What "Historical Inaccuracies" Drive Historians Crazy? - Reddit Podcast

what commonly accepted historical inaccuracies Drive historians crazy Albert Einstein didn't fail mathematics in school as is commonly believed upon being shown a column making this claim Einstein said I never failed mathematics before I was 15 I'd mastered differential and integral calculus thanks a lot now I have no excuse for failing my pre-cal class I mean I think not being Einstein is a pretty good excuse poor Einstein he had no EXC exuses I'm not a historian just Mexican and let me say that Chingo de Mayo is not Mexican Independence Day I am a historian and let me just say that it drives me mad when people think the Aztecs actually the mexic thought that Cortez was a god they were 100% clear on the fact that he wasn't people like to vilify donam Marina Malin malinin but she's pretty much proof that nobody thought Cortez was a god since she actually gave the orders people also love to think the Spanish showed up with 500 men and took over the capital of the biggest empire in the new world but they conveniently forget that lexans have pretty bloody hands in that respect as well especially considering the fact they talked Cortez into making a quick detour to Cholula to freaking Slaughter everyone there's a very prevalent myth about a famous speech given by John F Kennedy in Berlin The Story Goes that his statements berl translates to I am a jelly donut well Berlin is a word for a type of jelly fil pap history no one at the time thought that's what Kennedy meant the general story is that Kennedy should have said IB berina rather than IB Ein berina people claim that adding the indefinite article in is the problem while a does give Nuance to the statement it didn't make anyone at the time think Kennedy was talking about being a donut had he said ibin berlina his statement would have conveyed a sense of him being a Berlin native which obviously he was not ibin Ein Bina however means something closer to I am one with the the people of Berlin which is exactly what Kennedy wanted to say no halfway intelligent German speaker at the time thought Kennedy was talking about food in fact the first time the alternate translation of the sentence is noted wasn't until 20 years later in 1983 I must admit that I bought this myth Hook Line and Sinker I blame Eddie iard as likely to many people of my age or older first that Roman gladiatorial battles or blood baths with like 30 men dying in one fight I read something very recently saying that one in 200 fights ended in killing Gladiators are freaking expensive and you don't just get them killed I'm not saying that there are no accounts of large battles with many deaths I'm saying that they were rare when a man was injured fight over the second was that Nero played the fiddle and sang while Rome burned he was an antium and hurried back to Rome my source is tacitus I used tacitus since he's a primary source and a contemporary Roman historian firstly a larger amount of the information we have on this time period is skewed by the fact that the Christian Church produced and held a large amount of the records and if you think that the Romans hated Nero wait till you see what the Christians thought of him secondly if you're really interested in learning more the fine community at Reddit ask historians is full of the most knowledgeable and polite bunch of redditors you'll have the pleasure of interacting with now to expand on Nero there are other accounts of him spearheading the relief efforts and housing refugees in what was left of the Imperial Palace the equites were really not fond of Nero though and since they were the ones that wrote the history books we get a demonized image of Nero I'm also glad that you pointed out the gladiatorial misconception Gladiators were very well cared for by those that owned them the misconception probably stems from the use of Arenas as execution grounds for prisoners and the like they would often be killed on mass which could easily be mixed up with the Gladiators being tossed into die as the years went on those points aside I'd like to address a couple of things on Nero he was was one of the worst Emperors of Rome he was egotistical violent paranoid and this is important very young he openly scoffed at the senis which still attempted to act like it had power but was referred to as a club for washed up old men and Nero did as he wished he would belittle wealthy and influential men seduced their wives and generally act like the brutally violent petulent child that he was we cannot confirm or deny that he did in fact Set Fire To Rome which was rumored as it was said he wanted to build a massive pal and bath complex in the city center and we can't confirm that he spearheaded the relief efforts and housed refugees which is either alive from his PR team exaggerated truth or actual truth what we can confirm is the fact that Nero used the radical Christian cult which is exactly what it was at this point in history as the scapegoats for the disaster resulting in severe persecution of the Christians at the hands of the Romans by order of Nero the cult was outlawed for a time and this was where the beginning of the rumors of Nero being the Beast can typically be be traced as for gladiators yes they would fight lions no it wouldn't be often lions are expensive Gladiators are more expensive there are plenty of instances where large numbers of exotic animals were killed on mass and even a few instances of gladiators but the majority of the time death was reserved for the Dishonored Gladiator The Unlucky Gladiator and most commonly those unfortunate enough to be sentenced to death in the arena a nice bloody practice Target for a gladiator I know more about the Gladiator diet than their actual combat and interaction however so I won't really dive any further than I've already done the Y in y oldi is actually abbreviated as an early modern English letter called Thorn that was pronounced like