By ‘myths’ I mean misconceptions and inaccuracies about past events that get bandied about which annoy you, not getting pissed off about the Twelve Labours of Heracles or something.
Here’s a coupla mine;
We’ve talked about what a douche Columbus was before, but the claim that gets thrown about concerning him really annoys me as it turns him from essentially a lucky dumbass into a pioneer of truth; that he was trying to prove the Earth was round. In actuality, everyone already knew this and he was operating under the notion that Japan was in Mexico. You may recall that Japan is not in Mexico.
Another one that annoys me. that Mussolini made the trains run on time which is not only not true but also elicits a giant ‘so what’ if it was. The man brought untold misery to his country by allying with a monster but we’re supposed to give a shit about the 1430 to Napoli or whatever? Bah.
Speaking of WWII, one that crops up usually in the comments sections of various hives of idiocy - nationalism based on the individual contributions of whatever nation the proponent is in. Surely one of the lessons we can take away from WWII is that rah-rah flag waving bullshit leads to bad things.
On the other side, the idea that Native Americans before 1492 were all peaceful enlightened proto-hippies who were more ‘in tune with nature’, the modern take on the ‘Noble Savage’. Neil Young gives you a dose of this is Cortez the Killer; “Hate was just a legend. And war was never known”, of an empire that hacked out human hearts and whose tyrannical rule made ready allies for Cortez.
Anyway, those are just a few common ones that crop up and rub me up the wrong way.
One that almost literally hits the OP’s title is the idea that the Amazons burned off one breast so that they could shoot arrows more accurately.
Not only is it not necessary (there are plenty of women archers who didn’t “give their left tit” for their art), but none of the ancient Greek depictions of Amazons show them without one breast. The whole thing seems like a case of Folk Etymology gone wild, with a side of male fantasizing.
The Battle of the Alamo was fought for the cause of freedom. Actually, one of the issues that provoked the Texas War of Independence was the fact that Mexico had abolished slavery, and many of the Texans were slave holders who wanted to keep their property. (Two of the survivors of the Alamo were slaves that had belonged to William Travis and Jim Bowie; the victorious Mexicans gave them their freedom.)
There’s also Teddy Roosevelt’s cavalry charge up San Juan Hill. It was not on horses as commonly believe but on foot. I’ve read two versions of why this was. One was that the horses were being shipped on a separate boat and had not yet arrived. The other was that the horses were on the same boat, but Teddy was too impatient to wait for them to be unloaded. But the charge was on foot.
And of course, there’s the old chestnut “Jesus died for your sins.”
The myth of the Plymouth Colony and the Mayflower really pisses me off especially because I work not 20 minutes from it. The general idea is that the Pilgrims were Puritans who were the first European Settlers to permanently populate the modern day U.S. That is patently false and I am living proof.
There are tons of problems with those ideas full stop. I am a direct descendant of the 1st colony at Jamestown that arrived staring in 1607 well before the Mayflower was ever conceived. I have the same last name and full documentation for it. I visited my ancestral homeland in Virginia last year (my great x grandparents plantation is still there and has several historicals marker both inside and outside the colony) and that was the real first permanent English colony and the Mayflower was just a Johnny Come Lately. Good luck getting anyone to accept that fact. After the Civil War, the major publishing houses based in Boston and New York rewrote U.S. history to exclude anything positive in the South and those myths persist to this day.
However, I don’t want to be too cocky about that. The Spanish had already conquered much of what is now the modern U.S. starting in the early 1500’s not through any special plan but through introduced diseases and extreme will. There were Spanish groups all up and down the East Coast when the English landed. The settlers at Jamestown had to worry about them at least as much as the natives so any claim to being the first at anything is dubious. The Native American population used to be huge. Nobody knows exactly how many there were exactly but they certainly were not hunter gatherers. They had carefully maintained agricultural land and well established trade routes. Over 90% of most tribes died through European introduced diseases on a scale that has not been seen before or since. The English settlers just happened to hit the jackpot at exactly the right time and walk right in to land and villages that had been recently used but weren’t anymore because almost everyone that lived there died through recently introduced diseases.
The whole Pilgrim story is full of fallacies as well. You had Squanto who could somehow magically speak English when the Pilgrims showed up. That part is true and there is an explanation for it. He was picked up on earlier voyages and went back and forth from modern day Massachusetts to Europe 6 times in his lifetime. His tribe was wiped out by epidemics but he was perfectly assimilated to European culture before the Mayflower ever showed up.
However, most people do not understand the difference between the ‘Pilgrims’ and the ‘Puritans’ even if they want to assign Massachusetts rather than Virginia as the true start of the modern day U.S. The Mayflower brought over a load of Pilgrims. That only means a voyager in a practical sense although there is a religious element implied but not required. Many of the Pilgrims were not Puritans and some were not religious at all. They founded the Plymouth Colony which was one of the successful ones out of a large string of previous attempted English colonies but not the first successful and permanent one (see Jamestown). The colonists did not land in Plymouth at first. They landed on Cape Cod near modern day Provincetown until they figured out that it was a great place for gay nightclubs but not a good place for sustenance farming
The first Thanksgiving did not happen at the Plymouth colony either. You can’t assign a true ‘first’ label to such a thing because harvest celebrations are common all over the world and the Jamestown colony had several documented ones before the Mayflower was ever conceived.
The Puritans were a separate group that left England to form the Massachusetts Bay Colony after the Plymouth Colony was well established. They started what is now Boston as opposed to the Plymouth colony which was an impossibly long distance at the time to the South.
That Ronald Reagan deserves the credit for getting the Iranian hostages freed. He doesn’t. The deal was well in place beforehand, and involved various back-channel negotiations by the Carter administration. The hostage takers just insisted on waiting until after Reagan’s inauguration as one last “fuck you” to Carter, whom they loathed. Some will say that just the thought of Reagan had them quaking in their boots and they knuckled under, but there’s nothing to support that.
Going along with this one, one that always annoys me is the myth that Native Americans used every part of the buffalo (or whatever else animal they were hunting). To their credit, they knew how to use every part of the buffalo, but unless they were experiencing unusual hardship, they often used the parts they considered choice, and discarded the rest.
I don’t know if this next one is as much of a myth as a joke, really, but there’s a comment that people repeat humorously about how the Irish, when faced with the potato failure, didn’t have the sense to eat fish, seeing as how they’re on an island and all. In reality, yes, they did eat fish when they could, but this was constrained by lacking the systems to get the fish from the coastal communities elsewhere, as well as the fact that the fishing rights in many areas were tightly controlled and illegal fishing was as punishable as poaching. Yes, people did it because they needed food, but it wasn’t some fishing free-for-all that was easy and obvious.
That the pyramids were built by aliens. In fact it seems almost every great piece of ancient work is said to be built by aliens. They dont give our ancestors nearly enough credit for brains.
Funny, just tonight I turned on The Weather Channel to see if its gonna snow, and there is some stupid shit show about “The Curse of Bodie” (ghosttown). What a bunch of horseshit.
Huh, I always thought that was real. Although I think that, if that was something Imperial Rome WANTED to do, it’s something they COULD have done, particularly if sea water counts as salt.
