In school we were taught that Christopher Columbus was somewhat of a good person, but what they didn’t tell us was that when he “discovered” America he slaughtered and enslaved thousands of native Americans.
In the very early 1960s, a viking settlement was discovered in Nova Scotia. This should’ve ended the Christopher Columbus narrative of being the first European to set foot on the continent, but instead the farce continued via public education.
John A. Macdonald stopped drinking in 1870. Most of his time as Prime Minister he was totally sober, happily married and faithful, and regularly attending church. Almost all of the good stories involving him were from his pre-Confederation days.
So I grew up in Alabama and as part of our history, we were taught that only rich landowners owned slaves. Most people with small farms did not….however, I was looking for information about something in my area and looked at the census records for the time. Yes, there were large landowners with slaves, some had over 100 enslaved people, but there were also a whole bunch of people who owned 1-3 slaves. So it really wasn’t true what we were taught. I don’t know how it was anywhere else, but in my county at least, a lot of people owned slaves.
“True” damascus steel is not a “lost” art in any sense of the word even if people constantly repeat that myth.
Not only did people write down recipes from as far back and al kindi and before (zosimos, for example gives a vague but not inaccurate description), to as recent as eyewitness accounts from 1903 (Ananda Coomaraswamy), but production continued as late as that and resumed as soon as people had the material testing equipment to get the composition right (see Wadsworth through to Verhoeven).
These days plenty of people can make pattern forming crucible “damascus” steel with historic compositions.
Damned near everything taught in American schools about the Puritans (“Pilgrims” of Rhode Island Colony and Massachusetts Colony) is wrong. They weren’t “seeking religious freedom”, they lost a war to impose fascism and genocide in England, moved to Holland, got kicked out of there, hid in England for a couple years and then moved west.
They were FAR from the first white settlers in their landing area, much less the New World (Jamestown Colony was over a DECADE old at that point) and New Amsterdam was already a bustling metropolis, at least in colonial senses.
EDITED ABOVE TO CORRECT TIMING, other colonies in the New World were a century older than anything the Puritans had, but Jameston was only 17 years prior, not a century. Mea culpa.
They didn’t “host a Thanksgiving” (celebrations of ANY SORT were forbidden, it was a feast of sorts, but it wasn’t a Thanksgiving in the way normally shown), they didn’t really have farming problems (they were absolute idiots the first year and didn’t bother growing storeable foods, so that part is kinda-maybe-if-you-squint trueish), the land was fertile and grew well.
Oh, and they were literal mass murderers of anyone who disagreed with them, they slaughtered native towns and even fellow white people because the Quakers weren’t their kind of Christian. They are distinctly responsible for what would later be called the French and Indian War (indirectly, but Prince Philip’s War led other tribes to be unwilling to trust English Colonists, which led to the FIW), and the policies that in centuries to come would lead to such abominations as The Trail of Tears and the massacre of the Sioux people. Those policies are directly attributable to people who were the descendents of Puritans.
And they slaughtered their own people, the Witch Trials of Salem were not the first on American soil, but all of them were Puritan based.
And generally American schools show them as poor waifs who were just looking for religious freedom.
While the Founding Fathers were pro-business they were NOT pro-corporation. They were all for sole proprietorships and partnerships but were adamantly against corporations (having just one the first, anti corporate war).
The Founding Fathers were so suspicious and concerned about corporations that they required them to apply for state-controlled charters and had to prove that the corporation would serve the public good (like building a railroad or a dam). No value to society? So sorry, no corporate protections.
Of course, ever since, we’ve evolved a 180° turn from that to, now, you CANNOT have a social mission unless you declare it at the start or file as a B-corp.
I find it interesting how many of these im seeing here are just as inaccurate as the initial inaccuracy they seek to fix.
Political party switch – The Democrats became a whole different party and took up progressivism as its central tenant. The republicans…. well they just kinda sat there. It wasn’t a swap. It was 1 party completely redefining itself in a full 180 from their past. TLDR: There was no swap.
