OK, very minor, but something that, up until recently, even I believed. That the Pilgrims wore belt buckles on their hats. 
Pilgrims & Puritans were all humorless religious fanatics who always wore shades of black or gray. (The “cartoon history of the U.S.” portion of Moore’s BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE really pissed me off, stating that the Puritans ran from England because of delusion of persecution [never mind that they really were being imprisoned and killed for their beliefs] and fled to America because they were total cowards [never mind that bidding goodbye to the civilized world and all your family and friends to cross an ocean in a tiny floating dark rodent ridden hellhole to get to a totally strange land where you’re outnumbered thousands-to-one by natives isn’t exactly what most people think of when they think “cowardly”].)
Bessie Smith (or Dr. Charles Drew, who perfected plasma storage- take your pick since this tale is oft-told of both of them) bled to death because there was no hospital nearby that treated blacks. (What’s especially annoying about this is that even Bessie Smith’s half sister, “Diamond Teeth Mary” McClain, was repeating it as recently as the late 1990s [then there’s the business of the Albee play], while I’ve literally read the story of Drew dying from being denied treatment in black history textbooks; in fact, the first person on the scene at Smith’s accident happened to be a white doctor who by all accounts gave her excellent treatment AND the nearest hospital, only two miles away, was a BLACK hospital- she, like Drew, was sadly but simply too seriously injured for any medical assistance to save her.)
The Jim Crow South was bad enough- we don’t have to make it worse than it really was.
American Indians were all nature worshipping pacifists who smoked hemp, had prophetic visions, and never committed any unprovoked slaughters of white people. (Before I get Pitted in the Pit, I’m not saying that Indians didn’t get the shittiest treatment in American history, just that they committed a few atrocities of their own as well [and they certainly weren’t uniform in their religions or any other way].)
Only partially correct. They didn’t surrender at any given time, but the French armed forces (circa 1939 to the present) are indeed a joke. While not lacking in courage, their leadership does nothing but lack. One prime example is Dien Ben Phu, during the French-Indochina war. Great military idea for standing three divisions (or a reinforced corps if you like) around an airstrip. The firebase at Dien Ben Phu was, on visual inspection by George Sawyer (LTC, US Army Corps of Engineers, Ret) “a meatgrinder.” But as Sawyer also warned the Legion colonel in charge(Colonel Lalande) that they needed to watch for Viet Minh artillery fire from a series of hills surrounding the firebase. The colonel ignored it…and the Vietnamese shelled the everliving fuck out of the base, thus denying the use of the airfield, and cracking its defences, leading to yet another French surrender.
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The Patriotes rebellion was primarily or entirely ethnic in character, pitting French-Canadians against British-Canadians. Papineau had no English speakers in his force, nor did he ever correspond with Mackenzie who was leading a revolt in Upper Canada at the time, nor did he ever suggest that the hegemony of the Chateau Clique or the search for responsible government had anything to do with it.
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The Second World War started in 1941.
That women broke ribs with corsets, had ribs removed to lace tighter, and that all women had fifteen inch waists.
Bullshit. The average corset could be laced down to nineteen inches, at the smallest, leaving no gaps between the lacing. However, most women DID leave a few inches between the laces.
Do these idiots have any idea how truly tiny seventeen inches around is? A woman with a seventeen inch waist would look really bizarre (Ever see pictures of Cathy Jung? I think she’s got 16 inches-she looks really freaky).
Grrr, corset myths piss me off.
On this, I’d also like to beg to differ. WWII did indeed start in 1941, just not on December 7. Depending on how you define “World War,” it either started on June 22, 1941 with the launch of Operation Barbarossa, or on December 10, 1941 with the German decleration of war on the United States. Either way, it did start in '41. Until then, the world was indeed embroiled in conflict, but those could be boiled down to two major theatre wars (UK/France fighting Nazi Germany and Italy in Europe, beginning in 1939 and the Japanese war in Manchuria, which began in 1933.) The earlier date of June 22 would bring the idea of a major “World War” into context as it involved forces from powers on two continents, but even that doesn’t fully create a “World War.” The decleration of war by Japan on the United States on December 7 (Dec 8, Tokyo time) didn’t do it either, as it simply expanded the Pacific war to include the USA. Not until Hitler declared war on the US did it really become a “World War” with forces from multiple powers fighting simultaniously in multiple theatres.
