The TV series claimed that? (Not surprising; that long debunked myth pops up at least once a year or so in major articles or speeches.)
I’ve seen the episode. Granted, it has to do with a member of the US military forces who thinks there’s a difference between “black” and “white” blood, but Pierce tells the story as Drew dying because the surgeons refused to treat him because he was black.
A few commonly believed and or repeated gay myths:
Homosexuality caused the downfall of the Roman Empire. Odd that it continued expanding even after the reigns of such flamers as Nero (1st century) and Heliogabalus (3rd century) and that one of its greatest emperors, Hadrian, was one of the biggest flamers of all. Also odd that by the time it fell in the west it had been Christian for more than a century.
Greeks and Romans considered homosexuality the ideal form of love. Not exactly. You were still expected to marry and make babies, and men whose sexual leanings were exclusively homosexual or whose mannerisms were effeminate were looked down on even then, and if you were ever learned to be the passive partner in anal sex, your reputation was gone forever.
The Koran allowed Muslim men to have four wives. Actually the Koran limited a man to four wives. (Muhammad had at least that many and probably more when he received the revelation.)
George Washington Carver invented peanut butter. Peanut butter was older than Carver by at least a generation. It was even used in Civil War hospitals as a means of providing protein to men who couldn’t chew. Carver developed many other uses for the peanut, but Jif just didn’t happen to be one of them.
Anne Boleyne had six fingers on her right hand. Not quite: she had a growth on her right hand that may have been the tip of a sixth finger or may have just been a fleshy growth. She certainly didn’t have a fully functional and fully formed sixth finger.
Colonel Sanders was a failure in everything he did until he started KFC in his sixties. Actually he was a very successful businessman for many years who had a catastrophic setback when the interstate bypassed his motel and restaurant. He was broke when he began KFC, true, but he was far from a penniless slacker.
*Chief Seattle gave a beautiful and prophetic speech about the environment in * False . This is another one that is quoted at least once a year in “respectable” articles and speeches.
Salieri was a repressed no-talent hack who killed Mozart. Only in the play. The real Salieri was a jovial man who delighted in his many daughters (10, I believe), was seen and saw himself as a capable musician- nothing spectacular- who was mainly important for his professorial duties. His students Beethoven and Schubert remembered him very kindly.
Goddammit, I meant to bring that up. That was my argument about a truth being distorted into something else, in that, while there were atrocities as those, they don’t equate to wanton(sp?) cruelty in all forms.
Thanks for pointing out my forgetfulness. 
I’m a historian of pre-modern science: I got a million of these aggravating little button-pushers. Here’s a few:
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The Arabs (or the Indians) invented zero.
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Ancient artifacts like Stonehenge prove that ancient nonliterate societies were very astronomically sophisticated.
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Galileo dropped heavy and light objects off the Leaning Tower of Pisa to prove they would fall at the same rate.
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Copernicus’ heliocentric astronomy was better than Ptolemy’s geocentric astronomy.
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Pythagoras discovered the Pythagorean Theorem.
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Astrology is many millennia old.
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The ancient Greeks invented science.
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The seventeenth-century Europeans invented science.
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There’s coded astronomical or other scientific data in religious scriptures.
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There was “warfare” between science and Christianity.
Etc. etc. etc., ad infinitum, ad nauseam.
Mrs. O’Leary’s cow kicked over a lantern and started the Great Chicago Fire.
Following this reasonning, then, we should say that World War one began in 1941. Because your conditions were not met to call the 1914-1918 conflict a “world war”, either.
I would suspect that actually, the contrary myth (amerindians were wise, enlightened people respecting nature and peaceful in their interactions with other people) is much more widespread.
Same thing concerning the comment made by another poster about the celts, by the way.There’s no reason to assume that author stating they practised human sacrifices were lying, and there even are some archeological evidences that they indeed did. They weren’t reluctant to attack/invade their own neighbors, either, and the fact that the celts occupied a big chunk of Europe should be a hint. What happened to the people living in these lands before the celts came in, according to you? Besides, they weren’t necessarily worst off after the roman occupation, and one could easily make a case for the roman empire bringing in peace and prosperity.
More generally, Idealizing a given people is as much idiotic as assigning it “evil” characteristics. Let’s say that will be my “annoying historical myth” for now : People X were really great, worthy of admiration, without any human flaw, until their amazing culture was destroyed by corrupted and evil people Y.
(I’m going to make an exception for Tamerlane’s hordes, that I really despise. I can’t help myself. Apologies to the poster going by the same name).
