I’d love to know which ones and learn the accurate information.

26 comments

  1. Just read through the questions and answers on this sub and you will see the scope of the historical, social, political, economic, geographic, and cultural facts that are widely believed and inaccurate.

  4. The one that comes to mind first is that there were no witches burned at the stake in Salem.

    EDIT for the pedants: No, there aren’t any such thing as witches and yes, they were killed in other ways. Never fucking change Reddit.

  5. A lot of people think that Vietnam was a slaughter-fest. And it was- for the Vietnamese. North Vietnam had around ~849,000 military deaths (not including missing), while the US had 58,281 dead.

    ​

    The Tet Offensive was an absolute disaster from a military standpoint. The NVA won that fight in the newsroom.

  6. The American Revolution is commonly portrayed as lily-white in skin tone.

    In reality, upwards of 10-15% of the American soldiers that fought in that war were African-American, and a smaller percentage (although significant to their total population) of Native Americans fought alongside or even in the Continental Army.

    They fought from Concord to Yorktown, but their contributions tend to get overlooked today, at least in the public eye. One of our national shames.

  8. People believe a lot of inaccurate things about the Salem witch trials. A lot of people think that everyone who was accused was convicted because it was all just a shame to kill women’s who made herbal remedies for the community, only women were killed, and that they were all burned at the stake. All this could easily be dispelled if they just could be bother to just use any search engine and look up the events themselves. But that contradicts the “people in the past were all stupid and spent all their time liking for reasons to burn women at the state and thought everything out of the ordinary or anything a women accomplished was witchcraft” narrative. I don’t think we actually have any historical account of anyone being burned alive for witchcraft.

    “The Salem witch trials were a series of hearings and prosecutions of people accused of witchcraft in colonial Massachusetts between February 1692 and May 1693. More than 200 people were accused. Thirty people were found guilty, 19 of whom were executed by hanging (14 women and five men). One other man, Giles Corey, died under torture after refusing to enter a plea, and at least five people died in jail.” – Wikipedia.

  9. George Washington probably didn’t chop down a cherry tree, and was in fact able to tell a lie.

  10. That everything west of the Appalachian mountains had always been sparsely populated by Native American tribes. There were large number of people living there but a lot of them got wiped out by disease from contact with Spanish explorers and French trappers 200-300 years before the US was even a country, in those hundreds of years the land simple took back over making it seem no one every lived there

  11. Here are a few American sports myths:

    Babe Ruth (probably) never called his HR in the World Series after deliberately taking 2 strikes, and he absolutely didn’t do it the way it’s been portrayed in film & media

    Max Baer (as memorialized in The Cinderella Man) was a gentle clown & not a vicious, unrepentant killer.

    The term “upset” as a euphemism for the favorite falling to the underdog existed prior to Upset beating Secretariat.

    Bo Jackson actually could play a guitar as well as Bo Diddley

  12. I don’t know how widely believed these are but here are three wrong notions I’ve heard presented to me as “facts”:

    1) A man named John Hanson was the actual first President of the United States. [He was not](https://historymyths.wordpress.com/2012/05/18/myth-88-john-hanson-was-the-real-first-president-of-the-united-states/). All sorts of other weird claims are also made about this guy, like that he was African American or that he established Thanksgiving as a national holiday.

    2) German was almost the official language of the United States – a lot of boomers seem to believe this one. [Also not true](https://language.mki.wisc.edu/essays/german-as-the-official-language-of-the-united-states/).

    3) This isn’t necessarily a historical myth, but you’ll sometimes hear that the United States does not in fact have fifty states, but forty-six states and four “commonwealths”. The reason for this is that Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, and Virginia’s official names all start with “The Commonwealth of…” [Used in this context, this is solely a naming convention and has no legal or constitutional relevance](https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/whats-the-difference-between-a-commonwealth-and-a-state).

  13. Christopher Columbus never landed anywhere in the mainland United States on any of his 4 voyages to the ‘new world’.

  14. Canada didn’t burn down the White House during the War of 1812. It was a battalion of soldiers from Bermuda who were already in the Chesapeake Bay with reinforcements from the UK who were veterans of the Peninsular War during the War of the Sixth Coalition. None of soldiers present at the battle were from the Canadian colonies.

  15. -The role of the US in WW1 and WW2

    -most of our tech was infact not from Germany after WW2

    -Pretty much everything about wars

    -who burned the white house, because it wasn’t the Canadians.

