Or for a woman, if you lived past years of child-birth.
Speaking of geographic misconceptions—The 1969 Woodstock Music Festival was NOT held in Woodstock, New York–it was on a diary farm 60 miles southwest in Bethel.
Woodstock was the promoter’s original plan but the local residents objected.
One myth I’d accepted was that all the horses used by the Sioux, Cheyenne, Comanche, etc. were the result of the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. The Pueblo had had enough, killed or scared off the Spaniards, and slapped their horses on the butts so they ran off north. Maybe that was the single largest source of horses onto the Plains, and the Pueblo used the horses as trade and tribute instead of just turning them loose, but it wasn’t the only way they became available.
The famous “Keep Calm and Carry On” signs were produced in Britain at the beginning on World War 2, but were rarely displayed and had been mostly forgotten until 2000 when a bookstore owner bought one at an auction and hung it in their shop.
Yes. IIRC they found them in storage in a bomb shelter?
I think that’s true for a lot of inventions; the person who gets the credit is the one who comes up with the first practical version of that thing, not the person who made the initial very rudimentary version of the thing.
I think the Wright Brothers may be another example of this – other people may have built flying machines that could hurl themselves into the air, fly in a straight line, and basically crash land, prior to their first flight. But the Wrights built the first one that could be flown in a controlled manner.
To be fair, it’s a great painting. Have you ever seen it (or its copy) in person? It’s damn impressive.
IIRC they kept the name as Bob Dylan was living in Woodstock at the time, and they hoped people would think he was on the line up because of that.
According to the wikithingy, it is 12’5" tall by 21’3" across. That would go nicely in my living room.
I have not actually seen it. But I think it’s a cool painting, I like Washington, and he did win in Trenton. I’m just saying an artistic work, like “The midnight ride of Paul Revere” becomes commonly accepted version of what happened.
Here’s a trivia question you can toss at somebody who’s looking at the painting; pick out the future presidents.
The obvious answer is George Washington. The less obvious answer is James Monroe, who was Washington’s aide during the war and who is the guy right behind Washington in the picture, holding the flag.
Pretty doubtful that anyone here has seen the original since it was destroyed in 1942 in a bombing raid in Bremen. The full sized copy which was painted shortly after the original is in The Met.
There is also a smaller version that was once displayed in the West Wing of the White House. In 2015 it was purchased and placed at the Maritime Arts Museum in the small town of Winona Minnesota. We were able to see it there, before it was sold in 2022 for 45 million dollars. Even the smaller painting is amazing to look at.
I was just reading that “ring around the rosie” had nothing whatsoever to do with the Great Plague. First version found dates from 1790, and doesnt contain the ‘all fall down” line.
The myth that the British government invented a bunch of atrocities committed by the Germans in Belgium at the start of WW1, in order to drum up support for the war. That is absolutely a myth. They made the most of the atrocities that were committed, and produced a bunch propaganda that portrayed the Germans as monsters. But it was all based on real atrocities carried out in Belgium by the Germans, the British government did not invent anything.
The British tabloids, having the same high standards in 1914 they do nowadays, did print a bunch of made up stuff, often just unfounded rumors from Belgian refugees in the UK.
This myth was widely accepted as true in the interwar years and had massive repercussions. As when the allies, particularly the British, started to hear about the Holocaust, even via methods that could be made public (they were never going publicize Enigma decrypts), they were very reluctant to make them public as it would seem like Germans in Belgium all over again.
I’m half way through re-reading The Guns of August, and Barbara Tuchman goes into quite some detail on the German atrocities in Belgium, saying they were essentially out of frustration they were not just allowed to march through unopposed to attack France. The later atrocities in France, out of an exaggerated fear of partisans ( francs-tireurs ). But I’ve not seen any mention of this myth, that they were invented by the British government for propaganda purposes. As you say, no actual need to as the British press did that job quite fine, for free.
German soldiers ate Belgian babies, and strung them on bayonets?
Atrocity propaganda was widespread during World War I, when it was used by all belligerents, playing a major role in creating the wave of patriotism that characterised the early stages of the war.[21] British propaganda is regarded as having made the most extensive use of fictitious atrocities to promote the war effort.[21]
One such story was that German soldiers were deliberately mutilating Belgian babies by cutting off their hands, in some versions even eating them. Eyewitness accounts told of having seen a similarly mutilated baby. As Arthur Ponsonby later pointed out, in reality a baby would be very unlikely to survive similar wounds without immediate medical attention.[22]
Another atrocity story involved a Canadian soldier, who had supposedly been crucified with bayonets by the Germans (see The Crucified Soldier). Many Canadians claimed to have witnessed the event, yet they all provided different version of how it had happened. The Canadian high command investigated the matter, concluding that it was untrue.[ 23 ]
Other reports circulated of Belgian women, often nuns, who had their breasts cut off by the Germans.[24] A story about German corpse factories, where bodies of German soldiers were supposedly turned into glycerine for weapons, or food for hogs and poultry, was published in a Times article on April 17,1917.[25] In the postwar years, investigations in Britain and France revealed that these stories were false .[2 1
Dont get me wrong= plenty of real atrocities occurred. Many by German soldiers in Belgium, generally after being shot at by resistance.
However- the Allies committed their share also- the food blockade of Germany continuing after the war was over, so that the French could get better terms
In 1915, the captain of the British Q-ship HMS Baralong ordered his crew to kill German U-boat survivors in retaliation for the sinking of the passenger liner RMS Lusitania.: Also n December 1918, Australian and New Zealand soldiers attacked the Arab village of Sarafand in Palestine..
Not to mention the various atrocities the Russians committed.
And of course the Armenian genocide committed by the Ottoman Empire.
The British press was completely censored and controlled during the war. Those tabloid stories only got out if the British government approved them.
Which were not included in British government propaganda during WW1, as explained in that Wikipedia article:
One of the most widely-disseminated documents of atrocity propaganda during the war was the Report of the Committee on Alleged German Outrages, or the Bryce Report, of May 1915. Based on 1,200 witness depositions, it depicted the systematic murder and violation of Belgians by German soldiers during the German invasion of Belgium, including details of rapes and the slaughter of children
The key point being….
historians focusing on the actions of the German army in Belgium have found Bryce’s work to be "substantially accurate