drummed up to make the broadcast sound more revolutionary and Welles sound even more brilliant. Many news stories reported at the time about people’s fears and even heart attacks over the event were found to be baseless. Nevertheless, the myths became legend, which soon became fact.
  8. Paul Revere made a famous midnight ride: Here’s another case where a popular author took history and gave it a shine. Paul Revere was indeed a player in the American Revolution, and he was one of several messengers helping to arrange resistance to British forces. But he wasn’t considered a hero until 1861, when Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote the poem “Paul Revere’s Ride,” which manufactured events out of thin air and turned Revere into a Revolutionary War legend. His poem contradicts recorded facts at every turn, from the length of Revere’s ride to his purpose and success. (The real Revere was one of many messengers, and he didn’t make it far without being captured.) If you’re looking for a heroic rider who helped alert the colonists to war, ignore Revere. The man you want is Israel Bissell.
  9. Isaac Newton was hit by an apple: Many aspects of the story of Isaac Newton are fuzzily recreated for students, most notably the idea that he was hit on the head by an apple falling from a tree, an event that spurred him to study and theorize about gravity. He was actually likely never hit in the head, and the apple story didn’t even appear in print until an essay by Voltaire written the year Newton died. Even more important: the issue of gravity wasn’t in doubt, but whether gravity as a force extended far enough from the Earth to be responsible for the position of the Moon. Newton’s life story is a fascinating one, it just doesn’t get told a lot.
  10. Napoleon was tiny: Despite being emperor of France and one of the most renowned generals in history, Napoleon Bonaparte is remembered as a laughably tiny man, nicknamed “la petit caporal.” He’s even the inspiration for the Napoleon Complex, the inferiority complex described by psychologist Alfred Adler in which shorter people become overly aggressive to compensate for their lack of height. And thanks to a famous painting by Jacques-Louis David, people think he always had his hand stuffed into his coat. He’s remembered and portrayed as a tiny, petulant guy, but in reality his stature was totally normal. He was portrayed in the British press as being small, and the image stuck thanks to the discrepancy between French and British inches. His height was about 1.7 meters, though, making him 5 feet 7 inches tall, a completely average height for his era and today. It’s a myth that’s almost impossible to shake from our collective subconscious at this point, even though it’s radically inaccurate.

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