Another "Things most people know about history... that are wrong" thread

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
41

[QUOTE=Wendell Wagner]
You’re being unfair to Loewen. You’re better read in American history than most people and less likely to believe some of the false information that he writes about. I think that his books are reasonably good but need to be read skeptically just like anything else. Yes, he’s self-impressed and makes occasional mistakes. The same is true of some pretty good posters here, including you.
[/QUOTE]

He does more than make occasional mistakes. He makes many mistakes, stretches facts to fit his politics, and (most damning) he has been known to falsify footnotes. Or to be charitable, make “mistakes” in his footnotes. In short, he fights “lies” with different “lies.”

I wouldn’t trust anything he has to say.

42

[QUOTE=Sampiro]
I can’t provide a cite (because I haven’t looked for one), but I seem to remember reading that bayonets killed more people in the Revolution than musket balls. I’m positive they did at many battles, because in addition to the time it takes to reload there’s the fact that it’s very difficult to fire a musket in damp weather.
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I love the movie Last of the Mohicans, but it’s funny watching how they finesse the loading time issue. Every time Hawkeye kills a Huron, it is just at the moment that the Huron has finished loading his own rifle. So Hawkeye drops the rifle he’s just fired and grabs the Huron’s rifle, all ready to go.

43

Thanks to the movie Inherit the Wind, many people have a distorted view of the Scopes monkey trial was about the conflict between a school teacher and a crazed, religious populace that opposed the teaching of evolution. In reality though, there was no such conflict. There was no attempt to enforce the Butler Act, which would have restricted the teaching of evolution, nor was there any jail penalty attached to this law. Quite the contrary; Scopes had to be persuaded by a group of Dayton businessmen to present himself as a defendant so that the ACLU could present its case.

44

In fairness to Inherit the Wind, I should note that Jerome E. Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, the authors of the play, never claimed it was a depiction of the Scopes trial. They changed the names (Scopes is Bert Cates. Bryan becomes Brady, Darrow becomes Drummond), and they explicitly state at the beginning of the printed edition that it isn’t depicting events in Dayton.

Kinda like Scaeffer wasn’t trying to be historically accurate in Amadeus or The Royal Hunt of the Sun, although most people probably don’t realize it. At least Lawrence and Lee changed the names.

45

As I sit here, I’m less than a mile from the Monitor/Merrimack Bridge-Tunnel. sigh That one has been irritating me for years.

46

Most people think Ann Rule got the contract to write “The Stranger Beside Me” only because she knew Ted Bundy. Actually, she had the contract months before Bundy was even a suspect. She started writing the book not knowing she wouldn’t be writing about a stranger, but someone she thought she knew, a friend of many years.

47

Walt Disney was not cryogenically frozen. He was cremated, and his ashes were interred in a cemetery in LA. You can see his grave if you want.

48

[QUOTE=Sampiro]

One of the most irksome that I’ve heard and I’ve heard it many many times including from college professors-

“Oh, during the Middle Ages/on the American Frontier/back in 1900/etc., if you lived to be 50 you were considered old. You probably had grandchildren and no teeth and were seen as near miraculous.”

and closely related

"

[/QUOTE]

This one totally bugs me too! I try to explain that life expectancies have increased because of a decrease in infant mortality; if you made it past childhood then you had a fair chance of making to old age. And most of the adult increases are due to our ability to fight infection, not because we can know deal with chronic diseases.
Oooh, that one just bugs me!!!

49

The Internet was not designed to survive nuclear war. It was designed to be robust in the face of unreliable networks, but networks have always been plenty unreliable without Russkie nukes to worry about. Cite from an authoritative source.

A significant number of people apparently think the Internet is the same thing as the Web and was invented sometime around 1993. Both are wrong, and the date is laughably wrong. The Web was invented in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, but all that consisted of was writing the first Web server, a simple text-only Web browser, and creating the simplified SGML dialect called HTML. (SGML is IBM’s Standard Generalized Markup Language, a very complex markup language invented in the 1960s. XML is a somewhat less simplified application of SGML.) Graphical browsers came later, and browsers that could display graphics inline came a bit later still.

(Sidenote: The big feature of Web browsers initially (prior to about 1993) was that they presented a unified interface to everything the Internet offered, from FTP to Usenet to email to Gopher (a hypertext system similar to the Web but not really) to, yes, the Web. The Web only began to seriously pull ahead after the first browsers had been written and put into use.)

