Surprised that, although James Loewen was brought up, no one seems to have mentioned Richard Schenkman. His Legends, Lies, and Cherished Myths of American History obviously belongs here. It was popular enough to make it into paperback and audio editions. Like Jearl Walker, he is a sourcebook rather than a final source – you really have to look up his references to get the full benefit of his work. He wrote two more books, of declining quality, but still decent reads – I Love Paul Revere, Whether he Rode or Not and Legends, Lies, and Cherished Myths of World History. (He preceded these with One Night Stands in American History, which has recently been expanded and re-issued, and he’s had a brief cable TV series that Loewen refers to.)
What? Where did you learn all your history? Were you there? Oh…your TEACHER told you, well then it must be true!
Most annoying myth? Revisonists must always be right 
I’d like to remove the word “revisionist” from the whole dialogue about history. It’s meaningless.
All right, I brought up the science stuff, I guess it’s my responsibility to straighten some of it out, eh?
clair: -The indians inventing the zero. Who did?
GM: IIRC, Hindus most often get the credit for this, because they were the ones who invented the zero symbol, of a circle.
JRD: 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”.
It is possible that Indians in the early first millennium CE independently reinvented the zero symbol, and as JRD notes, they are (almost) indisputably the ones who combined it with a decimal place-value system. However, Babylonians in the first millennium BCE had earlier developed the practice of putting a zero marker in their sexagesimal (base 60) place-value system, and Greek astronomers adopted it from them (although the Greek alphanumeric number notation was not employed in a place-value way in other contexts), usually in the form of a small circle with or without a bar over it. Much Greek astronomy and astrology was transmitted to India near the beginning of this era, and it’s possible that the circular zero was part of that transmission (we don’t have enough original documents from this era of Indian history to know for sure).
By the way, “Indo-Arabic” is the “scholastically correct” term for the modern decimal place-value numerals in English too; it just hasn’t caught on as widely yet.
clair: -Ancient artifact like stonehenge: don’t they actually prove they had soemastronomical knowledge?
sb: Well, sort of, yes. Many of them were pretty sophisticated star-readers.
“Star-readers” meaning what? Nobody’s denying that non-literate ancient civilizations had some familiarity with periodic astronomical phenomena, and looked at stars and had names for some of them and so forth. But it’s very unlikely that they performed sophisticated calculations to make extremely accurate astronomical predictions. And the arguments from archaeoastronomy (studying the astronomical orientations of ancient monuments and so forth) are pretty much crapola in that regard. There are fairly simple practical ways to orient monuments with respect to the cardinal directions quite precisely. More elaborate arguments about more esoteric orientations are probably all just examples of pseudosignificant data; after all, pretty much any direction points to something that can be interpreted as astronomically significant, but that doesn’t necessarily imply that that’s what the original builders had in mind.
clair: -Galileo : how did he conduct his experiments, then?
JRD: Rolling weighted balls/cylinders along inclined rails in the workshop
sb: He probably didn’t [drop the weights off the Tower of Pisa], but we have nothing to say either way. Its possible.
It’s very unlikely; we have a lot of Galileo’s actual experimental records and they are the sort of workshop experiments that JRD describes. Galileo’s science-popularization works did discuss a lot of nifty scenarios for understanding relative motion, like dropping cannonballs down the mast of moving ships and shooting arrows from the back of a running horse; and in fact among academicians and amateurs of science a little later, the descriptions inspired a bit of a craze for actually trying them out. But there’s no reason to think that Galileo himself tested such scenarios experimentally. A certain amount of lab work with simple mechanics and a whole lot of calculation: that seems to have been where Galileo’s physics really came from.
clair: *-Copernicus : here, I’m not asking for the SD, I disagree with you : though Copernicus system was flawed, […] Copernicus system was still an approximation of the way things really worked, while [geo]centric system was utterly wrong (and much more convoluted). *
JRD: 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.
Half right clair, mostly right JRD.. Of course the heliocentric hypothesis is in fact “better” (in the sense of more nearly approximating modern theory) than the geocentric, qualitatively. However, as interpreted by Copernicus it was certainly not less “convoluted”; it had at least as many phenomena-saving devices as the Ptolemaic model and possibly more, depending on how you count the circles. Also, it was very unsatisfactory in terms of mechanics, because it didn’t predict what people’s physical experience of being on a moving object led them to expect. It took a couple centuries, plus the work of Tycho Brahe, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton, as well as the discovery of stellar parallax, to re-educate those expectations so that celestial mechanics made some kind of physical sense again (and it wasn’t till the discovery of the aberration of starlight and the explanation of frictional coupling in the Ekman layer of the atmosphere that some of the puzzles were completely laid to rest). So the idea that Copernicus thought up the heliocentric system and it was obviously better and everybody except the stupid old Catholic Church ought to have been able to see right away that it was better is simply a myth.
clair: -Astrology not being milenias old : wasn’t there astrologers in Mesopotamia, some thousand years ago?