th so it's pronounced more like the oldie than anything else also because gutenberg's printing press didn't have Thorn so they improvised with why that Paul River actually staged a midnight ride and was the only one who did so he actually went from Lodge to Lodge warning people then got his butt arrested then he escaped later on in the night Paul River's Ride written by Henry woodsworth Longfellow in 1860 when Rivier had been dead for 40 years it's kind of a dramatization of the events of the night and plays up R and downplays the involvement of others like William dors possibly because the poem starts with listen my children and you shall hear of the midnight ride of Paul Rivier doors doesn't fit with the rhyme scheme when Rivier died his obituary didn't even mention his ride Longfellow was just lazy da would have been easy it Rhymes just as well as rever hear the story of William Daws his midnight ride in noble cause boom did that in 20 seconds that Marie Antoinette said let them eat cake also most of the misconceptions about her in general she led a really sad Life as a porn in her mother's game and a lot of the things that people assume about her come from a lack of understanding about the role of a queen of France at the time and the French court she personally preferred a less opulent Lifestyle by Court standards but was seen as snubbing the court by trying to make changes to it her marriage wasn't very happy either and later her own daughter didn't remember her very fondly because she generally tried to raise her kids to not be spoiled she wasn't without her faults or mistakes but by reading a lot of biographies about her you start to understand how the image of Madame deficit and the real woman don't match up for anyone wondering about the origins of the quote the quote came from a book and was attributed to a great princess It Was Written in Rosso's confessions and was published when Marie Antoinette would have been just 9 years old and still living in Austria that most of the slaves in the Triangle Trade ended up in the USA wrong just plain wrong the majority of ships shipped from Africa ended up in south or Central America or the West Indies just to add to this so many slaves were shipped to the West Indies because it was cheaper to work current slaves to death and just replace them rather than give them even a substandard quality of life the same is true for the mass majority of slaves today of which there are approximately 27 million one thing that really bothered a professor I had was that when people discussed the leaders of Germany immediately prior to World War II they frequently label them as Psychopaths insane or crazy this is especially true of their leader when discussing him people right off the bat label him as evil a monster an addict had one ball basically any reason to distance him from a normal person you can't just dismiss what happened in Germany as craziness there were rational people making decisions and running the country my professor would call us out on it and ever since then I noticed it a lot and it irks me too it's true we can't just assume that removing the crazy people from government will get rid of this ever-looming threat that we still face today there are very calculating people who will use others fears and insecurities to gain power no matter how how many groups they have to kill to get there the one that makes me mad was that the Titanic was in any way badly designed badly built or badly operated by the standards of the time in fact there are so many ridiculous inaccuracies surrounding the Titanic that it's hard to list even a fraction of them here she was an incredibly seaworthy ship much more so than any passenger ship around today the iceberg tore a gash almost a third of the way down her side and she still stayed afloat for more than 2 hours in that time all but two of her lifeboats were launched there wasn't time to launch any more she could have had a hundred more lifeboats on board and that wouldn't have helped without vastly more crew to operate them Titanic's passengers genuinely believed that she was practically Unsinkable when the time came to began loading the lifeboats many passengers thought they would be safer staying on the Titanic there wasn't time for the crew to wait around so when the Lifeboat was ready and there was no one else waiting to get in it had to go this is why so many of Titanic's lifeboats left only half full Titanic wasn't traveling too fast for the conditions by the standards of practice around at the time further precautions were put into practice after the incident but no one on board can be blamed for doing what anyone on any ship would have done the same she wasn't built using substandard materials this rumor goes around a lot these days because of an article that was written some time ago what the article is supposed to mean is that there was much better quality steel available today this was not the case in 1909 additionally Titanic's Builders were paid on a fee plus m materials basis they were given a set fee to construct the ship plus the cost of all materials used there was no incentive to use anything but the best steel they could get their hands on the shipyard had an excellent reputation and would not risk tainting it by using bad steel which could easily be noticed on inspection anyway Titanic and her two sister ships the Olympic and bratanic were also surprisingly maneuverable for their size much more so than expected some will tell you that Titanic's Rudder was too small but this simply isn't true in fact fact Olympic's wartime Captain marveled at her maneuverability and was even able to throw her into a sudden turn ramming and sinking a German ubbo Olympic was the only Merchant vessel throughout the first world war recorded to have sunk an enemy vessel you can submit your own stories to be featured here on the channel the story submission link is in the description below and if you want to listen to some viby music