Similarly to the Rosenbergs, many people believed that Alger Hiss never worked for the Soviets as a spy. A find called the Verona papers indicated otherwise. Though some still hotly dispute this, “few today question that Hiss was indeed a spy.”
Of course, many people believed that Joseph McCarthy and others of his ilk were true patriots exposing rottenness in the government. Today, nobody but cranks support this.
A little footnote to history. At the same time as some of these hearings, Congress set up an investigation of comic books, a medium about which dozens of serious people had been fulminating for a decade saying that they corrupted our youth. Nobody today believes that either. Also see video games.
She didn’t know anything about atomic program espionage.
I read that Julius was really a low-level spy, passing along military information, but nothing too serious, and nothing to do with the atomic program. Ethel knew about his activities, but wasn’t directly involved.
I don’t understand this sentiment, expressed by several posters now.
Less than 10 years before millions had died for their ideologies in WWII, why is so strange that someone would do the same in the 1950s?
The “sentiment” seems to be that dying for your beliefs is more noble if innocents don’t suffer as a consequence.
Of course, it helps if one’s cause isn’t horribly flawed to begin with.
A lot of people have seen the Rosenberg case through the distorted lens of their own convictions (including the writer whose article suggested that Ethel could be folded into the Me Too movement). The established facts, while not terribly kind to the U.S. government, are damning to the Rosenbergs and those who assisted them.
On the contrary, the standard view is now that he did describe a pyroclastic flow. In his second letter to Tacitus, Pliny mentions that, ‘Soon afterwards, the cloud began to descend, and cover the sea. It had already surrounded and concealed the island of Capri and the promontory of Misenum.’ The classic 1982 article by Sigurdsson, Cashdollar and Sparks argued that what Pliny was describing in that passage was a nuée ardente associated with a pyroclastic flow.
That article has been hugely influential. They were writing in the immediate aftermath of the Mount St Helens eruption and so were applying the brand new thinking about pyroclastic flows. Their reinterpretation of the AD 79 eruption was seen as a big breakthrough and was presented as such in almost all media coverage about Pompeii in subsequent decades. This was when talk of pyroclastic flows became the cliché of every TV documentary on the subject. Such discussions were usually accompanied by claims that this proved that Pliny’s account was accurate.
Talking about the once common claims made by Western experts that lots of civilzations were made by a now lost Nordic race. Well in Ramses case, we have a red-haired pale-skinned fellow, though probably of Hykos not Nordic heritage. So were his father and grandfather.
I recall reading books which (properly) were derisive of the racist idea that he was a white looking foreigner and the red hair of his mummy was explained as henna, closer examination of the hair and DNA analysis showed that actually, no he was, in fact, light-skinned and red-haired. (I remember one archeologist commenting that the actor who he probably looked like most was Damien Lewis).
Frankly, I used to hold it in the same regard as Ian Smith’s regime claims that Great Zimbabwe was made by “a lost white race”.
Of course, some clues were already there, Grand Pa Ramses was a military general who usurped the throne and started worshipping of Seth, hitherto the bad guy of the Egyptian pantheon (and a ginger to boot), which suggests that they were trying to make virtue out of necessity.
Thucydides claimed that the Plague of Athens was brought from Africa, whch was generally dismissed by modern scholars. Until Ebola, which began in the same region and has very similar symptoms to what has been described for the plague victims.
Red hair isn’t exclusively a White trait. It occurs in North Africans and Asians, even Polynesians. He may have had some Hyksos ancestry, but his reign was 10 generations or more after the Hyksos rule. To call him “foreign” is just wrong.
And Ramses I did not usurp the throne. He was chosen by the heirless Horemheb.
And the full demonization of Set only really kicks off post-19th Dynasty - and he was hardly the equivalent of Satan then, he had many public temples and a postive role in the mythology along with the antagonist role - somewhat more akin to a Loki than a “big bad”. And in any case Ramses I was already High Priest of Set before he was appointed heir to Horemheb. He’d named his own son after the god before then, even.
I remember news reports a few decades ago when some Hiss files were opened to the public. One of the conspiracy theories about Nixon was that Hiss was railroaded. The fact that the FBI could never find the typewriter he was alleged to have used was considered part of the plot - they didn’t really try to find it because they knew Hiss hadn’t used it. In fact the FBI files revealed that they had honestly done a serious and extensive search for that particular typewriter, they just never found it.
Many archaeologists and historians were convinced that the Biblical King David was completely fictional. The discovery of the Tel Dan Stele has convinced all but the most dedicated of Biblical minimalists at least that the man existed, even if they believe the Biblical narrative of his rise and reign to have been exaggerated or fabricated.
I think what stands out is the futility of it. Their “sacrifice” did nothing to help their cause. It did not help the Soviet Union. It didn’t help communism. No one on their “side” cared. All it did was orphan their children. You can argue the futility of those that died during WWII especially at the individual level but at least it lead to the end of an evil in the world.
I came across one historian’s work from around 1910 who claimed that Jefferson was much too feminine in nature to have had an affair with Sally Hemings. I think we can file this one under “They thought it was bullshit because they didn’t want to view it as being true.”
What on earth was that supposed to mean? It sounds like a total non sequitur unless “feminine in nature” is code for gay, but it seems improbable that a historian from 1910 would want Thomas Jefferson to have been gay …?
Well, their sacrifice would have protected other Soviet intelligence assets, thereby benefiting the USSR, wouldn’t it? Sounds like the sort of thing an ideologically-motivated spy would die for.
Joan of Arc was treated as a semi-legendary figure for hundreds of years, until a bunch of primary sources (including letters and trial transcripts) resurfaced in the19th C.
If I remember correctly didn’t European scientists believe the preserved body of platypus was a fake–made of several animals sewn together before someone managed bring back a live one from Australia to prove it was real?
It wasn’t so much that Julius sacrificed himself, he sacrificed his wife and hurt his children.
My memory may be hazy but what I remember is if Julius had admitted guilt and said his wife had nothing to do with it their children would have had a mother. He would have still been executed but no one else would have gone down.