Christopher Columbus – By no means a saint. Did some fucked up stuff. Simultaneously, much of what we are seeing is inaccurate. The majority of the atrocities he is being held up for, were committed after his death, by his son. The British pushed out propaganda against the Spanish and in it much of the deeds of his son and others were superimposed onto him. And some things in our modern day were imposed onto different groups. So far as we know he wasn’t chopping off the hands of the natives. He was chopping off the hands of the Spanish for not paying their taxes. Because he was racist. And figured the Spanish should know better, but did not hold the natives to the same standard. That is what he was imprisoned for.
Just 2 here. But yeah, there is a lot of misinformation in this thread.
I grew up in Kansas about three hours from Tulsa, Oklahoma. There was a brief mention of a “race riot” in the Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa in 1921 and that a few people died.
It wasn’t until I was in my 30’s that I learned the truth about the Tulsa Massacre. The event wasn’t just scrubbed from history books, in most cases it was never included at all.
Pocahontas and John Rolfe fell in love and got married. Utter horse shit. Pocahontas was being held hostage by the English to keep the Powhatan from attacking Jamestown. While in captivity she was tortured and raped mercilessly by a number of people, almost certainly including John Rolfe himself. We also know that she had at least one child that was a result of the rapes that died after birth. We know all of this because the English were stupid enough to let her visit with her sister unsupervised as a gesture of good faith and she told her everything that had happened. The wedding idea came after the English realized the mistake they made and that if the sister got home before they did, a Powhatan war party would be on its way to Jamestown shortly after. The English Escorted the sister home and announced Pocahontas’s conversion to Christianity and the engagement to John Rolfe before she got the chance to even open her mouth. Absolute best case scenario is that Pocahontas had Stockholm Syndrome and had developed a bond with John Rolfe because she for some reason felt the most safe with him. More likely, it was a forced marriage to sweep her torture under the rug and save themselves from being wiped out.
“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people,” former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman told Harper’s writer Dan Baum for the April cover story published Tuesday.
“You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,” Ehrlichman said. “We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
Hitler’s art was dry and uninspiring, but showed solid technical ability and excellent grasp of color and shading. I don’t understand people who say he wasn’t talented. If his paintings weren’t done by one of the worst people in history they’d look great in a nice cozy living room.
Claudette Colvin, a 15 year old black girl, was actually the first to not give up her seat on the bus for a white passenger. It was 9 months before Rosa Parks. The NAACP (and others) decided Parks was a better person to use as a figurehead because she was an adult. So, it’s true what Rosa Parks did. But Colvin did it first.
The second amendment, and the belief of the founding fathers that it was critically important for civilians to keep and bear arms, is intrinsically and undeniably linked to their deep And profound belief that the U.S. should NEVER have a standing army.
When you understand that the founding fathers firmly opposed the very existence of a standing army, the first sentence of the second amendment suddenly makes much more sense.
Rather a misconception that I have no ideo how it came to be. People think primitive = stupid/unskillfull. Its so prerelevant that it must somehow get taught.
I often hear people at any specific time couldn’t do xy because it wasn’t “invented” yet. Give our ancestors some credit for their igenuity.
That bíblical Jews were slaves in Egypt and wandered the desert for a hundred years. My whole life I thought this was true (I went Catholic schools) but there’s absolutely no evidence of it.
That the burning of the Library of Alexandria set humanity back: “all official knowledge lost.” No. it was the Library of Congress back in its day: the information inside was a copy, as it was believed that having a copy of texts and other items was a good idea.
“Honest Abe” Lincoln was a politician most modern pols would recognize. He was perfectly willing to lie, cheat and steal. And also hassle the press corps of the time. It wasn’t that uncommon for journalists back then to get thrown in jail briefly for writing articles favoring the Confederacy. Of course that technically violated the Constitution so would be let out fairly quickly but the point was made.
George Washington was by all historical accounts not a good field general. He was mostly good at raising an army that didn’t completely desert under fire (pretty important) but repeatedly made basic tactical blunders in the field.