in the background check out easy mode also linked below and subscribe Galileo's models at the time of the controversy were less accurate than the geocentric models for predicting movements of celestial bodies important for navigation there was ample reason to be skeptical the Catholic response was primarily because he decided to insult the pope his Patron not his scientific views Church views on geocentric system were largely based on Greek models and not the scripture since his parody of the Pope was done within his Works advocating heliocentric ISM the church requested he cease to publish them but allowed him to publish about other scientific subjects he agreed to do so he later broke that promise leading to the famous trials it wasn't a war against science it was politics uh the myth that Napoleon was Tiny he was actually above average height this mistake is due to the fact that the French inches were different from the English inches I believe and there are paintings where he's depicted with French grenadiers which usually were the biggest soldiers in the French army and all towered over him also British propagandists were really good at the time so they convinced everyone including America to this day that he was short that people in the Middle Ages used spices to mask the flavor of meat that had gone bad if you could afford spices that were traded from far off lands at Great expense you could well afford fresh meat well what about local spices cumin grew all over the Mediterranean and was used more often than black pepper which is from India the ancient Greeks kept cumin at the dining table in its own container much as pepper is frequently kept today and this practice continues in Morocco cumin was also heavily used in ancient Roman Cuisine the source is Wikipedia here though so isn't it plausible that poorer Indians used a variety of things to preserve meat and mask the flavor of lower quality stuff while poorer Europeans used local cumin for the same purpose obviously people enjoy spices anyway but it doesn't seem outlandish that poor people would use whatever was local and cheap in Greater quantities whereas richer people would have access to the Exotic stuff and use it for more variety although even healthy Romans used spices far in excess compared to what our contemporary palletes are used to essentially masking what we think good meat should taste like so maybe our entire concept of seasoning just doesn't translate to their time but the fact is there were definitely peasants who took their chances on varying grades of crappy meat but also access to cheap local spices I think people forget that there's a scale from stomach ache to full-on 48-hour gut-wrenching spew inducing hell caused by food poisoning and peasants would be hardpressed to waste something that was only a little bit spoiled a quick search also reveals that cumin and coriander are recommended by a lot of websites for treating very mild cases of food poisoning any beneficial properties of something so abundant and commonly used back then would have been known through folk recipes and such the idea that Columbus was trying to prove that the Earth was round or that anyone at the time period even believed that the Earth was flat Columbus thought that the distance to India was much shorter than everyone else thought that's why he went that way of of course everyone else was right and the distance was much greater but America was in the way this is what I was taught about the whole situation is there any truth to it this is correct Columbus believed that India was about three times closer than it actually is those who believed Columbus's Voyage would fail did so because had he not run into the Americas he and his crew would have starved long before ever reaching the Orient Mark Twain didn't say the coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco I I've seen quite a few quotes attributed to him that are really of Unknown Origin I think because of his wide range of writings it's easy to claim that he wrote something the Vikings never wore horns on their helmets the only reason we believe that is because of poems and tales of the Vikings saying they did so we found remains of Vikings and non-h horned helmets after the idea that they had horns on their helmet was popularized just think about it aren't horns on helmets a little impractical and inconvenient you would never use them and it would make a great handle for the enemy to drag your head to the floor there are horned helmets at the national museum of Denmark long before the Scandinavians started raiding and therefore became what we think of as Vikings their shamans might have worn horned helmets these helmets predate not only the introduction of Christianity to Denmark but also the Scandinavian take on the Roman Pantheon Odin frig Thor and the others yeah I think anyone who's done even the most general of history courses on Europe has been aware of this but it's probably a good idea to shout it out to the listeners who don't know that people who lived before modern medicine lived much shorter lives when we say that the average life expectancy of an individual in say the year 1100 was 35 it doesn't mean that most people lived to around 35 and then suddenly died it means that mainly due to high childhood mortality and death during childbirth rates the average age of death was driven down if you survived childhood and pregnancy you had a fairly good chance to live well into your 60s or 70s of course people died more often from diseases and malnutrition but these were marginal factors in reducing the average life expectancy compared to Childhood mortality and death during child birth Pocahontas and John Smith thanks to Disney no one remembers that Pocahontas was a 12-year-old girl that was kidnapped by a 30 plusy Old Man dragged from her home and killed by a disease that she had no immunity to the tatana is somehow the best sword Humanity ever created and that the samurai were the best