Historical Misconceptions - Sam O'Nella Academy - A Historian Reacts

welcome back everyone to another reaction video and today we are returning to a channel that i know many of you love as much as i do and that is sam oneella academy uh we're gonna take a look at another one of his videos today we're gonna be looking at some historical misconceptions for you to talk during family dinner i've put a link in the description to the other videos of his that i have reacted to in the past so you can check those out as well as the link to the original content that he created make sure you go over and check it out and give him a like if you would if you like what you see here please consider subscribing to this channel as well tomorrow we will be getting back to uh looking at the last few videos uh in the turkish century series looking the history of turkey and the ottoman empire so that'll be coming back tomorrow also some more information about my trip which is now just a little over a week away to vicksburg and what will be coming with that so be watching for that make sure you turn on your notifications so you don't miss it let's dive in this episode of salmonella academy is brought to you by skillshare [Music] hey kid yeah you i just got off the phone with the big man upstairs and he told me that i need to clear a few things up around here so without further ado here's 10 pieces of malarkey that you might still be spreading number one nobody was ever burned to death at the salem witch trials of the accused 15 died in prison 19 were hanged and one was squished to death that last one is way more interesting than any cremation boy dude was a badass his name was giles corey he was 81 years old and so done with the town of salem's garbage that he wouldn't even dignify the trial with a plea so the town stuck in between two boards and stacked rocks on top of him in an effort to draw out a confession but every time they tried to get something out of him all he would say was more weight this went on for three solid days until he finally died never giving any indication as to whether or not he was a witch one can only wonder so uh there's a couple things about giles corey number one he was 81 years old i mean and and this just it's a fascinating study uh to look into the salem witch trials and how mass hysteria grows i mean it's a perfect case study in mass hysteria how it starts uh you know with a couple of teenage girls in a town in a time when this kind of thing this kind of accusation was taken really really seriously um but there's a reason first of all that he uh doesn't plea either way because pleading guilty first of all you know if you're if you're sincere in your faith as a christian to admit to something like witchcraft was a pretty serious thing and not something that should be taken lightly but to plead innocent then meant that you would end up being found guilty and executed by hanging as they executed the others but they also would take your property if you um you were found guilty and so there was actually a method to his madness and not pleading either way he deprived them of the ability to find him guilty but also to uh you know to end up taking his property and he wasn't going to plead guilty and so he basically put them in a position where they had no choice i think it might have actually been doors rather than boards i could be wrong about that but i think it might have been two doors he was between or at least the door on top and then they just kept piling the rocks but yeah that is a total bad you know what move to to say more weight more weight when when they're slowly pressing you to death like that and there were hundreds more people who could have died if a judge hadn't stepped in and put a stop to the whole thing when he did number two the og buddha wasn't the obese guy that's buddai a chinese folk character meant to represent matreya aka future buddha now this shirt is double sad number three buddha wasn't a god either he was just a guy gautama now this shirt is triple sad number four ever heard of a vomitorium turns out no it's not a place where roman nobles would go to make room for more pheasant spleen and lobster eyelids it's just a big entrance way to the coliseums that hordes of peasants would spew out of number so i mean you get that how that could end up being misconceived in people's minds but it does kind of work as far as the the imagery of that right i mean if you've ever been to a big sporting event my boys and i went to see the columbus crew the other day at their new stadium and it was just this huge hoard of people it took us like 20 minutes to get the quarter mile to our car just because of how many people were all going out of the same exit at the same time and it does really have that imagery of you know vomiting out large numbers of people five washington never cut down a cherry tree in his youth i don't get this one at all apparently it's supposed to paint the man in a good light somehow it's like tyler what the hell happened while we were gone where's the tree in the front yard oh yeah that was me got bored just felt like vandalizing something you know you know with any famous person who becomes almost like a cult-like status mythological status like george washington they're going to be all these imageries that people have of him um the wooden teeth for example which he never had usually people's false teeth at that time were made from dead people or from animal teeth and they were kind of strung together and and we actually have some of washington's teeth so we know what they were made of in fact he had a set of false teeth i think that were made by paul revere at one point the whole chopping down a cherry tree and then owning up to it because he didn't want to be caught in a lie well first of all uh washington's father