One that really irritates me is one that is also going to make others angry with me. The one I mean is the story of Abraham Lincoln setting out to end slavery. When Abraham Lincoln was elected he had absolutely no intention of freeing the slaves or ending slavery, he was only trying to stop the slave trade from spreading further north because they had a Hugh influx of white Europeans coming to america and needing work. The only reason the emancipation proclamation exists is because so many slaves freed themselves and ran to the north. Those that made it were offered legal freedoms as long as they fought for the union army, by the time the emancipation proclamation was written there were so many slaves that had freed themselves that Lincoln had no other option but to completely end slavery all together.
This error in history teachings bothers me for a couple reasons
The history should show that while a constitutional amendment gave the slaves the freedom legally it was really the slaves that freed themselves and I personally think they should be given the majority of the credit for that, instead the government felt it would be better to praise the white man that did nothing but sign a paper.
This also is one point in history that shows how people that are politically conservative have a huge problem, and that is that they almost always cause their own problems. In this case they wanted to keep their slaves, but instead of accepting that they wouldn’t be allowed to sell slaves to people north of a specific line, they chose to cause a war that lost them the right to own the slaves they had. Conservatives have done this same type of thing repeatedly.
Comments
I actually think a lot of the history we have learned has been altered or fabricated. All in an effort to have the current world we have
That women did nothing
In school we were taught that Christopher Columbus was somewhat of a good person, but what they didn’t tell us was that when he “discovered” America he slaughtered and enslaved thousands of native Americans.
Ben Franklin discovered electricity
In the very early 1960s, a viking settlement was discovered in Nova Scotia. This should’ve ended the Christopher Columbus narrative of being the first European to set foot on the continent, but instead the farce continued via public education.
George Washington never won an election, he was appointed by Congress. Not so much a lie as it is just never talked about in the first place.
John A. Macdonald stopped drinking in 1870. Most of his time as Prime Minister he was totally sober, happily married and faithful, and regularly attending church. Almost all of the good stories involving him were from his pre-Confederation days.
So I grew up in Alabama and as part of our history, we were taught that only rich landowners owned slaves. Most people with small farms did not….however, I was looking for information about something in my area and looked at the census records for the time. Yes, there were large landowners with slaves, some had over 100 enslaved people, but there were also a whole bunch of people who owned 1-3 slaves. So it really wasn’t true what we were taught. I don’t know how it was anywhere else, but in my county at least, a lot of people owned slaves.
“True” damascus steel is not a “lost” art in any sense of the word even if people constantly repeat that myth.
Not only did people write down recipes from as far back and al kindi and before (zosimos, for example gives a vague but not inaccurate description), to as recent as eyewitness accounts from 1903 (Ananda Coomaraswamy), but production continued as late as that and resumed as soon as people had the material testing equipment to get the composition right (see Wadsworth through to Verhoeven).
These days plenty of people can make pattern forming crucible “damascus” steel with historic compositions.
george washington did not cut down his fathers cherry tree- it was made up by a biographer (weems)
paul revere never completed his midnight run – he was arrested
sybil luddington’s ride was more successful than revere
That the first US settlers were fleeing religious persecution
Said religious persecution was being told that they couldn’t religiously persecute others
Tale as old as time I guess
Lost Cause of the Confedereacy
Damned near everything taught in American schools about the Puritans (“Pilgrims” of Rhode Island Colony and Massachusetts Colony) is wrong. They weren’t “seeking religious freedom”, they lost a war to impose fascism and genocide in England, moved to Holland, got kicked out of there, hid in England for a couple years and then moved west.
They were FAR from the first white settlers in their landing area, much less the New World (Jamestown Colony was over a DECADE old at that point) and New Amsterdam was already a bustling metropolis, at least in colonial senses.
EDITED ABOVE TO CORRECT TIMING, other colonies in the New World were a century older than anything the Puritans had, but Jameston was only 17 years prior, not a century. Mea culpa.
