Maybe I should have bolded the anything part. Yes, book, TV, and internet are where I learn pretty much all of my history. The difference is, I don’t believe everything I read or hear.
[tangent]
A few years ago, the company I was working for built a good sized exhibit for the Smithsonian about Vikings. In it was a panel discussing their clothing, and that panel specifically explained how the whole horned helmet thing was a myth. So, you leave the exhibit proper and go into the Viking gift shop where you can buy . . . helmets with horns on them.
[/tangent]
Now THERE’s a complicated (or at least long) answer. Here’s what I know, though it might not be completely accurate; all of this was either told to me by my english prof who’s got her doctorate in British lit or gleaned from sources she had no issue with. YM, as always, MV.
The notion that Shakespeare was an ignorant clod is borne mainly from two things: 1) His spelling is seen as, to be polite, woefully nonstandard, and 2) He was not formally educated at Oxford or Cambridge or anything like that. The reason for the spelling, I am told (I have no cite on this, but on the outset it makes sense to me), is that he was spelling the words as they were meant to be said by the particular characters; as such, a Londoner and someone from, say, the tippy top of England would pronounce words differently just as a New Englander might say “tie-eh” instead of “tire”, while someone from this area (SWVA) might say “tar” or “ter” instead of “tire”. The spelling is meant to be not dictionary-like but phonetic. The issue of lack of professional schooling involves the notion that Brits of the time in the academic know were too self-righteous to admit that someone hailed as a great poet and playright might not have gone to one of their proper schools (one wonders how he would have gotten away with all the brazen sexual innuendo had he been school at one of same schools…), but I don’t put as much behind that theory as the other one.
The important thing to remember about the whole “Marlowe/Queen Elizabeth/John Smith” writing Shakespeare’s work for him is that plagiarism as we understand it today is vastly different from the system back in those times. Hell, Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus consisted in part of work he paid for outright from two other writers. It was not unheard of in the least for a work to be translated from one language to another with no attribution (Faustus, for its part, was something of that and something of a collection/fictionalization of German folklore, so in a modern sense it was certainly not wholly plagiarized), nor for works to be edited very slightly and passed off as brand new. It was also not a practice that was punished, as far as I have ever heard, if for no other reason (and there are other reasons) than the fact that the speed at which information moves today versus how it moved in the 18th century is beyond comparison. Even had someone believed their work had been stolen, how in the world would they find out in the first place?
Shakespeare used some of Marlowe’s ideas, Marlowe used from others, and so on. If Shakespeare owes anything to Marlowe (I think he does), it’s the popularization of the history play and tragedy, two theatrical forms that simply weren’t popular (or, for the most part, even attempted) before Marlowe wrote The Rich Jew of Malta and Edward II. Then there’s the issue of blank verse, but that’s getting more into a “What did Marlowe contribute to today’s society” (a paper I wrote) vs the strict relationship between what Marlowe did vs. what Shakespeare did.
The second theory in my first paragraph tends also to lend itself to the notion that Marlowe or whoever also wrote part of all of Shakespeare’s works. Given that Marlowe died in his 20s almost penniless, it seems doubtful that he penned any of those works commonly attributed to Shakespeare. Elizabeth is known more (in terms of literature, anyway) for her letters than anything else AFAIK.
Details?
Still mostly false. The great British blunder of fighting in the European mode was Braddock’s destruction in Western Pennsylvania–in 1755, 20 years before Concord. By the time of the War for Independence, the Brits were well aware that such maneuvers in broken wooded country were declarations of intent to suicide. The Brits were quite capable of fighting from behind cover, just as the Yanks were, and the Yanks developed the art of fighting in formation (when the tactics required it) with the assistance of von Steuben and Lafayette. The Brits also had a significant guerrilla force of their own among the Loyalists as the survivors of the Wyoming Valley could attest.
Rasputin’s Death
The myth- He’s invited to a party. As nobody else has shown up(no one else had been invited), the host tells the Debauched One to help himself to the refreshments. Rasputin eats and drinks large quantities. His host is surprised that Rasputin shows no signs of succumbing to the massive doses of poison he’s just ingested. Rasputin is beaten with a large pipe. Instead of dying, the monk just gets mad. The hapless assassin empties a revolver into Rasputin. He then dumps the body in a river. Autopsy later reveals Rasputin’s death was caused by drowning.
