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

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
61

[QUOTE=Sampiro]
A few that irk me (some of which I’ve heard recently)-
“Jefferson Davis was captured wearing a dress in order to avoid arrest.”

Fact: Jefferson Davis was over six feet tall and at the time of his capture had a full beard; nobody would have been fooled by him in drag. He may (accounts vary) have been wearing a shawl (that may have been his wife’s, though men also wore shawls) over his head due to a cold, but he made no attempt to disguise his identity when Federal troops surrounded his party.
[/QUOTE]
The Northern press very definitely made much more of Davis’s attire than accuracy would permit. However, there appears to have been a grain of truth in the details on which they built their lies, (unless this letter from Varina Davis is a forgery–a point on which I have no information).

Scroll to “Jefferson Davis Captured!.” I have seen the entire text of the letter on the internet, but the last site on which I found it is defumct and even this page (taken from a “this day in history” site) is a Google cache.

62

spoke- writes:

> But you might want to do that before you decide to believe everything Loewen
> tells you just because he published a book.

I never believed everything Loewen wrote. You, on the other hand, have decided that it’s O.K. to declare Loewen worthless because you’ve found some mistakes in his books. You also seem to believe that I’m so stupid and uneducated that it’s not worth the time for you or anyone else to compile a list of Loewen’s errors. If there are people out there who believe that Loewen is so consistently wrong that readers have to be warned away from his books, it’s worth the time for someone to compile a list of his errors.

63

I share Wendell’s curiousity about criticism of Loewen, and it seemed to me that, as there are so many critics of the man, somebody would have published a list of proven errors. I’ve looked many times for this on the Internet, and found very little. Mostly you find reviews praising the book. If you go to places like Amazon.com and look for the negative reviews, they’re simply short blurbs without any substantive points, basically throwing up their hands in exasperation at the book.

I’m a liberal type, myself, and I generally agree with Loewen, and found many revelations in his books (The truth about the Spanish-American War, “Sundown Towns”), but even I have to admit that there are points at which I find the man exasperating. It’s hard to believe that he would really expect some of his proposals to be taken seriously. I’d like to see a real critique of his work by someone who genuinely disagrees with him. It’s not merely a matter of rooting through his footnotes – as someone who agrees with a great deal of what he says, I won’t see the problems that someone of the opposite view might have.

64

A piece of “historical fact” that frequently gets cited when people are slamming the Food and Drug Administration is that it approved thalidomide for sale in the United States (I saw someone making this claim in an Internet forum just yesterday).

Except the reverse is true - an FDA scientist, Frances Kelsey, blocked approval of the drug, preventing the widespread, horrendous birth defects seen in England and Europe.

65

[QUOTE=Wendell Wagner]
I never believed everything Loewen wrote. You, on the other hand, have decided that it’s O.K. to declare Loewen worthless because you’ve found some mistakes in his books.
[/quote]

These are not “mistakes.” These are attempts to mislead readers by twisting facts to fit Loewen’s thesis. Really, if you don’t see the fundamental dishonesty in what Loewen is doing (as pointed out in my last post), I can’t help you.

I don’t think you’re stupid, Wendell. I do think you need to be careful about accepting Loewen uncritically.

As for it being “worth the time” to compile a list of Loewen’s errors, please define your terms. If you would like to pay me to research Loewen’s footnotes, then let’s talk. Otherwise, no, it’s not worth my time. I am satisfied, based on the number of false footnotes I found just in looking at a couple of chapters in his books, that Loewen is not to be trusted.

Now that I think of it, we had a whole thread on this several years back, entitled “Lies James Loewen Told Me.” (IIRC, SDMB old-timer 2sense was the OP.) That thread, too, seems to have been lost in the flood.

Not sure why these threads didn’t survive the purge. Oh well.

(And CalMeacham, I’m a lefty too, but I don’t like propaganda whether it comes at me from the left or the right.)

66

[QUOTE=Skylark]
Creationism vs. Evolution is a very controversial subject.
[/QUOTE]

(In reference to Abner Doubleday.)

I get your reference, but Doubleday wasn’t involved with baseball at all. There is no evidence the man ever so much as picked up a bat.

67

[QUOTE=Jackmannii]
A piece of “historical fact” that frequently gets cited when people are slamming the Food and Drug Administration is that it approved thalidomide for sale in the United States (I saw someone making this claim in an Internet forum just yesterday).

Except the reverse is true - an FDA scientist, Frances Kelsey, blocked approval of the drug, preventing the widespread, horrendous birth defects seen in England and Europe.
[/QUOTE]

?? I have a friend with thalidomide damage, She will never be able to have kids because of the type of damage she ended up with. She is very firmly born in the US.

68

[QUOTE=aruvqan]
?? I have a friend with thalidomide damage, She will never be able to have kids because of the type of damage she ended up with. She is very firmly born in the US.
[/QUOTE]

Did you read the cite?

69

Sampiro, correct me if I’m wrong.