They didn’t “host a Thanksgiving” (celebrations of ANY SORT were forbidden, it was a feast of sorts, but it wasn’t a Thanksgiving in the way normally shown), they didn’t really have farming problems (they were absolute idiots the first year and didn’t bother growing storeable foods, so that part is kinda-maybe-if-you-squint trueish), the land was fertile and grew well.
Oh, and they were literal mass murderers of anyone who disagreed with them, they slaughtered native towns and even fellow white people because the Quakers weren’t their kind of Christian. They are distinctly responsible for what would later be called the French and Indian War (indirectly, but Prince Philip’s War led other tribes to be unwilling to trust English Colonists, which led to the FIW), and the policies that in centuries to come would lead to such abominations as The Trail of Tears and the massacre of the Sioux people. Those policies are directly attributable to people who were the descendents of Puritans.
And they slaughtered their own people, the Witch Trials of Salem were not the first on American soil, but all of them were Puritan based.
And generally American schools show them as poor waifs who were just looking for religious freedom.
While the Founding Fathers were pro-business they were NOT pro-corporation. They were all for sole proprietorships and partnerships but were adamantly against corporations (having just one the first, anti corporate war).
The Founding Fathers were so suspicious and concerned about corporations that they required them to apply for state-controlled charters and had to prove that the corporation would serve the public good (like building a railroad or a dam). No value to society? So sorry, no corporate protections.
Of course, ever since, we’ve evolved a 180° turn from that to, now, you CANNOT have a social mission unless you declare it at the start or file as a B-corp.
I find it interesting how many of these im seeing here are just as inaccurate as the initial inaccuracy they seek to fix.
Political party switch – The Democrats became a whole different party and took up progressivism as its central tenant. The republicans…. well they just kinda sat there. It wasn’t a swap. It was 1 party completely redefining itself in a full 180 from their past. TLDR: There was no swap.
Christopher Columbus – By no means a saint. Did some fucked up stuff. Simultaneously, much of what we are seeing is inaccurate. The majority of the atrocities he is being held up for, were committed after his death, by his son. The British pushed out propaganda against the Spanish and in it much of the deeds of his son and others were superimposed onto him. And some things in our modern day were imposed onto different groups. So far as we know he wasn’t chopping off the hands of the natives. He was chopping off the hands of the Spanish for not paying their taxes. Because he was racist. And figured the Spanish should know better, but did not hold the natives to the same standard. That is what he was imprisoned for.
Just 2 here. But yeah, there is a lot of misinformation in this thread.
I grew up in Kansas about three hours from Tulsa, Oklahoma. There was a brief mention of a “race riot” in the Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa in 1921 and that a few people died.
It wasn’t until I was in my 30’s that I learned the truth about the Tulsa Massacre. The event wasn’t just scrubbed from history books, in most cases it was never included at all.
That corsets were instruments of death imposed on women by men.
There was no famine in Ireland. There was a potato blight. There was ship loads of food leaving the country for Britain every day .
People in Columbus’ day didnt think the earth was flat we knew it was a sphere since around 500BC
Pocahontas and John Rolfe fell in love and got married. Utter horse shit. Pocahontas was being held hostage by the English to keep the Powhatan from attacking Jamestown. While in captivity she was tortured and raped mercilessly by a number of people, almost certainly including John Rolfe himself. We also know that she had at least one child that was a result of the rapes that died after birth. We know all of this because the English were stupid enough to let her visit with her sister unsupervised as a gesture of good faith and she told her everything that had happened. The wedding idea came after the English realized the mistake they made and that if the sister got home before they did, a Powhatan war party would be on its way to Jamestown shortly after. The English Escorted the sister home and announced Pocahontas’s conversion to Christianity and the engagement to John Rolfe before she got the chance to even open her mouth. Absolute best case scenario is that Pocahontas had Stockholm Syndrome and had developed a bond with John Rolfe because she for some reason felt the most safe with him. More likely, it was a forced marriage to sweep her torture under the rug and save themselves from being wiped out.
That Thomas Edison was a great inventor. He really just tweaked other people’s inventions and patented/sold them.
As a kid in the USA I remember always being glad that the “good guys” “won” every war they taught us about.
