For instance I’ve read Paul Revere never shouted the phrase “The British are coming!” As the operation was meant to be discrete. Whether historical or current, what’s something widely believed about the US that’s wrong?

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  2. apparently it’s somewhat common for non-Americans to believe there are 52 states. this confuses me bc 50 is such a nice clean number, it seems easy to remember + it matches the stars on the flag. I think it has to do with Alaska & Hawaii.

  3. Working cowboys in the Old West never wore what we now call the cowboy hat. The bowler hat was most popular.

    Even the original Stetson hat looked very different from the modern cowboy hat, with a flat brim, straight sided crown, and rounded corner. It resembled a wide-brimmed bowler.

    But the expensive Stetson hat was also more popular among affluent Easterners who visited the West and brought it back East than among working cowboys of the era. And Stetson itself was an Eastern company, based in Philadelphia.

  5. That we have no vacation time or maternity leave.

    It’s not federally mandated, but most employers provide it voluntarily.

  6. George Washington never had wooden teeth. They were ivory, Pearl, and even the teeth of his slaves.

  7. That the early 17th century English colonists of what is now the southern US enountered virgin forests that had been untouched for millenia…

    …in fact, the growth was less than a century old at that time. The final collapse of the Mississippi culture occured in the early 16th century ended the practice of slash-and-burn agriculture that they practiced. Prior to the collapse, the landscape probably resembled a savanna, rather than the thick forests the English saw.

    All of that carbon sequestration may have contributed to the temporary climate change we now call the Little Ice Age.

  9. If you spend a week on reddit as a European you’d be forgiven for assuming that everything is absolutely terrible all the time because that’s what people like to talk about. In reality America is an imperfect nation just like anywhere that is mostly populated by people trying their best to live a decent life.

  10. According to people asking questions here, most of us are dying of curable ailments and obtaining health insurance is a privilege for the wealthy few.

  11. Some people believe George Washington only had one penis, the real number is more like 30.

  15. That we don’t use metric for anything, nor do we know the system at all. Anything and everything to do with the sciences is in metric, and we learn the system early in elementary school.

  16. States don’t have to hold popular elections for President. It’s entirely permissible under the Constitution for them to just change their state law to appoint whatever electors they want and not have a Presidential ballot.

  18. Every American child is taught in school that the Boston tea party was the colonists’ response to an increase in tea taxes by Britain, but this isn’t the case. [The Tea Act](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_Act) actually eliminated tax duties on tea being exported from Britain, so colonists now only needed to pay import taxes. What they were actually protesting was Britain pushing a tea trade monopoly to reduce a large stock the East India Company had built up. Tea from other countries were taxed as normal and tea smuggling laws actually began to be enforced (something like 85% of tea in the colonies was smuggled Dutch tea). This basically forced colonists to buy low quality English tea through an official source

  19. Christopher Columbus did not discover America, and he never set foot on US soil.

    He’s only honored because he was a white Anglo-Saxon.

    Edit: okay, he wasn’t Anglo-Saxon, but he was white, unlike the multiple people who discovered the Americas before him, and he still never set foot on US soil.

  20. It’s commonly stated by Europeans that US salaries are so high because we have to pay for health insurance, and that said health insurance is extremely expensive. I guess they don’t realize that the vast majority of high paying jobs *also* come with free or inexpensive health insurance.

  21. That we have some unique claim to social issues like racism, when we are leaps and bounds ahead of much of the world. It seems especially bad in America because we have a unique settler colony experience AND we are constantly talking about it.

    Talking about it is the only way to address the issues. In a lot of other countries, the dominant culture just totally shuts the conversation down, literally accusing young people of being brainwashed by America propaganda. (i.e. the Florida playbook)

  22. Even after the last two, a ton of people still think impeachment means the president is automatically removed from office.

  24. US is not Democratic Country.

    Corrupt two party system designed specifically not to allow for a third party and heavily influenced by special interest and religion is not what I would consider democratic country.

  26. Apparently we don’t have ApplePay, according to Europeans.

    I don’t think I’ve used a physical card in months.

  27. Non Americans somehow think we use the imperial system for measurements when we have never used it, we used English units, and US Customary has been a thing since 1832.

  28. Paul Revere never shouted the phrase “The British are coming!” because everyone including him were British, Massachusetts was a British colony at the time and the inhabitants were British, British subjects.

    He and is compatriots were said to be reporting that “The regulars were coming!” IE. The British soldiers were on the march in an operation to find and confiscate stores of colonists arms.

  31. We don’t all own iPhones. For some reason, a lot of Indians who never left the country seem to think we all have iPhones. (I was rocking Android at the time, and it outright confused them)

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