Sherman did not burn Atlanta to the ground. The Confederate Army burned ammunition depots during their retreat in order to keep them from the Yankees.

Any truth to the idea that the British soldiers heavy, woolen, “redcoats” made fighting the Revolutionary War problematic?

70

[QUOTE=ivylass]
Sampiro, correct me if I’m wrong.

Sherman did not burn Atlanta to the ground. The Confederate Army burned ammunition depots during their retreat in order to keep them from the Yankees.
[/QUOTE]

True. The famous burning of Atlanta scene in GWTW was the fire started by the Confederates when they burned the supplies they couldn’t evacuate, including ammo, while withdrawing. The movie actually makes that clear, but you still hear it referred to all the time as Sherman’s burning of Atlanta. (He did burn some buildings in Atlanta- most of them legitimate targets (printing offices, telegraph offices, anything that had been used for the war effort) and destroyed a lot more during the shelling, but between the Confederates and Sherman together only a bit more than a quarter of the city was destroyed. The reason there’s only a handful of antebellum buildings left in Atlanta (literally, about 3 or 8 or so depending on how you figure Atlanta) is because most either fell down/burned down after the war or, in most cases, were torn down to build something new.

Speaking of Sherman’s destructiveness, while it was terrible- no doubt about that- it was actually exaggerated into something out of mythology over the years. He really didn’t go to every farm and every plantation and gang rape all the women and burn everything down and then cast a lustful eye upon the Rottweilers- he didn’t have time. The greatest damage he did to civilians in Georgia wasn’t burning houses (which takes a lot of time) but cleaning them out of anything edible. 70,000 men were moving across the countryside without supplies- it was like locusts. (Then when Sherman’s men departed, the same farms were apt to dig up what little bit they had salvaged only to have to deal with the Confederates, about 6,000 of them, who were following Sherman, harassing him where they could, and also living without supplies- they came to be as hated as the Union.)
Anyway, in Georgia the willful cruelty and destruction of his march was exaggerated. Ironically, in South Carolina it seems to have been minimized; he was FAR more vicious- deliberately and calculatedly- in South Carolina, and really did send people to burn any house they found. This was for several reasons, among them that SC was considered the mother of the Confederacy (as the first state to secede and long the one threatening to), plus by S.C. he’d learned of/sent men to liberate Andersonville and rescued other Union prisoners from camps that were smaller but not much better, and some of the Confederate officers had made the mistake of executing unarmed Yankee prisoners, which sent Sherman into absolute orbit. (He initially responded by having some unarmed Confederate prisoners chosen at random shot as a revenge, but the men from the first firing squad absolutely refused to participate in any further executions of randomly chosen men, saying that for the first time in the war they felt like murderers.) Also, he had learned in the first newspaper he read in Savannah of the death of another one of his children, and blamed that and the son he had already lost on the war (though in Ohio,they died of diseases passed along by soldiers) and he wanted the war to be over.

71

[QUOTE=Sampiro]

The greatest damage he did to civilians in Georgia wasn’t burning houses (which takes a lot of time) but cleaning them out of anything edible. 70,000 men were moving across the countryside without supplies- it was like locusts. (Then when Sherman’s men departed, the same farms were apt to dig up what little bit they had salvaged only to have to deal with the Confederates, about 6,000 of them, who were following Sherman, harassing him where they could, and also living without supplies- they came to be as hated as the Union.)

[/QUOTE]

Margaret Mitchell got this pretty accurate then…after Scarlett flees Atlanta with Wade and Melanie and Beau and Prissy (and the cow) she was able to cadge food from the neighbors. Then the Yankees came through, took most of their food supplies, and after the war Melanie felt the need to feed every Confederate soldier who came by.

I always thought that if there were no war, slavery would have eventually died on its own in the South. It was just too expensive to be maintained, plus the South needed to modernize away from agriculture. Wasn’t Whitney’s cotton gin initially dismissed by plantation owners?

72

[QUOTE=ivylass]
Margaret Mitchell got this pretty accurate then…after Scarlett flees Atlanta with Wade and Melanie and Beau and Prissy (and the cow) she was able to cadge food from the neighbors. Then the Yankees came through, took most of their food supplies, and after the war Melanie felt the need to feed every Confederate soldier who came by.
[/QUOTE]

The book is actually pretty good as historical fiction. The movie embellishes of course. I’ve always hoped one of the reincarnations of it (like the current London musical that’s gotten almost unanimously miserable reviews) would introduce the Fontaines, but none so far. (The musical does restore Scarlett’s oldest two children.)

[QUOTE=ivylass]
I always thought that if there were no war, slavery would have eventually died on its own in the South. It was just too expensive to be maintained, plus the South needed to modernize away from agriculture. Wasn’t Whitney’s cotton gin initially dismissed by plantation owners?
[/QUOTE]

It was probably on its way out- not immediately, but as more and more immigrants came to the south and as cotton prices fell it probably would have been transitioned out.

