Well, what about the classic Old-World pistol-duel, where the gentlemen take 10 paces in opposite directions, turn and fire? That ever happen IRL? Is that how Burr killed Hamilton?
(Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon portrayed that differently --when Lyndon and his stepson Lord Bullingdon have a duel, they start out several paces apart and shoot in turns, tossing a coin to see who gets to shoot first, which is apparently SOP.)
Try it now. (And say goodbye to anything you might call a “life.”)
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According to Wiki, yes, both methods occurred in pistol duels. Duel - Wikipedia
It did make a good movie. They even found a way to resolve the ethical dilemma.
Captain John Smith was born in 1580, while Pocahontas was most likely born in 1595. So she would have been thirteen and he would have been twenty-eight. Still unsettling, though.
But at least the love story between them is widely recognized as an embellishment. And Pocahontas wasn’t actually considered a princess - the title does not exist in most Amerindian cultures and Pocahontas’ mother was believed to have been a concubine instead of an actual wife. (Though her father still loved her the same as an official child.)
No, I’m pretty sure all the captured sailors in that one would have been immediately repatriated.
Why? Great Balls of Fire! ain’t.
Added note: The concept of “princess” did exist in more advanced pre-Columbian societies such as the Aztecs of Mexico and the Incas of Peru, but generally the societies in the United States didn’t have that.
Pocahontas was simply the chief’s daughter. She probably didn’t even have a title.
there was also an earlier duel in Barry Lyndon between Barry and an English officer where they didn’t take turns, but stood apart and fired at the same time
Historians can’t quite make sense of the marital and family dynamics of Powhatan (or Wahunsunacough, or other spelling of actual name), Pocahontas’s father. It’s generally believed that Powhatan was no more representative of the chiefs of his tribe or his time than Napoleon was representative of French heads-of-state of the 18th century; he was an all new kind of powerful monarch.
What is pretty well agreed on about him: he was from an extremely powerful clan, one that probably already had prestige when he was born into it and one that he, probably assisted greatly by his brothers, had greatly increased in power and in territory in the generation before the English came. He had a position similar to High King, or Chief of Chiefs, that had absolute control over villages as far south as [what’s now] North Carolina and as far north as [what’s now] New Jersey and as far west as the mountains, yet at the same time had almost no control over villages and clans much closer to his own capital for reasons not exactly known. It is known that he was constantly at war, probably had been for much of his life, and the reason he didn’t wipe Jamestown, which even with their guns and steel he could have done relatively easily in the first few years by strength of number alone, was because he wanted an alliance so he could use their swords and guns against his enemies, and of course he had no idea how many whites would be coming to his land (and they had settled on land that he didn’t want anyway because the water was too brackish).
It is known that Powhatan was werowance, or chief/king/whatever, by virtue of his family’s position in a particular clan within the tribe he headed, and that like most east coast tribes, clan membership was 100% matrilineal. His children, including Pocahontas, would not have belonged to his clan unless their mothers did, and it was usually taboo to marry someone within your own clan, therefore a werowance’s children really had no place in succession. They practiced an age and generation based “uterine succession” (there’s your obscure term for today- uterine succession means it passed to a relative on the female side); Powhatan is known to have had several brothers and sisters on his mother’s side (though it’s hard to draw a family tree- it’s possible, for example, that some were actually cousins on the mother’s side but addressed as brother or sister, but the point is they were close relatives he was raised with and on his mother’s side and treated as immediate family) AND it is known that power COULD pass to a sister as well as a brother.