Stonehenge was built by Druids.
As all right thinking people know, the druids didn’t come along until at least a thousand years after the aliens.
Ok. I believed in several of these myths, and I would like to get the straight dope about them :
-The indians inventing the zero. Who did?
-Ancient artifact like stonehenge: don’t they actually prove they had soemastronomical knowledge?
-Galileo : how did he conduct his experiments, then?
-Copernicus : here, I’m not asking for the SD, I disagree with you : though Copernicus system was flawed, and despite the fact that the geocentric system had been “improved” by adding a lot of complicated stuff wich helped to exlain away most of the discrepancies between theory and observations (hence resulting in the superiority of Heliocentic system not being blatantly obvious), Copernicus system was still an approximation of the way things really worked, while heliocentric system was utterly wrong (and much more convoluted). So, I’m not sure why you think his astronomy wasn’t better.
-Astrology not being milenias old : wasn’t there astrologers in Mesopotamia, some thousand years ago?
I of course meant GEOCENTRIC system was utterly wrong.
You’re not condoning slavery, but you are perpetuating a myth about US history (the problem addressed in the OP) by trying to argue history with a theory of what people might have done, rather than looking to see what they actually did. It doesn’t matter what would be “reasonable” for a slave owner to do. The fact is, humans don’t like being treated like cattle, and were constantly malingering or escaping and getting whipped for it. Furthermore, slave owners needed to relentlessly degrade them in order to keep them fearful and and maintain their own perception of them as a wretched and inferior race. This is not “reasonable,” it’s what happened. Not much of history is reasonable. Do some research, rather than argue from a position of what reasonable people would do if they invested money in humans. You could read some slave narratives, for example.
Rolling weighted balls/cylinders along inclined rails in the workshop
As to Copernicus, I think the allegation is that he did not arrive at his model through “better astronomy”, but that this was a case of theory first, observations afterwards. The modified epicyclic-geocentric model WAS a “better” match for observed celestial apparent motion than specifically what Copernicus proposed. This is however kind of unfair since he just did not have the observational and calculational resources that Galileo, Tycho and Kepler did.
Also keep in mind that there was, on a large plantation, a distance between the plantation (slave) owner and the field hands. The hands were worked by an overseer. The overseer isn’t the one who shelled out money for the slaves. His goal was yield from year to year, not making sure he got 20 years out of a field hand.
Rosa Parks was just a seamstress with sore feet who decided one day she was too tired to give up her seat to a white man. (Actually she was an NAACP secretary and activist and knew they were looking for a “test case” - none of which makes her action any less brave, of course.)
The six counties of Northern Ireland elected to stay in the UK after the south was given dominion status. (The counties were not given the choice, and if they had been, two of them would have joined the Free State.)
Oooh, slave narratives
That the Vietnam War claimed the lives of approximately 58,000 people in total.
(a US-centric view)
It wasn’t invented, it was discovered. It was actually a fairly revolutionary philosophical move, to recognise the representation of nothingness. Various cultures made this discovery independently of one another.
IIRC, Hindus most often get the credit for this, because they were the ones who invented the zero symbol, of a circle.
Alexander Fleming’s father saved Winston Churchill from drowning; Churchill’s father paid for Fleming’s education; Fleming’s invention of penicilin saved Churchill’s life.
I was sent this recently in an email with the subject “Cute but…”. It also contained a cutesy image, and promises of good luck if I forwarded it or bad luck if I didn’t. I replied “Cute but… not true! See Snopes”. The sender replied “I think that we all know these are not true but we send them on anyway. Not because we actually think that we will have good luck or get special wishes or whatever but just because it is something nice instead of all the crap we usually hear about.” I’m afraid that got a big WTF 
from me. By attaching the names of real people to it, most people don’t know it’s not a true story. If you remove the names Fleming and Churchill, then what’s left is not a particularly good or interesting story, just some lame crap that someone made up - and something most people would never bother to send on because it’s not interesting. On top of that, the wishes for good luck are one thing, but I don’t appreciate threats of bad luck if I don’t forward crappy made up stories to all my friends. I never do, unless there’s a particularly funny joke or something I wish to share to people who I know will appreciate it, and even then I remove all the crap about forwarding it.
It just bugs me so much that most people would prefer to believe a lie than learn a truth. No matter how you go about telling them that the story is false, they always react in much the same way, some variation on “Oh. But wouldn’t it be great if it was true. It probably is, you know!”
Wilbur and Orville Wright invented honey roasted peanuts and tiny bottles of alcohol.
Yes, I am kidding.