As far as we can tell, astral omens (predicting a certain terrestrial event from a certain celestial phenomenon) emerged as a subfield of divination in Mesopotamia about 2000 BCE. But this was overwhelmingly a state-oriented form of prediction, interpreted to predict the fate of the king and the kingdom. Birth omens—predicting the fate of any given individual depending on the position of the sun and moon and visible planets at his birth—don’t seem to have come into use until after Persian domination of Mesopotamia in the middle of the first millennium BCE (when, presumably, a lot of Babylonian court diviners were out of a job and needed a new clientele). And the classical system of horoscopic astrology derived from these birth omens apparently emerged among Greek scientists in Egypt only a couple of centuries before the current era. So astrology as we know it is a little over a couple thousand years old, but it certainly doesn’t stretch back many millennia to the dawn of civilization, as many people seem to think.
sb: Err… you can make a pretty good argument for both of these places/periods [classical antiquity and seventeenth-century Europe for the invention of science]. It all depends on what a given person considers science.
True, but most people don’t think about it hard enough to realize that there are different ways to define the term “science”; they assume that it has a single obvious meaning and a single historical origin, which is what makes those statements annoying myths.
The term “the burning times” is a neologism that modern witches/wiccans use to refer to the period in European (and, to a lesser extent, American) history when people were killed for “practicing witchcraft”.
Duffer: Most new slaves were born rather than bought. Yes, they were considered valuable movable capital but that doesn’t mean that they would receive more than the bare minimum in terms of food, clothing, and shelter.
I think what Smiling Bandit is referring to is that slavery in the Caribbean was far more brutal and costly in terms of lives - slavery in the US became largely self sustaining in a way it never really did in the Caribbean. I am not sure I would agree that US slavery was the most benign in the new world, as I believe that slaves in both Brazil and the ex-Spanish mainland colonies had some rights that their US counterparts lacked - they could work for pay on Sundays and holy days, the money could be used to buy their freedom, and they could become citizens IIRC.
The invasion of the colony of Upper Canada failed, which frames my point in another way I guess.
Canada and Canadians sprung full grown from the brow of Zeus in 1867? Did someone living in, say, York in 1812 consider himself British or Canadian? I think there’s a lineage there you’re not acknowledging. For instance, if I chose to say “we won” about the French and Indian War, the “we” would be referring to the U.S. and its people, though neither existed at the time. There is a direct line though, between the places and people then, and the places and people that became the U.S. I think that matters more than the fact that the U.S. in 1755 and Canada in 1812 were British colonies. Just my opinion.
I agree. Even as early as Canada’s first novel – The History of Emily Montague, published 1769 – there’s already hints of an evolving English-Canadian identity, though Quebec had been New France a scant ten years earlier. By the early Nineteenth Century, Canadians are already portrayed in our literature as very different from their British counterparts.
IIRC, much of England’s military was busy with Napoleon, so it was largely Canadian-born troops who had to deal with the invasion. Let’s also not forget the contribution of the First Nations people under Tecumseh, who could hardly be refered to as British.
Not that I’m implying that Tecumseh should be regarded as Canadian, simply that looking at the War of 1812 as a continuation of the War for Independance (Americans versus British) is much too simplistic.
Sorry guys, I must have missed where Canada was a signature to the peace treaty. I mean if Canada was actively involved as an independent entity during the war we would’ve been there right?
Of course not. The British and US signed the peace treaty. I’m not asserting that a Canadian identity wasn’t developing; however it was not a Canadian war but a war fought by Canadian colonists under British direction.
These are two that I more or less believed. What’s the straight dope behind them?
Oh, and what about Caligula and making his horse a consul?
No one’s disputing that Canada was not an independent political entity at the time. But the question is “What is a Canadian?” (or an American, or Ukrainian, etc…). Some people take the purely legalistic defintion (No Canada, no Canadians), but I think identity is a lot more complex than that, and that it’s possible to speak of Canadians prior to the existence of a state called Canada.
Saying “The British side of the War of 1812 in North America” is not so much a myth as a different interpretation of what constitutes a national identity. For many of us, “nation” and “state” are not interchangeable terms.
That should be “Saying ‘The British side of the War of 1812’ was largely composed of Canadians…”
All the way to the third page before getting to my favorite myth:
Medieval Europeans ate spoiled meat. They covered the taste of cheap, locally-produced meat with really expensive imported spices.
That’s a good one Devil’s Grandmother, my personal favorite was the idea that people were midgets in medieval/rennassance/colonial times. While the average height has gone up a couple of inches in modern times, we are not talking about a race of dwarves here.
And I’ve made quite a few comments in GD with regards to Hemp advocates and the historical myths invented about their favorite crop.
Actually the central premise of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
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Not to mention that communism is still practiced in other countries.
For MaxTheVool, the Straight Dope from 1 November 2002: Were there really vomitoriums in ancient Rome?
Yes, but their legacy remains… hewn into the living rock.