Powhatan was a polygamist and he had many wives. (I don’t know if there was any distinction between a wife and a concubine except maybe in terms of political benefit.) This is where it gets really weird: Powhatan, like many powerful men in polygamous cultures, used marriage to form alliances, but he took it to weird new levels- he liked to get his wives pregnant, and then give them away. He also arranged the marriages of some of his daughters to his brothers and other relatives on the female side, which was taboo in most tribes; while they were not of the same clan (again, you had the clan membership of your mother, period- this was unalterable) and they could not inherit power, most southeastern Indian tribes (Cherokee, Creek/Seminole, Chickasaw, Yammassee, etc.) DID recognize a relationship between you and your father and thus marriage to a member of your father’s clan was frowned upon if not forbidden, and most had a powerful incest taboo as well, so uncle:niece marriages would have been seen as strange. He also took the children and wives of other chiefs and warriors into his own family. The result was a nebulous interconnection of families by blood and marriage and culture so that gradually everybody was getting related to everybody and it was hard to keep up, which might have been due to an unhinged mind (certainly related as so by 19th century historians) or, divorcing modern ethics and morals and norms from it, might have been an absolutely brilliant way of reinventing the social structure and perhaps settling tribal and clan scores he had.
Whatever the case, his habit of giving away his pregnant wives or wives and their children to other chiefs, and of marrying fairly close relatives, and of formign constant and confusing marital alliances with other villages and tribes and even within his own family, apparently made many of his own people a bit uncomfortable. His brother Opechancanough, who disagreed with him on pretty much everything but was 100% loyal to him, seems to have said “No more of that stuff starting now!” when he inherited. (By that time Pocahontas was dead.)
That said, he didn’t give away all of his wives and children. He raised Pocahontas, though it’s not inconceivable she may not have been his child biologically due to his weird alliances. He had many sons as well, and some other daughters who were mentioned, and they were important to him and basically like nobles at his [very primitive by Euro standards, of course] court, BUT because they were not of his clan they could not succeed him so they weren’t princes or princesses exactly, but I think it would be fair to call them “aristocracy” of a fashion.
Also given his marry everybody to everybody policies, it would be highly doubtful that the notions of his daughter Matoaka (Pocahontas was a nickname that, per 17th century accounts anyway, meant ‘mischief maker’ or something like) marrying had not been brought up. Some biographers believe she probably was already married when she was kidnapped into Jamestown (this after Smith left), but I have no idea what their evidence is. (Does anyone? Bueller? Bueller?)
While she was captive Pocahontas did seem to expect her father and brothers and other relatives to come rescue her. Instead, Powhatan kept a cool head, knowing that by this time to storm the fort would be a bloodbath for both sides (though probably would still have been a tribal victory, just one with a lot of deaths). She seems to have become very hurt and very pissed over this, which also speaks to high status- a regular tribal woman would probably never have expected anybody to fight for her. This is when she converted to Christianity and took an interest in John Rolfe, both perhaps a direct reaction to her disillusionment with her father. Since in the eyes of the church any marriage she had would not have been valid anyway, it may not even have been mentioned, and her father probably thought her marriage to Rolfe was absolute wonderful news that settled his difficulties with his favorite way: through marriage.
In any case, she was addressed as Princess in London, though unfortunately she was not given quarters befitting the daughter of a monarch, so she was accepted as royalty, but not really. Historians debate whether she was presented to James I, though I think there is evidence she was at least present in the same place as his queen, Anne of Denmark (one of those figures with a great costume but no lines in the drama that is English history), at some point and met with other nobles.
A good general source on Indian politics and white-Indian relations in that period is American Colonies, by Alan Taylor.
(When are they going to come out with the second volume of The Penguin History of the United States, dammit?!)
Oh, yes, and there’s the opening scene where Barry’s father dies in (what appears to be) that kind of duel.
BTW, in Thackeray’s novel, The Barry-Bullingdon duel never happens. Lord Bullingdon dies commanding British troops in the American Revolution. It is Barry’s wife Lady Lyndon who finally bests and ruins Barry – by using lawyers!
Okay, Amadeus is one of my all time fave films. Please someone wade in and detail the mistakes? Won’t make me love it any less but I’m damned curious.
Google “amadeus historical inaccuracies” and you’ll be busy for a couple of hours.
Believe me, that was the least of U-571’s problems. The movie was pure unadulterated bullshit from beginning to end, the fantasy of some 1990s Hollywood hack scriptwriter. It pisses me off that some people actually take it as history when it most certainly ain’t!