The truth is likely that Rasputin was simply poisoned. Supporters of the prince who killed Rasputin made up the story. It made the prince look macho and brave, and credited Rasputin with supernatural powers which could only come from Satan.
Talking films existed as early as the 1890s, using various film-and-disc methods; none terribly successful or marketable. Experiments with sound-on-film were well underway by the early 1920s, and many sound shorts from that period exist. Hell, The Jazz Singer wasn’t even a talkie, it was a part-talkie! What is was, was the first commercially released film using sound-on-film that proved the technology was adaptable and ready to go.
As far as Edison, his PR machine worked overtime. Moving pictures (both in flip-machines and projected) were invented in Europe and in the US before, and at about the same time as, Edison’s. He just had more money and a bigger reputation (I mean, let’s not write him off as an inventor, for goodness sake!). There is even some evidence that Frenchman Augustin Le Prince invented projected movies in the late 1880s.
Black Cleopatra!
40 acres and a mule!
Slave reperations because the white man oppresses all!
Okay, a couple of things…
This is true, though, of pretty much everyone’s spelling in Shakespeare’s day – standardized spelling didn’t come about until around the eighteenth century or so. The one spelling-related issue that does come up with regards to the so-called “authorship controversy” has to do with the spelling of Shakespeare’s name: none of the extant signatures use the spelling “Shakespeare,” and occasionally the name is hyphenated on some of the early print editions, which is sometimes taken as evidence that “Shake-speare” is a pseudonym, though according to the good people at this site there’s no grounds for that (that’s a great site, btw, and I tend to draw on a lot of the stuff there when talking about the case for Shakespeare).
The specifics of the case against Shakespeare vary, of course, depending on the alternate candidate being put forth, but the cases tend to boil down to the idea that Shakespeare’s plays display a level of knowledge and reading that Will Shakespeare of Stratford couldn’t have acquired based on what we know about him. The plays don’t bear this out, nor does the reputation Shakespeare had closer to his own day as a kind of “native genius” who cranked out masterpieces effortlessy – another “historical myth” that makes this post at least nominally on topic. 
Well, tragedy, of course, has always been popular, and Marlowe may well have been following in the footsteps of Shakespeare when he wrote Edward II, which probably postdates at least Shakespeare’s Henry VI plays (which have a very complicated textual history and were extremely popular in the 1590s, if not today. Thomas Nashe makes what appears to be an allusion to 1 Henry VI in his Pierce Pennilesse that indicates that it drew big crowds, although his reference to “ten thousand spectators” may be an exaggeration). So I imagine Shakespeare had at least as much of a hand in popularizing the English chronicle history play as Marlowe did. (Although, in the circular way these things work, Shakespeare’s Richard II is certainly influenced by Marlowe’s Edward II.)
There’s been a lot of ink spilled on Shakespeare’s poetic (rather than generic) debt to Marlowe, so I’ll hold off on that. I would like to say, though, that this is probably the most politely-worded post on the authorship controversy I’ve ever written.
It could well be that he survived the poisoning and had to be shot or stabbed. The poison he was served was cyanide; it is known that Rasputin had stomach problems whose symptoms matched dyspepsia, and there are a number of conditions with peptic acid irregularities that would either neutralize cyanide or at least make it very slow acting.
OTOH, Prince Yussupov was a pathological liar.
The “rule of thumb”.
Benjamin Franklin invented electricity.
Life was better and people were more moral in the Fifties.
Don’t even get me started…
Premarital sex is mostly a 20th century problem. Odd then that every issue of the New York Times published during the Civil War had advertisements for abortionists (“Are you affected by an obstructed menstrual cycle? We can help you”) and STD treatments, or that 1 in every 6 Civil War soldiers is believed to have had a venereal disease.
The Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4, 1776. Nobody signed it on July 4, and some signers did not sign it until years later. (Adams and Jefferson really did both die on July 4, 1826, though.)