swordsman bull crap the k is great assuming you're fighting in Japan as soon as you hit somewhere with metal armor specifically Europe that sword actually kind of sucks also when you break down sword fighting among all the major sword cultures of Europe Japan China some parts of India 75% of it is the same crap mostly with variances in footwork Europeans could handle a sword just as well as the Japanese the katana is celebrated because Japan and its Samurai class celebrated the reality during actual wartime was that the sword was not nearly as important as other weapons and the real warriors were prized on their skills with other weapons like the bow or the naginata which is a weapon not unlike a lance swords were like sidearms and the other weapons were the Mainstay once peace time came and the samurai had nothing better to do with their time and money besides wax philosophical they spent a lot of time glorifying and romanticizing the past and that's where a lot of the veneration of the sword Bido and even the term Samurai comes from exactly just like everyone else swords are great in jewels in actual battle they're actually too difficult to maneuver with everyone crushing in around you the exemption of the American Philippine War from lower levels of History classes I didn't even hear about it much less learn about it until I took an AP class yeah people really don't learn how crappy America has been sometimes yeah George W bush offered the standard US High School explanation of the Spanish American war during a visit to manilo once and I face palmed the version where Spain totally had it coming because they blew up our one ship yeah and we were greeted as great liberators by the Filipinos who graciously submitted to a half century more of colonialism with no questions asked good old imperialism the system where everybody wins it's topics like this that fill me with information that tends to only be useful in making people not like me when I correct them knowing things makes me lonely the common American Myth that Jesse James was an American Robin Hood Jesse James was a fiery Rebel who killed unarmed and innocent people who posed no threat to him and robbed Southern as well as Northern Banks and trains Jesse's murderer is frequently referred to as the coward Robert Ford while Ford did shoot him while facing his back Jesse James once shot an innocent man named John Sheets who was merely filling out a bank slip Jesse James never gave any money back to people who needed it or really had any chivalrous qualities other than deluding himself that he was a southern gentleman the truth is that Jesse James was a domestic terrorist who stole and victimized dozens of people killed Innocents and aized himself by stealing the success of others as someone from the UK I think people forget about how crappy the country is acted over the centuries we're obviously not the root of all evil but people forget we seem to celebrate the abolition of slavery and look at the us as the ones with slaves when we' been cting slaves around the world for a substantially longer time having a huge Empire might have sounded quite cool and civilizing but we were pretty awful in some cases especially with how we treated the aboriginies the Tories seem to want to bring back the pride in the history of the Empire but it's something we should have looked at more objectively the same goes for Belgium Leopold II killed a lot of people he was responsible for the death of about 10 to 12 million congales people yet nobody really seems to remember it just doesn't have the same impact all because we haven't heard of it or we didn't watch enough documentaries about it the relative scope of World War II on the Western Front versus the Eastern Front people never understand or even taught the sheer magnitude indifference Americans are taught as if we were basically what won the war in Europe it's pretty darn misleading fun fact 80% of German combat power was used on the Eastern front in reality D-Day while significant did not win the war in Europe a few battles I would say are more significant would be Stalingrad and of course k people have no idea of the sheer size of the war on the Eastern Front not to mention the brutality on both sides you know it must suck when German troops consider fighting on the Western Front a break or vacation that there were just 300 Spartans at thermopol there was pretty much every other Greek city state there at the time Sparta fielded one of the smallest armies there and reluctantly went to war because they initially wanted to stay behind on their little Peninsula even after the crap hit the fan and the rest of the Greeks retreated there was still 700 thespians and 400 thebans as well as 300 Spartans that fought to the last what really rustles my jimmies about it is that the Spartans couldn't be seen as retreating they had to fight by the morals and laws that had been drummed into them the thebans and thespians just stayed behind because they had gonads of Steel even though in those days they were more of a militia than trained soldiers like the Spartans and they get zero recognition cant are not French everyone including the French Associates them with France but really the crossant is Austrian after a baker in Vienna saw that the Turks were coming the alarm was sounded just in time when eventually the Turks were beaten back the baker was allowed to make a celebratory pastry for the occasion he created a crescent moon since this was the Islamic and Turkish symbol we skipped to Mary Antoinette she loved the crossant and took the recipe with her to France from then on it became one of the most famous pastries of all time when you subscribe make sure to hit the Bell to turn on notifications put the playlist on in the background to finish listening to all the stories or if you want some viby music to put on in the background check out easy mode if you 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Published: Tue Feb 13 2024