Reference the James Garner role in The Great Escape, I think he was supposed to represent George Harsh, who was in fact an American serving in the RAF. But you’re quite right in pointing out that all of the USAAF personnel at Luft Stalag III were segregated from the Brits well before the escape took place.
As always, start with Wiki.
(That’s about the play, but the movie made no important changes AFAIK.)
One thing I know is that Mozart and Constanze had two kids (out of six born) who survived infancy, not just one.
Even worse, the film/movie makes no mention at all that Mozart was a Freemason, and thereby utterly ignores an even juicier conspiracy theory (which I recall from a History of Music course in college) – that his fellow Freemasons poisoned Mozart in punishment for his (symbolically/metaphorically) revealing the secrets of Masonic initiation rites in The Magic Flute.
Nutshell:
The biggest one is that nobody really believes Salieri killed or was obsessively jealous of Mozart. They knew each other, if they weren’t bosom buddy then writings from both men to other people imply that each man seemed to think at least favorable thoughts of the other.
Salieri was also not, as the play/movie (and the play and movie have differences) imply, completely forgotten or considered a failure or mediocrity in his final years. He was highly respected as a music professor especially; his students included Beethoven, Liszt, and Schubert, and he conducted their works and his own works in public even as an old man (at which point his operas were still being performed as well- they still are, in fact, just not with the frequency of Mozart’s).
In the play and movie, Mozart dies penniless and is buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave. The truth is a bit more complicated.
Mozart had a big income until his dying day. If he wasn’t an 18th century ‘One-percenter’ he would most certainly have been a ‘ten percenter’ and probably way better than that. His income came from royalties, students, commissions, and other sources, but, while it’s hard to translate 18th century sums into 21st century, he probably would have been earning well into the six figures, certainly as much as a prosperous doctor or lawyer, probably as much as Salieri.
That said, he was always broke and often in debt, though biographers aren’t exactly sure as to why. He did have a lavish lifestyle at one point, but certainly by the end he had taken it down several notches and should have been living well within his means even when you consider he may have been paying debts already incurred. Theories include blackmail (not that likely), embezzlement, alcoholism and or other drug addictions that left him unable to manage his resources, a gambling problem (I remember reading that there is evidence of this but I don’t remember the evidence- youl could probably google it), and just being generally piss poor at managing money (which a lot of otherwise intelligent people are, including a lot of former child stars [which Mozart was- he made the transition well careerwise but he probably never really got used to having to do things on his own- he always had his father and other ‘people’]). In any account, his poverty in his final days wasn’t exactly poverty as most would understand the term, and certainly wasn’t due to Salieri pulling strings.
There’s a lot more. But, as Cal Meacham pointed out and as is usually pointed out (it’s come up several times), the story is a metaphor and was never really meant to be taken literally.
The play, however, does- goes into some detail about it in fact, and in the play he also hits up the other Masons for money which was a no-non.
Thus implying the movie was made by Masons.
In Hollywood, this is known as CLOUT! And in 1963, no one had more clout in Hollywood than Steve McQueen! That’s also why the motorcycle stunts were written into the script, at his request—cycling was one of Steve’s favorite pasttimes.
Not by the standards of the day it wouldn’t. In a world where you were lucky to live to 40 or 45, people got married and started having children at a very young age. Plus, the attitude toward children was completely different: you didn’t form close attachments to children because they were likely to die in infancy, and until the age of five they were treated like big babies because the world was a very dangerous place—open fires, livestock roaming freely, sharpened farm implements stacked about, and so on. After the age of five, they were treated like little adults and expected to work and (ASAP) marry and start having children of their own. This was the only way humans could hope to survive as a species prior to the 19th century.
Nothing then was thought of an older man marrying a pubescent girl: if he was middle-aged, he’d probably been through three or four young wives already, all of whom had likely died in or soon after childbirth (just like Ben Cartwright on Bonanza ;)).