died when he was like a really small like child i want to say he was less than 10 years old so this idea of like a adolescent george washington uh owning up to his dad about what he'd done couldn't happen because his dad wasn't even alive at that point but you know and and throwing the silver dollar across the delaware river or something like that i don't even know where some of this stuff comes from but we have those kinds of stories about all of our kind of mythological historic figures the ones that rise way above abraham lincoln's another one people that we don't even really see as human beings sometimes to the point where when they're portrayed as a complete kind of complex person in film or in tv shows it's almost like a disappointment because people are like wow really that's washington but those are some of the best portrayals you know the portrayal of george washington and turn washington spies portrays him as a very normal human being with flaws and fears and doubts and and you know kind of doing stupid things sometimes and that too george washington really was hey what about my honest character number six the pyramids weren't actually built by slaves these workers were respected members of society they ate meat and worked in three-month shifts and even got to be buried right next to the tomb after their death i don't know maybe somebody who's more familiar with egyptian history can uh set the record straight on this one in the comment section but where where it all was it all the workers who got to be buried in those i know in those complexes like by the great pyramid uh there's a massive complex i thought maybe it was like just like the the the head engineers and people who helped like the leaders not like literally every worker but maybe i'm wrong about that matter of fact that's more than we can say for the people working on man's greatest achievements today if i spend years of my life helping to build the space station you're damn right i'd want this salmonella memorial corpse receptacle floating along right next to it the salmonella memorial corpse receptacle now what's cool is they actually um a while back had a thing where you could have a small amount of your ashes like launched into space i think they did that with gene roddenberry the guy who created star trek i think they sent some of his ashes up into space like that cool thing about the pyramids though and this kind of gives you some perspective on history uh maybe you've heard this before cleopatra who was kind of considered to be like the last pharaoh of egypt even though she was more greek than egyptian um it's closer to modern times like today than she was to the building of the pyramids in terms of history uh we were talking about this on one of my um on the podcast i was on with purequino the other day um how you know to the romans the ancient egyptians were as ancient as the romans are to us i mean that's how long ago those pyramids were built and that's what an incredible feat that was for as long ago as it was that would be amazing number seven the great wall of china is not the only man-made object visible from space i don't know where you dip shit's got this one from first of all there's no way you could see it with the unaided eye the wall is like 30 meters thick at most while the distance to outer space is generally recognized to be 100 kilometers up known as the karman line to give some perspective that's like me holding up a standard sized guitar pick from across the entire length of a football field and asking you what color it is also there are plenty of man-made objects that are way bigger in terms of local surface area than the great wall yeah perfect example right there a home depot parking lot is easily more visible from space than the great wall of china would be i really don't understand where that one came from either i don't know why anybody ever said that with any kind of like legitimacy whatsoever he's right there's so many objects that are so much more massive than the great wall of china and the great wall of china is not even one wall it's actually a series of walls some of which are not even connected to each other that make up kind of a complex of walls it's not just one long wall from one end to the other so even if it was visible there's no way it would be the only one number eight you might have heard this one before you know hitler was a jerk and all but hey he made the autobahn so at least he was efficient actually hitler didn't create the autobahn it was already there he just helped expand it into newer territory in a similar vein mussolini didn't make the trains run on time with most of italy's infrastructure repairs happening before his rise to power in 1922. and here's what i don't understand about any of that what's it matter i mean so he even if it were true that he helped create the audubon it doesn't excuse the fact that he's responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of people between the holocaust and other atrocities atrocities and the wars itself it doesn't excuse any of that stuff now it's it's not like you know we're gonna remember him more for that you know for example there are a lot of historical figures who have some really big negatives about them you know i could speak of thomas jefferson and say hey you know what he owned slaves bad um he hired a guy named james calendar to you know put him on the government payroll uh while simultaneously using that guy to undermine the very government that he was supposed to be working for and then calendar dies under really mysterious circumstances right before he goes to testify against jefferson it's not like you know we remember him more for those things than for the fact that he wrote the declaration of independence and he was a two-term president first secretary of state you