Nostradamus foresaw every major world event from the death of Henri IV to the Minelli-Gest divorce. To quote Cecil, “Nostradamus did for bullshit what Stonehenge did for rocks.”
The emperor Claudius was a brief restoration of normalcy and decency between his insane nephews Caligula and Nero. Claudius was, if anything, bloodier and hornier than his nephews and far removed from the sweet befuddled pragmatic old cuckold depicted in the [still excellent anyway] miniseries and novels.
Ancient people worshipped stone and marble statues. This one drives me nuts and I’ve heard it from some of the damnedest people [including schoolteachers and ministers]. The ancients weren’t stupid: they no more thought that marble statue was really Zeus than most Methodists think that the camels in the plastic Nativity Set in their yard are going to eat their flowers. Idols were a representation used as a focal point for worship and veneration.
Two especially fruitful sources of misinformation, incidentally: Paul Harvey’s The Rest of the Story (which is usually wildly distorted if not outright wrong) and the Time-Life series of books (which also tends to leave out a few major points about the mysterious “coincidences” that make them less mysterious).
So Eve… was Lana Turner really discovered at Schwabs? And were the Munchkins on Wizard of Oz really a bunch of partying boozehounds?
Before him people had to watch TV by candlelight.
Does anybody know if the Futility/Titanic coincidences are real or exaggerated?
Who were these druids…and what would they say to us if we were here tonight?
The ancient history student weighs in.
Caligula actually made his horse a senator, not a consul. Whether this is true or not I can’t say, nor can anyone else, really, but it is in the ancient sources.
… cite? That’s certainly not how Suetonius or Tacitus see it.
The coincidences are real–but their eerieness is exaggerated.
Fourteen years before the Titanic was launched, Robertson wrote a book about the sinking of a liner that was a bit larger than the Titanic (but within the projected range of a “real big” future ship, given the developments in naval architecture at the time) that hits an iceberg and sinks. In each case, the ship was supposed to have been “unsinkable” based on the latest technology. All of that is easily arrived at by standing in 1898 and projecting where shipbuilding would go.
The only thing that is striking in the way of coincidences was his choice of a name: Titan.
The actual sinking is wholly different: the Titan was moving too fast through fog (a common complaint against liners in the late 1800s) and ran up onto a shelving iceberg, from which it slid back down at a steep angle, sinking immediately with no heroic self-sacrifice by some people or cowardly attempts to save themselves by others, no ignored distress calls, no shortage of lifeboats, and the list of dissimilarities goes on.
The Wreck of the Titan, or Futility used to be on line, but I did not see it with a quick search. It is hardly a novel, in length, and is even among the shorter novellas I have read.
According to Lana herself, from her Variety obit, she was discovered at the soda fountain at the Top Hat Cafe (not Schwab’s), across the street from Hollywood High School, by Hollywood Reporter publisher W.R. Wilkerson.
The Munchkin partying stories come from Judy Garland, who was a great storyteller with a sharp wit and who never let the truth get in the way of a funny story. The surviving Munchkins were royally pissed-off at her, though.
“The daughter of the great camp Goddess
Will wed in the city of towers
The man who plays for the other team.
The guest list will be terrifying.”
I have a book that contains all his quatrains, in their original languages. I keep it just to debunk him.
Bread And Circuses
The gladiators and various other arena spectacles weren’t some kind of distraction to keep the citizens from rebelling.
Good point; the history of revisionist history is, after all, simply the history of history. Now somebody explain this to our semi-educated President.
I FORGOT SOME OF MY FAVORITES, STOP THE PRESSES!
A) Edison invented the lightbulb.
B) Paul Revere saved America’s ass.
C) Abe Lincoln’s duck could quack, but it would not echo. (I have heard that Abe wrote on shovels when he did his homework. This is just a lie, right?)
D) Napoleon stuck his hands in his armpit for an undisclosed reason. Napoleon also was the shortest man alive. Napoleon was also the greatest French person ever born (ok, it is a nitpick as he was Corsican, but yea…)