So, when was the Internet invented? Well, a number of dates are possible, depending on what, precisely, you define as the “Internet”:
[ul]
[li]1969 was when the ARPANET project was founded by the DoD. This is the kitchen-sink-historian viewpoint: The ARPANET was the first packet-switched network and was certainly the ancestor of the Internet, but very little specific has carried over into the modern day. The main innovation from this early was packet-switching, or dividing up the message into a lot of little packets that are all individually addressed and can each make their own way to their ultimate destination. This provides reliability, simplicity, and economy compared to the phone system.[/li][li]1977 was when the first gateway was demonstrated: Specifically, it was the first TCP-based transmission between three dissimilar networks. This is the functionalist viewpoint: Both TCP and the heterogeneous network-of-networks concept are essential to the modern Internet. The network-of-networks concept (implemented by gateways) allows different physical networks to share the same data, for example phone lines and Ethernet cables and WiFi. TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) guarantees reliable and in-order transmission of data over unreliable physical networks, mainly by resending packets that got lost. Once you have gateways and TCP, you have the modern Internet. Cite for the date.[/li][li]1983 was when NCP was ditched for TCP/IP on the ARPANET. This is the most restrictive/pragmatic view: NCP was the underlying protocol suite/software used on the early experimental ARPANET, whereas the TCP/IP protocol suite (as implemented by a lot of different software) is what we use today. NCP was implemented by specialized hardware and would have been prohibitively expensive to replicate anywhere else, whereas the TCP/IP stack has been implemented multiple times for multiple kinds of hardware and on multiple OSes. TCP/IP allowed the Internet to take off.[/li][/ul]

The indispensable Hobbes’ Internet Timeline.

50

A software related piece of information I didn’t know until very recently but found interesting was that Windows 1.0, released in 1985, not only did not revolutionize PCs, it was a total flop.

UP ABOVE IN THE LIFE EXPECTANCY RANT, I somehow didn’t include the link I mentioned.

The Dead at 40 Myth (from Plimoth Plantation)

51

[QUOTE=CalMeacham]
In fairness to Inherit the Wind, I should note that Jerome E. Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, the authors of the play, never claimed it was a depiction of the Scopes trial. They changed the names (Scopes is Bert Cates. Bryan becomes Brady, Darrow becomes Drummond), and they explicitly state at the beginning of the printed edition that it isn’t depicting events in Dayton.
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Right. In fact, the Wikipedia page that I linked to specifically emphasized that. That doesn’t stop schools from showing the movie in biology class though, nor does it stop people from thinking that the Scopes trial was all about a townful or religious people hounding a teacher, persecuting him, and locking him in jail.

52

[QUOTE=JThunder]
Right. In fact, the Wikipedia page that I linked to specifically emphasized that. That doesn’t stop schools from showing the movie in biology class though, nor does it stop people from thinking that the Scopes trial was all about a townful or religious people hounding a teacher, persecuting him, and locking him in jail.
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My understanding, from people who were actually there that I knew when I was a kid, is it was basically a publicity stunt designed to drum up tourism for a struggling town. They had even checked on the prices of renting ferris wheels long before the trial began, and ironically Scopes himself did not believe in evolution (or else hadn’t really thought about it one way or the other). The courtroom scenes, though, are pretty close, sometimes word for word, with the real trials.

There have been two remakes- the first with Kirk Douglas/Jason Robards was terrible. The most recent, with George C. Scott and Jack Lemmon, was excellent. (Scott played Drummond/Darrow on Broadway and was offered the role in the movie, but only agreed to star if he got to play Brady/Bryan, the role he liked much better.)

53

spoke- writes:

> He does more than make occasional mistakes. He makes many mistakes,
> stretches facts to fit his politics, and (most damning) he has been known to
> falsify footnotes. Or to be charitable, make “mistakes” in his footnotes. In short,
> he fights “lies” with different “lies.”

Cite? Really, I’d like a list of his mistakes. If they’re as common as you claim, someone should have compiled such a list. Where can I find that list?

54

[QUOTE=Wendell Wagner]
spoke- writes:

> He does more than make occasional mistakes. He makes many mistakes,
> stretches facts to fit his politics, and (most damning) he has been known to
> falsify footnotes. Or to be charitable, make “mistakes” in his footnotes. In short,
> he fights “lies” with different “lies.”