know he did all those great things but in context let's also talk about some bad stuff too okay it's good to talk about both george washington great man did great things father of our country also owned slaves also did some pretty shady things in terms of his dealings with freed slaves after the revolution stuff like that it's good to talk about both but he's primarily going to be remembered for the good things hitler is always going to be primarily remembered for the deaths of tens of millions of people in mass genocide and war so what if he also happened to do this nice little thing on the side and even then they weren't nearly as punctual as he'd like you to believe so unfortunately you're gonna have to find something else to like about these fascists like hitler's elegant way of speaking or the way mussolini says spaghetti number nine iron maidens weren't actual torture devices used in medieval times basically what happened is some archaeologists in the 1800s saw an old metal coffin and some spikes and said yo wouldn't it be wild and if we put these things up in here so that way if someone goes in it they get poked in their bits you are a sick man cornelius you know what this reminds me of i don't know if you've ever seen um i don't even remember what it's called but um it's like these llamas and the one llama like does these horrible atrocities and then he's like like real nonchalant about it afterwards like like he eats children and eats hands and causes a nuclear holocaust to take place somewhere and sinks a cruise ship and kills all the people on board i don't remember what's called somebody help me out with that one but it reminds me of that kind of sick humor but that's basically what this was it was completely made up fabrication and we have a lot of stuff like that that are modern forgeries or modern things that people make up that they try to point to being real but they weren't you know another one not really history but in terms of food most of the food that we get at a chinese food place here in america like fortune cookies not chinese at all invented in the united states i don't know why we call them chinese food they're not i like it into the museum it goes at least iron maiden was real they were as real as it gets still are don't you forget it number 10 einstein never failed math he had mastered both integral and differential calculus by the age of 15. 99 chance this one was just made up to make glue eaters feel better about themselves well congratulations dimitri looks like you failed pre-algebra for the third time afraid he still can't graduate well hey that means i'm still on par with famous smart science man so uh yeah worship me now that said there are some good examples of people who failed something only to be excellent at it later michael jordan did get cut from his high school basketball team before going on to super stardom in college and obviously in the pros the beatles did very get fame very famously get told by a record label that guitar music was on their way out and they weren't very good um i think charles schultz was another example walt disney people who ended up being the people maybe most remembered for their craft being told that they were no good in that craft so that does happen so we don't need to point to einstein as an example of that there are plenty of other fantastic options abraham lincoln with the exception of one term in the u.s house of representatives and i think maybe some local elections at the state level lost every election he was in including losing to stephen douglas for the senate race in illinois only to turn around and beat the same stephen douglas in the presidential election a couple years later so there's some great examples of failures becoming successful without having to make one up so it just goes to share that we've all got a lot to learn about the world around us that's why you need to go to skillshare skillshare is an online learning community with over twenty thousand classes i use it it's fantastic design business and more premium membership gives you unlimited access to high quality classes on must-know topics so you can improve your skills unlock new opportunities and do the work you love they've got great courses in graphic design and animation which i've clearly i mean check this out but i'm sure you could get a lot of use out of them you can also learn plenty of more recreational skills like how to solve a rubik's cube or how to play chess really well join the millions of students already learning on skillshare today with a special offer just for my viewers where you can get two months of skillshare completely free to sign up go to skl.sh samo again go to skl.sh slash samo to get two months of unlimited access to over 20 000 classes for free act now for this special offer and start learning today anyway till next time i'm sam mannella and thank you for watching all right so that's the end of that one i hope you guys enjoyed that let me know yours as well use the comment section below what are some other historical myths that people have always believed or that you grow up believing grew up believing that you later found out was not true at all and just blew your mind when you found out it really wasn't a thing use the comment section below if you have other ideas for uh reaction videos you'd like me to take on let me know we're gonna finish up that turkey series this week and then we're gonna move on to the 30 years war from extra history so be watching for that as well thanks you

Channel: Vlogging Through History

Views: 412,752

Keywords: sam o'nella academy, history, historical misconception, historical misconceptions reaction, historic misconceptions, sam o'nella reaction

Id: ZpscLwOsVzQ

Length: 17min 22sec (1042 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 08 2021