Annoying Historical Myths

The BBQ Pit
201

I really hate this myth. Its like various schools of knife-fighting, wrestling, boxing, swordfighting, and rachery simply never existed. Irritating.

Errrrmmm… I don’t think we actually know that. The number of Buffalo way well have decreased impressively as they were hunted, but simply never entirely extinct. After the onset of mass disease spread by European contact, the hunts were disrupted and the wild game population exploded - just in time for expanding white settlement to take advantage of it.

In time, there probably would have been a die-off as well.

202

Another myth about Galileo I hate:

Galileo Galilei was such a devoted astronomer that he went blind from staring at the sun through a telescope while researching sunspots.

Even in the 16th century people knew that staring at the sun wasn’t a good idea, with or without magnification. Galileo went blind because he was old and had cataracts and glaucoma.

203

Marconi invented the radio. HA!

Tesla was to split a Nobel Prize with Edison.

Tesla did NOT invent the polyphase induction motor.

And last but not least…Tesla Coils aren’t good for anything but special effects and small lab experiments. Grrrrrrrrr…

204

One bit of lore I’ve heard repeated many times is “When native Americans killed a buffalo, they used every part of the creature and didn’t let any of it go to waste.” Is this true? If it is, then who did it and in what sense did they “use” it?

205

I’m sure indians found use for just about eveyr part of it.

The meat would obviously be used for food, both for them and (probably the less apetizing parts) for their animals. The bone and sinew could be used for decoration, tools, weapons, etc.

206

Shame on me for not thinking of that one m’self.

If one were to beleive the myths, then a dozen ninjas or Samuri would massacre an army of armored knights.

207

Well there was also a major climate change when all this was going on.

208

Meaning what? I don’t follow the connection from buffalo hunting.

209

Meaning that their methods for dealing with the giant sloth et al. weren’t so sustainable–they weren’t extincted from overhunting. The Buffalo didn’t go extinct mainly because there were so damn many of them, and so few Indians.

The myth you’re implying, GorillaMan, is that the Native Americans had a high environmental consciousness that led them to carefully restrain their environmental impact. There’s no evidence of that, and plenty of evidence against it. Their apparent environmental friendliness was simply that their low population density, relative to the agrarian society that white settlers brought, didn’t have all that much of an impact after the easily extincted animals were gone.

In Northern Canada, the Inuit were in the same position, taking willy-nilly from the bi-annual Caribou runs, never needing to worry about it until they got guns from white traders, at which point their hunting did impact the population and thin the herd.

210

At the time of Samuel de Champlain, the Iraquois and the huron tribes were engaged in a bloody conflict-the Iraquois had almost wiped out the huron Indians…the fact was that the hurons immediately allied themselves with the white men, for their own protection!
Un the case of the plains indians, the Lakota soiux and the blackfeet were in a state of almost perpetual war…and the addition of firearms almost wiped out the blackfeet. Even in the Southwest, the Apache were sworn enemies of the navajo and pima indian tribes.
So pre-white man America was not as peaceful as some would have us believe…war was common between tribes, and killing was seen as something good and manly.

211

You know, I’ve seen that offered as an alternative explanation for the extinctions, but I just don’t buy it. Fossils of mammoths (to take one example) have been found as far south as Guatemala. (Maybe farther. Guatemala is just the southernmost mammoth fossil of which I am aware).

Given their geographic range, and the adaptability it implies, I find it hard to believe a climate change could do them in. Why couldn’t they just migrate to a better climate?

On the other hand, the arrival of man in America and the essentially contemporaneous extinction of numerous large mammal species seems much more than coincidental.

212

Re Indians

There was a thread on this. IIRC it was ‘The Myth Of The Wasteless Indian’. However, various searches on “myth”, and “indian” haven’t turned it up.

213

So they should have said “no, we will leave the horses of the settlers, we will ignore their weaponry, to keep to only just killing enough to survive”?

Arguing that they weren’t a balanced part of their environment because European inventions destroyed that balance is ludicrous.

214

The American Indians did indeed seek the total elimination of enemy tribes. As noted above, the Huron were wiped out by the Iroquois. The Illini confederation was wiped out by the Winnebago, and the Chippewa went after the Fox like Hutus on Tutsis until the Fox fled south and allied themselves with the Sauk.