“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people,” former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman told Harper’s writer Dan Baum for the April cover story published Tuesday.
“You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,” Ehrlichman said. “We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
Vote locally in efforts to Decriminalize Nature.
Hitler’s art was dry and uninspiring, but showed solid technical ability and excellent grasp of color and shading. I don’t understand people who say he wasn’t talented. If his paintings weren’t done by one of the worst people in history they’d look great in a nice cozy living room.
Claudette Colvin, a 15 year old black girl, was actually the first to not give up her seat on the bus for a white passenger. It was 9 months before Rosa Parks. The NAACP (and others) decided Parks was a better person to use as a figurehead because she was an adult. So, it’s true what Rosa Parks did. But Colvin did it first.
The second amendment, and the belief of the founding fathers that it was critically important for civilians to keep and bear arms, is intrinsically and undeniably linked to their deep And profound belief that the U.S. should NEVER have a standing army.
When you understand that the founding fathers firmly opposed the very existence of a standing army, the first sentence of the second amendment suddenly makes much more sense.
Rather a misconception that I have no ideo how it came to be. People think primitive = stupid/unskillfull. Its so prerelevant that it must somehow get taught.
I often hear people at any specific time couldn’t do xy because it wasn’t “invented” yet. Give our ancestors some credit for their igenuity.
That bíblical Jews were slaves in Egypt and wandered the desert for a hundred years. My whole life I thought this was true (I went Catholic schools) but there’s absolutely no evidence of it.
It wasn’t so much that George Custer lost the Battle of the Little Big Horn as that the Indians won it.
That the Confederacy didn’t fight the American Civil War over slavery
That the burning of the Library of Alexandria set humanity back: “all official knowledge lost.” No. it was the Library of Congress back in its day: the information inside was a copy, as it was believed that having a copy of texts and other items was a good idea.
That Medieval people only lived to 30, which is wrong, average life expectancy was low due to infant mortality, but adults have been living long life
George Washington cut down a cherry tree.
Trump is a brilliant businessman.
Biblical ones as ‘fact’.
“Honest Abe” Lincoln was a politician most modern pols would recognize. He was perfectly willing to lie, cheat and steal. And also hassle the press corps of the time. It wasn’t that uncommon for journalists back then to get thrown in jail briefly for writing articles favoring the Confederacy. Of course that technically violated the Constitution so would be let out fairly quickly but the point was made.
George Washington was by all historical accounts not a good field general. He was mostly good at raising an army that didn’t completely desert under fire (pretty important) but repeatedly made basic tactical blunders in the field.
The book of Mormon. Completely made up.
That Columbus discovered America
That men were hunters and women stayed in the cave and tended to the children, and the fire, and gathered berries.
Reality – evidence shows that women were hunters as well.
One that really irritates me is one that is also going to make others angry with me. The one I mean is the story of Abraham Lincoln setting out to end slavery. When Abraham Lincoln was elected he had absolutely no intention of freeing the slaves or ending slavery, he was only trying to stop the slave trade from spreading further north because they had a Hugh influx of white Europeans coming to america and needing work. The only reason the emancipation proclamation exists is because so many slaves freed themselves and ran to the north. Those that made it were offered legal freedoms as long as they fought for the union army, by the time the emancipation proclamation was written there were so many slaves that had freed themselves that Lincoln had no other option but to completely end slavery all together.
This error in history teachings bothers me for a couple reasons
The history should show that while a constitutional amendment gave the slaves the freedom legally it was really the slaves that freed themselves and I personally think they should be given the majority of the credit for that, instead the government felt it would be better to praise the white man that did nothing but sign a paper.
This also is one point in history that shows how people that are politically conservative have a huge problem, and that is that they almost always cause their own problems. In this case they wanted to keep their slaves, but instead of accepting that they wouldn’t be allowed to sell slaves to people north of a specific line, they chose to cause a war that lost them the right to own the slaves they had. Conservatives have done this same type of thing repeatedly.
The good old Pilgrims and the first Thanksgiving in America.