Whitney’s cotton gin- I did tons of research on it recently, but I’ll try to keep it brief- It was used for separating green-seed cotton, which grew well in the Deep South but was such a major pain to separate seed from boll that few planters grew it. (Black seed cotton was a breeze to separate, but only grew well in the coastal areas.) When the gin was first introduced, it was ignored at first for two reasons-

1- it meant plowing your ground and completely revamping your farm to grow cotton, which was too expensive an experiment for something that might or might not be profitable
2- the gin was simply too expensive (“about a hundred dollars, yeah, about a hundred dollars”), which was the fault of Whitney’s investors. They produced them for about $20 and sold them for several times that, even though the machine was fairly simple to make and reproduce.
Unfortunately for them, it was too simple to reproduce- a good blacksmith or medium machinist could make one just like it, and did. Most people bought the far cheaper knock-offs, some of which were actually better in quality. All of them were illegal as patent violations, but prosecuting people was a bit of a problem when local law was less likely to aid a Connecticut Yankee who wasn’t there than a farmer they’d known all their life.
By the time Whitney finally got some justice in the courts in prosecuting the people making knockoffs, and by the time that enough planters were making a killing in green seed cotton for everybody else to start and thus demand for the gins was HUGE, his patents expired. That’s when everybody and their brother started openly manufacturing the gins for about $50 or so. So, bad marketing, greed, and late adaptors meant Whitney hardly earned a dime from the most successful machine in American history to that point. (He made a good bit of money with other projects though; his gun mill is considered one of the first assembly line factories in the U.S..)

73

I could not find the “grain of truth” in the details. Nowhere was a dress mentioned in Varina Davis’s description and in no way did she describe her father doing anything to suggest that he should be disguised.

The relevant part of the reference seems to be this:

She threw over him…

"…a large waterproof wrap which had often served him…for a dressing gown and which I hoped might so cover his person that in the grey of the morning he would not be recognized. As he strode off I threw over his head a little black shawl which was around my own shoulders, seeing that he could not find his hat…When he had proceeded a few yards the guards around our tents with a shocking oath called out to know who that was. I said it was my mother… "

A dressing gown is similar to a bath robe. They were made for both men and women. Apparently this was some sort of waterproof coat that he used for a dressing gown. It was not a dress. He couldn’t find his hat so she put her shawl over his head. I don’t doubt that she was trying to disguise him – but when he was over six feet tall and had a beard, I doubt he gave serious thought to disguising himeself as a woman. If he had, he probably would have tried a real dress and a bonnet.

I’m no fan of Jefferson Davis, but I don’t buy into the idea that he was trying to disguise himself as a woman. I think he might have been trying a weak attempt at camouflage. The truth is more likely to lie in the Yank’s desire to humiliate him further and I can’t say that I blame them.

74

[QUOTE=ivylass]
Any truth to the idea that the British soldiers heavy, woolen, “redcoats” made fighting the Revolutionary War problematic?
[/QUOTE]

I’ve never heard the idea, but it doesn’t seem likely, on the face of it. For one thing, being mass-manufactured on an Army budget, they weren’t particularly heavy. For another, they wore the same uniforms everywhere else in the world at the time. In cold weather they froze, and in hot weather they baked – but given the fashions and clothing technology of the times, so did everyone else.

75

Elvis is not a gas station worker suffering from amnesia, or travelling through Central America in a mobile home. Elvis is dead.

76

[QUOTE=Švejk]
Elvis is dead.
[/QUOTE]

Not according to Scouting for Girls .

77

[QUOTE=Derleth]
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.

[/QUOTE]

:smack: Consarnit! I’m gonna have to change the lyrics of one of my songs.

“Thanks to ARPA, I can finally score,
these tools were built for nuclear war,
not so nerds could get their grooves on.”

from modem.age.dreams by me (2006).
From your cite you can see how this idea took hold:

“It was from the RAND study that the false rumor started claiming that the ARPANET was somehow related to building a network resistant to nuclear war. This was never true of the ARPANET, only the unrelated RAND study on secure voice considered nuclear war. However, the later work on Internetting did emphasize robustness and survivability, including the capability to withstand losses of large portions of the underlying networks.”

78

Turing didn’t build the first computer. His work was far more important (and fundamental) than that. He showed universal computation was possible using a formalism that was (unintentionally?) easy to map to actual hardware, whilst at the same time clearing up a huge open problem in mathematics*. Once universal computation was shown to be possible, the task of building a general purpose computer was a minor ( :wink: ) engineering problem.

  • Church got there first, by a few months.
79

I don’t have facts to contribute, but I wanted to say that this is a very interesting thread. Thanks for posting it. Have there been similar threads like this in the past that anyone has a link to?

80

[QUOTE=beanpod]
I don’t have facts to contribute, but I wanted to say that this is a very interesting thread. Thanks for posting it. Have there been similar threads like this in the past that anyone has a link to?
[/QUOTE]

Here’s an earlier thread.