  17. A lot of people think that no countries ever come to the US’s aid when natural or otherwise major disasters have happened. Mexico helped us when Hurricane Katrina happened. They sent rescue teams. Canada was monumental in their help during 9/11. Landing thousands of airplanes and helping that many passengers. Many countries offered to help during that huge oil spill that happened in 2010, but we refused most of their offers for some reason.

  18. That the “Wild West” was actually wild and seething with violence.

    In his book *Gunfighters, Highwaymen, and Vigilantes: Violence on the Frontier*, Roger McGrath examines two California mining camps that at the time were considered among the most violent in the country. Newspapers called the residents of one of the towns “the bad men from Bodie” (their reputation for violence having captured national attention).

    The author has determined that by modern standards the towns were rather tame. There are various studies and reports that broadly support his conclusions

  19. Betsy Ross sewing the first flag is likely a myth. She was a real person and a seamstress in Philadelphia, but there is zero evidence she sewed any flag, let alone the first. The story didn’t come out until the centennial was being planned and someone wondered who sewed the first flag and her grandson said it was her, but also admitted he heard the story from his aunt, not his grandmother. Also the Betsy Ross house in Philadelphia is likely not hers. It’s likely she lived in the house next door, but that was torn down as it was a fire hazard. When it was torn down they made it into a courtyard where Betsy is now buried. Or is she? She was originally buried in a grave in the city proper, but she was moved to the outskirts of town due to expansion. When it came time for the bicentennial the city decided to move her back to her house. They dug up her grave and found no bones. So they started digging around until they found a female skull and proclaimed it was her and the male skull and leg bone her husband’s and moved them to the house. Is it possible it was her skull? Sure. Is it likely? Probably not

  20. That the new world was a perfect utopia of peace-pipe smoking native tribes who lived without war and oppression until evil white colonizers arrived.

  21. Pretty much anything about Native Americans

    This isn’t even because of whitewashing or swinging to far in the opposite direction either. It’s more that there’s multiple native nations at play and even diverging subgroups within them. There’s just way too much to accurately portray the dynamics with how simplified things are usually presented. A big chunk of the timeframe, the US wasn’t even the main concern, but rather other tribes (See Chickasaw-Choctaw conflicts).

    For example, with the Creek (Civil) War, we don’t talk about how the anti-American faction slaughtered livestock and pretty much condemned everyone to starvation since they viewed raising livestock as essentially losing their own culture and adopting the white man’s way. The whole bit how cultures change and adapt based off interactions with the cultures around them can get a bit lost, and it’s definitely true for the native cultures around early America.

  22. Rosa Parks and literally everything about her.

    First: it she was staged
    Second: she didnt do it because her feet hurt

    Claudette Colvin was the original who didnt give up her seat and was arrested. Ahe isnt well kno n because she was a pregnant teen and it was though t people wouldnt be sympathetic. Parks was a model citizen so they staged her

  23. The myth that the Revolutionary Colonists won the fighting vs the Redcoats by shooting rifles from behind trees, picking off officer, etc.

    While that happened occasionally, the vast majority of guns used were smooth bore muskets carried by Colonists who had a uniform and who got in lines and exchanged volley fire

  24. Probably the endless historical gross over-simplications that people love to use to bash the US.

    * “Saddam Hussein was a US ally”, no, he was seen the lesser of two evils in the Iran-Iraq war. The idea that he was ever anything more to us than a buffer against Iran is a gross exaggeration.
    * “The US created Al-Qaeda”, no, the US supplied weapons to Afghan mujahadeen resisting Russian occupation, some of whom would later join Al-Qaeda. Saying the US created Al-Qaeda by supporting the mujahadeen is like saying France created the Ku Klux Klan because they helped the US gain independence.

  25. The U.S. government never had a policy of using smallpox blankets to kill Native Americans. That claim was from a falsified research paper a few decades ago. The only documented case of it happening was by British forces during the French and Indian War.

    To be clear, there were still many messed up actions taken against Native Americans by the US. The blanket thing just wasn’t really one of them.

  26. A lot of people tend to think the US was predominantly puritans in the time of the revolution. In fact, the US was arguably the least religious place in the entire christian world. Only around 11% of Americans belonged to a church in the late 1700s and anywhere from 50 to 80% did not pray regularly. This is in comparison with half of Americans belonging to a church and praying today.

    The US became dramatically more religious due to religious revivals in the 1800s.

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