Great link, sugaree. The American Memory collection is awesome.
Well they won’t give up St. Pierre and Miquelon.
Re: my previous post as well
Not to Canada anyway.
Or, they were all noble New Agey types who lived in perfect peace and harmony with nature and each other.
Or they all lived in tepees, shot buffalo with bows and arrows, and said “How!”
There are plenty of myths about the “redskins.”
Canada declared war independently.
Your conclusion is frankly preposterous. The beginning and end of the Second World War is defined by the preponderance of opinion in terms of what war was - not in terms of some lame definition of what constitutes a “world war.” As has been pointed out, using your definition, the Second World War was actually the First World War. Those two wars were called “world wars” because the name just stuck.
The Second World War began in September 1939, because that’s where 99.9% of all the historians on earth have agreed to start counting, and in fact is where the people at the time started counting. And that’s really the only definition that matters.
In any event, we’re discussion historical myths, not semantic disputes. matt_mcl was, I believe, referring to the notion that Americans think the war started at Pearl Harbor. I don’t actually know any educated Americans who think that, but maybe some do.
Nine million people were killed in the Burning Times.
The Church caused the Dark Ages.
Exodus really says “you shall not allow a poisoner to live” but King James
caused “poisoner” to be translated as “witch”.
Reagan won the Cold War.
Reagan caused the collapse of communism.
Puh-leeze. The Soviet government collapsed due to its corruption and inefficiency, and also because Gorbachev was not willing to ruthlessly smite his opponents. The only thing Reagan accomplished with his military excesses was to bankrupt the country.
And used it in a base-ten place-notation system, that was what the West adopted. The Arabs get credit because that’s who the Europeans got it from. (Islamic scholars had brought together Greek and Indian maths and spread them through their sphere of influence.) Interestingly, in Spanish our numeration system IS called “indoarábico”.
The First World War was originally called the “Great War”. It was only at the onset of WWII did it get called a “World War”.
So the terminology used changes. But the currently accepted definition of WWII usually agrees on a start date of 1939. Future historians may settle on another name, (“20th Century Madness; part 2 in a series of 200”?) but further facts are unlikely to surface to change the start date.
Canada kicked the US’ ass in the War of 1812. Oh, and we burned the White House down.
I could start a whole thread on Hollywood myths alone: The Jazz Singer being the first talkie, Thomas Edison “invented movies,” etc.
If Ukulele Ike were around, we could discuss Lupe Velez drowning in her toilet. Where is Ike these days? Anyone checked his bathroom?
Care for a rematch?
Depends on how you look at it. It was only a couple of years of slow-motion collapse, so its not exactly wrong. Two years is practically nothing from a historical viewpoint.
Well, tat and they wanted to rule themselves. Such is life.
Its highly questionable whether England could have continued resisting (Germany may not have been able to invade, but Britain couldn’t have fought back) or Russia absorb the Wehrmacht without US economic aid, as well as military aid. Certainly, the US didn’t win it all by our lonesome selves, but Russia can’t claim that honor, either.
Partly true. Many of the American forces fought like guerrillas. Though many people do forget that we also fought continental style, too. Our habit of harrassing the British without direct confrontation was well-suited to the terrain and dispposition of our forces.
Well, yes and no to both. Sure, by our standards they didn’t treat slaves well, nor even by their own standards. But on the other hand, the slave population in the US went from the 350K imported blacks to the 3 million of the antebelum period. So while slavery was brutal and cruel, it was also the kindest in the New World. Both views are correct. Life was far better on the Older, east-coast states, largely because tghose areas weren’t expanding production and all the hot-blooded young entrepreneurs were moving west.
Well, sort of, yes. Many of them were pretty sophisticated star-readers.
[quote]
- Galileo dropped heavy and light objects off the Leaning Tower of Pisa to prove they would fall at the same rate.
He probably didn’t, but we have nothing to say either way. Its possible.
Err… you can make a pretty good argument for both of these places/periods. It all depends on what a given person considers science.
While its true that modern investigation implicates O’Lery’s neighbor the drunk, you can hardly blame people for a myth that has been repeated (with reasonably good evidence) for what, 80 years now?
Coming from a man named Bob-Lib-Dem… :rolleyes:
Sure, the USSR might have collapsed if it hadn’ tried to match Reagan’s build up. But we don’t know that, so you are essentially casting past what-if’s to suit your political views. And even if it had collapsed, it might have taken the USSR another generation - or three - to die off, and perhaps would not have become a democracy.
“Kindest in the New World.” Well, what other institutions of slavery in the new world are you comparing it too? And how does an increase in population mean suggest that life was better?
Betsy Ross created the first United States flag.
Vomitoria.
Well, the U.S. invasion of Canada did fail, albeit York(Toronto) got burned. And the White House was burned down, albeit by the British.
My mother is Canadian, and moved to the States at about age 14. She’s said that she studied the war her last year in Canadian school, and her first year in U.S. school. For a while, she thought they were two different wars. 
Hasn’t the whole Victorians/sex/table legs thing been debunked?
What are the “burning times”?
The Emperor Caligula made his horse a Consul.
Shakespeare was an ignorant clod and the real author was Marlowe/Bacon/Queen Elizabeth I/insert name of choice.
Lee Harvey Oswald was a patsy.
The ancient Egyptians were negroes.
They were a strange race of people. No one knows who they were…or what they were doing.