Cite? Really, I’d like a list of his mistakes. If they’re as common as you claim, someone should have compiled such a list. Where can I find that list?
[/QUOTE]

I don’t have the energy. We went over all of this long ago in a thread on Nathan Bedford Forrest (one of Loewen’s favorite targets). That thread seems to have been lost in the Great Upheaval.

In the context of that thread, I actually looked up several of Loewen’s footnotes at the Atlanta Fulton County Library. To put it most kindly, his footnoted sources did not support his assertions in several instances. By “didn’t support,” I mean they made absolutely no reference to the facts for which they were cited.

Aside from falsification of footnotes (or to be really generous, errors in his footnotes), he often tortured the facts to fit his ideas. One of the points in his book Lies Across America was that the South idolizes Nathan Bedford Forrest (a Confederate general who later founded the first incarnation of the KKK). He belittles Forrest’s military accomplishments (the better to further his idea that the real reason Forrest is being commemorated is his connection to the Klan), but doesn’t tell his readers that Forrest was widely regarded by generals north and south as the greatest tactical genius the war produced.

Loewen points out that a town in Arkansas named after Forrest, even though Forrest never fought there. But he doesn’t tell his readers that Forrest founded the town. He points out a statue of Forrest in Rome, Georgia. But he doesn’t tell his readers the reason it’s there: Forrest prevented the town from being sacked by Union forces. Loewen says that historical markers mentioning Forrest far outnumber monuments to Robert E. Lee in Alabama and Tennessee. But he doesn’t tell his readers that Forrest did much of his fighting in Tennessee and Alabama, while Lee never fought in either state.

Loewen also tells his readers that if your read historical markers in the South you’d never know the Confederacy lost the war because the markers always seem to commemorate Confederate victories. Living as I do in Atlanta, I find that laughable. Atlanta is peppered with markers showing the locations of Union triumphs.

I’m doing all this from memory, but I hope you get the idea.

55

This doesn’t strike me as huge amounts of errors. Seriously, I’d like a list of his errors. Saying that you don’t have time to list them doesn’t convince me at all. If he’s as bad as you claim, someone must have compiled a llist of his errors. I want to see that.

56

[QUOTE=Wendell Wagner]
This doesn’t strike me as huge amounts of errors. Seriously, I’d like a list of his errors. Saying that you don’t have time to list them doesn’t convince me at all. If he’s as bad as you claim, someone must have compiled a llist of his errors. I want to see that.
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I am not going to research his footnotes all over again to satisfy you. (But you might want to do that before you decide to believe everything Loewen tells you just because he published a book.)

57

[QUOTE=Illuminatiprimus]
America didn’t declare war on Nazi Germany in WW2 - Germany had already declared war on them in accordance with their military alliance with Japan after they bombed Pearl Harbour (admittedly they did so reluctantly not wishing to open up yet another front in the war, but still).
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That’s false, as has already been pointed out, and it’s “Pearl Harbor,” even if you live in the UK or Canada. It’s a proper name.

The myth that drives me bonkers: “Baseball was invented by Abner Doubleday.” A total and deliberate lie.

58

[QUOTE=Sampiro]
My understanding, from people who were actually there that I knew when I was a kid, is it was basically a publicity stunt designed to drum up tourism for a struggling town. They had even checked on the prices of renting ferris wheels long before the trial began, and ironically Scopes himself did not believe in evolution (or else hadn’t really thought about it one way or the other). The courtroom scenes, though, are pretty close, sometimes word for word, with the real trials.
[/QUOTE]

That is exactly right. The play and movie took tremendous liberties with the actual events, which is why it’s unfortunate that so many think it’s an accurate telling of history.

Oh, and some of the courtroom dialogue was indeed taken directly from the trial transcripts.

59

[QUOTE=RickJay]
The myth that drives me bonkers: “Baseball was invented by Abner Doubleday.” A total and deliberate lie.
[/QUOTE]

Creationism vs. Evolution is a very controversial subject.

60

[QUOTE=friedo]
I’m not sure what you mean by this. Declarations of war between the US and Germany were mutual in WWII.

Congress passed this atypically concise joint resolution on Dec. 11, 1941:
[Quote=Joint Resolution Declaring that a State of War Exists Between the People of Germany and the People of the United States]

Whereas the Government of Germany has formally declared war against the Government and the people of the United States of America: . . .
[/quote]

[/QUOTE]
(bolding mine)
While the declarations occurred on the same day, I note that Congress was acting in response to the German action. Do we have any evidence that there was a motion before the House or Senate to Declare War on Germany prior to receiving news of Germany’s declaration?