Does that mean that a Canadian soldier killed in 1940 didn’t die in the Second World War?
I live in Virginia, and have a father who has traced our lineage back to Robert E. Lee. Therefore, he considers himself a Civil War buff. He trouts this line out to me all the time. I’ve never bothered to research it, but it’s never sounded right to me. Could someone debunk this for me?
Let me also add:
- One French-Canadian airline steward brought AIDS to North America. (No, you [editorial comment deleted.] He was called ‘patient zero’ because he was the centre of the epidemiological population studied in one particular study by the CDC, which in turn was only because he had kept notes about his sex partners. There were a number of cases of AIDS identified before he showed up. Besides, now that we know more about the incubation period, it’s considered unlikely that he actually infected even the people linked to him in the study. Just go here.)
Charles Drew died because he fell asleep at the wheel; as a reult, he suffered a broken neck, and no blood was flowing back from his neck to his head (insert morbid innuendo); in the accident, he was thrown partially out of the car which then rolled over (and con resultat over him). Three white surgeons at Alamance General Hospital in North Carolina were unsuccessful trying to save his life.
But kudos to MASH for claiming he died because of his race.
Oh yea, there’s another myth I hate, that Canada has a military. 
I would have to say ‘no.’ Now, the no is in marks for a reason. I am not sure of the status between Canada and the British Empire at the time (the Commonwealth and all that. Were they a part of the Empire, as India was?) While the Canadian trooper would have indeed died fighting Nazism in Europe, he didn’t die in the Second World War. At the same time, neither did any of the American soldiers who were alongside Chang Kai Shek’s forces in China in the '30s and 1940.
The explanations I have heard have generally been of two camps:
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It was an issue of states rights. Looking at the history of states’ admission into the USA, they were usually included in twos; one was a slave state and the other a free state. It was an issue that had been gradually coming to a head for something like 50 years (at least), and an examination of the Lincoln-Douglas debates sheds interesting light on how Lincoln used the issue of states’ rights vs. individual/private citizen rights to corner Douglas into a Catch-22 situation.
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It was an issue of economics; given the number of slaves owned by people in the south, and the number of people who had much money to throw at anything, there was simply not much in the way of feasible plans for getting the labor force provided by black slaves … paid.
Neither of these is a perfect argument, of course, but the argument that we went to war purely because the North’s citizens all wanted black freedom is something less than truthful; for all his latter glorification Lincoln wasn’t even a true abolitionist, but of course teaching the truth isn’t nearly as interesting as what the victors claimed.
It’s not rally something you can “debunk.” The fact is, the official reason for the war was to “preserve the Union,” for the North, and to “preserve states’ rights” (namely the right to seceed from the Union) in the south. But the main reason the South wanted to seceed was that they were worried about losing the institution of slavery. People often cite the fact that few people owned slaves, but the fear of free blacks was used to propogandize the war to poor whites. What galvinized the soldiers of the North was opposition to slavery. I think where it becomes mythical is when people act like “it” was not “about” slavery. If you read documents from the era, prewar political speeches, pro- and anti-abolutionist speeches, discussions about the war in contemporary novels, and so on, you will see pretty much every body at the time knew it was very much about slavery – more about slavery than states rights and secession and preserving the Union.
It’s not rEally something one can debunk. :rolleyes:
I’d be interested in seeing other posts on this topic, though, esp. ones with citations or references to books. My opinion is shaped by reading a lot of 19th Century American Lit, but I’m no historian. I suspect that historians may have originated this dogma about what the Civil War was “not about,” perhaps to outline the official history of the war, but it is mythologized when people think it had nothing to do with slavery.
Disclaimer: Slavery is horrid.
If I owned slaves, you can bet your ass they would be treated well. That’s the work force. You want your fields tended? You damn well better keep them healthy and un-injured.
Beatings? Yes, of course they took place, but not on the grand scale you want to think. You’re perpetuating revisionism with your argument.
Put it this way. If I want to make a success out of my farm, I ain’t gonna run the tractor with no oil.