In their favor, the Indians sought to destroy enemy cultures, but didn’t subscribe to Nazi-like pseudo-scientific theories of racial superiority, so young childred would be spared and adopted into the conquering tribes. Even so, these children, especially the girls, were essentially slaves.

I was taught in high school history that the Indians didn’t rape their female captives, believing that the warrior’s sexuality was a spritual strength not to be wasted. Then I read about the Comanches. Sure, their sexuality was a spiritual strength - to be used as a brutal weapon.

215

Anything else to add?
:rolleyes:

216

Re: The War of 1812. No matter whether you define “Canadian” as a nationality or a culture, you still can’t get Canadians burning down the White House–the troops that did it were veteran British troops fresh from the Napoleonic Wars in Europe. No Canadians involved.

Other myths…

You can understand why people think of Edison as inventing the lightbulb or the motion picture. But what’s really amazing is the number folks out there who think Henry Ford invented the automobile! (He just invented a cheap way of making them. I’m sure 100 years from now many people will believe Bill Gates invented the computer. :rolleyes: )

The American Revolution happened because taxes were extremely high. (By modern day standards, the taxes imposed by the British were quite low. The sticking point wasn’t the amount, but the political consequences of paying taxes without democratic representation. The slogan “taxation without representation is tyranny” sums it up far better than “we want a tax cut.”)

People in England were commonly burned/executed as witches during the Middle Ages. (Not in England. Prosecutions for witchcraft were extremely rare during the Middle Ages; witch-mania didn’t really start until the Early Modern period. This is a case where the “dark age” was actually more civilized than the more recent one.)

Trial by water aka dunking worked this way: if you were tied up and put in the water and floated, you were guilty. If you were put in the water and sank, you were innocent…but you drowned. (Makes a nice story, but they did fish you out if you sank.)

During Shakespeare’s day, it was common for British women to marry in their early teens, hence Juliet. (Again a nice story, but in fact the average age of marriage for women at the time was about … 26! Though it is true that aristocrats were more likely to marry young than commoners.)

During the Middle Ages, anyone who was 40+ was considered quite old. (Not really. Yes, the average lifespan might have been 40, but that’s not because people hit 40 and then keeled over: it was because of truly horrendous mortality in childhood. If you made it to 20, you had a pretty good chance of making it to 60 or more.)

The Middle Ages were technologically stagnant. (Not so: indeed it has been argued that the Middle Ages were more technologically creative than the Roman period.)

The Inquisition killed millions of people. (Nope, probably more like 50,000, which is peanuts compared to 20th century legalized rampages.)

217

In some Plains tribes adultery (for a woman) was actually punishable by gang-rape.

As for warfare, there have been several burials of obviously important menw hose burial goods included not just bowls and amulets and arrows but skulls, probably of the heads of enemies taken in war but almost certainly not from volunteers.

218

I didn’t say they weren’t in balance with nature, I said that that balance was in no way due to any sort of environmental consciousness like you and others impute to them now. The fact that the introduction of European weapons unbalanced things is proof enough that they weren’t intentionally in balance with nature; the balance was an accident of their circumstances. Or rather, the balance that nature achieves, not the native Americans by any deliberate act or restraint. If they were environmentally conscious, then they would have recognized that firearms were much more efficient and that they had to alter their hunting habits to accomodate that: In other words, more efficient hunting tools means taking the same game with less effort, not taking lots more game until it dries up.

What you’re pushing, GorillaMan, is effectively the modern equivalent of the myth of the noble savage: that native Americans were somehow “in tune” with nature, and were consciously (or unconsciously) preserving the balance. Given the same opportunities as the Europeans to screw things up, they did it just as well as our white ancestors did.

219

Yes. Fuck you.

220

Also, in The Guns of August Barbara Tuchman clearly paints a picture of a totally stupid French general staff (with a couple of exceptions).

'Course, the Germans and the English were not that much better than the French, according to Tuchman. The impression I got from Guns of August was that WWI was what happens when your leaders do too much inbreeding.