That’s the classic mythical argument. However, history has not shown people to be rational animals, and one should not form pictures of history based on what he or she believes logical people might have done in that situation. Instead, one tries to find evidence for what people really did do, however disgusting it might be.
Will you speculate about what you might have done to form a historically accurate picture, or will you look for historical evidence? The documentary evidence is there – logs of beatings and whippings, ledgers showing purchases of whips and chains, diaries of slave drivers and overseers discussing how they dealt with upstart slaves.
You personally may “damn well” wish to keep your “workforce” healthy and uninjured, but what exactly in world history compels you to believe this has been a priority of anyone owning or directing a workforce? Certainly not a history of slavery in the U.S., or factory work in the U.S., or the feudal system in Europe, or the dynasties of China, or the serf system in Russia before the revolution.
In other words, read the OP. You’re part of the problem, mack.
I think there’s a marked difference between how you treat slaves normally (i.e. if you don’t see them as rising up for insurrection, or you’re not suspicious or whatever) vs. if there’s trouble brewing. I’d be interested to see a study done of what we know of treatment of slaves (here and abroad) both when they behaved and when they didn’t. The main difference AFAIK (read: I might not K) b/w us and, say, the Romans is that our slaves were more expensive; 40 years after the Civil War, a car cost $200, say. A slave cost more than that IIRC in 1860. This was no light investment, so while you might well punish a slave for trying to run away (and you’d punish just as much as a lesson to the others as you’d punish the slave him- or herself), those who did not have piles of money to spend on slaves to replace those who’d been killed by an overzealous owner probably didn’t go to such extreme lengths as others did to ensure their slaves stayed within bounds.
Evelyn Beatrice Hall, writing under the pseudonym S. G. Tallantyre published a book in 1906, The Friends of Voltaire. Inj it she notes the story of Claude Adrien Helvétius who pissed off the majority of the French secular and religious authorities with a claim that no such thing as virtue existed. She noted that Voltaire thought the work was trivial, but that the state and church seriously overreacted to such a silly work. In her conclusion to the summary of the incident, Hall wrote that Voltaire exclaimed
Asked about here paraphrase of Voltaire’s thoughts, Hall said, in 1935,
While your parsing of conflicts is admirable, it should be noted that Time magazine referred in its 11 September, 1939 issue (Vol 38 / No 1) to “World War II” having begun in the previous week, so however you wish to construe it, the people of the time recognized the September 1 invasion of Poland and the British and French (non-)response as the opening of a genuine world war.
Oh no!! I’ve been found out! I’m part of the problem! (Meaning, what? I condone slavery?)
You’re forgetting that the slaves in the US were BOUGHT! There was an investment in to potential work they could perform. That’s why they were auctioned to people with doctor’s there to examine them.
Dragging thousands of Chinese off to work on the Great Wall till they died was one thing, PAYING for forced labor was another.
Get YOUR facts together, mack.
I agree that slave-beatings probably didn’t occur as often as bad novels would have you believe. What did happen very frequently was worse: rape and sale. Slave families rarely remained together for a lifetime; even if your master truly cared about you and your family ties, a few bad harvests and you’re all heading different directions because his creditors have forced a sale of his assets, the most valuable being humans. (Perfect example: Thomas Jefferson- he never separated families when he could help it and took a very patriarchal compassionate interest in the well-beings of his slaves, but when decades of bad investments, extravagant spending, and declining tobacco prices finally reached critical mass, his slaves were sold to the four points of the compass and whole families were forever parted. (Remember the slave wedding vow: til death or distance do us part.)
As for the rape: practically every auction ad after the mid 17th century mentions the mulattos. Whether the girl or woman consented to the sex for whatever reasons was completely unimportant; no man in American history was ever prosecuted for the rape of his slave, regardless of her age.
The knowledge that your master or his overseer or any member of his family could come into the cabin where you live and tell you to take a walk while he has sex with your sister/wife/mother/daughter, who then has to work in his fields the next day, or that every new moon could be the last you ever witness with those you love, is a horror more dehumanizing to me than a beating. You’ll recover from a lashing; you’ll never recover from seeing the person you love most taken away screaming in chains while you watch completely powerless. “Like members of the family” my ass.