Historical myths that reallly get on your tits

[Fuzzy_wuzzy]

The New Deal helped beat the Great Depression. I don’t think this myth is as widespread as it used to be but it’s still widespread enough.

Shakespeare was Catholic.

Richard III didn’t have the Princes in the Tower killed, or, it was all Tudor propaganda against Richard.

[MaxTheVool]

I really wish people in this thread would (a) make it very clear whether they’re stating the MYTH or the REFUTATION of the myth, and (b) add at least a little bit of explanation.

Is the myth totally false? Or does it have elements of truth but is overstated? Or is it kinda true but misinterpreted? Or what?

[DSeid]

@MaxTheVool

I really wish people in this thread would (a) make it very clear whether they’re stating the MYTH or the REFUTATION of the myth, and (b) add at least a little bit of explanation.

Is the myth totally false? Or does it have elements of truth but is overstated? Or is it kinda true but misinterpreted? Or what?

Right. These sorts of threads often get people coming out stating their belief about something as truth and other beliefs as “myths”

[Son_of_a_Rich]

Before this thread goes any further, I want to say that I’ve never heard of the expression “on your tits”. Is this a UK thing?

[Shagnasty]

@Son_of_a_Rich

Before this thread goes any further, I want to say that I’ve never heard of the expression “on your tits”. Is this a UK thing?

I think it is a synonym for ‘sticks in your craw’. I have never figured out exactly where my craw is but I do know when I have something poking at it and it isn’t good. My tits have never been a big issue since I got out of junior high because I am a guy. Getting an unexpected Texas Tittie Twister is thankfully very rare in the adult world.

[BrotherCadfael]

@Shagnasty

Getting an unexpected Texas Tittie Twister is thankfully very rare in the adult world.

Well, for those of us of the male persuasion, sure…

[JohnT]

Myth: Mozart died broke and forgotten.

Fact: His last year was his most successful financially, earning him the rough equivalent of $500,000. In fact, during his Vienna years, he only earned less than $100,000/year once. Also, he was, in no way, shape, or form “forgotten” - people understood quite clearly that they had lost an irretrievable treasure.

Fact: The “broke and forgotten” myth was largely perpetuated by his spouse, who rode the “poor widow” gravy train hard. She was the original Priscilla Presley in this regard (PP took a largely moribund Elvis estate and turned it into an income-generating economic entity within a decade (with the help of a friendly judge, who advised the estate to sue the hell out of Colonel Tom Parker, which they did)).

[Mr.Kobayashi]

@Locrian

“Hitler was an atheist.” – WHAAA???

I hear this much more frequently now that we have more tea-partying history-rewriting people with a microphone. Clearly they’ve never read Mein Kampf or noticed the SS belt buckles with “God With Us” engraved in German on there.

Slight nitpick; SS buckles usually had the SS motto “Meine Ehre heißt Treue”, “My Honour is Called Loyalty”. Gott Mit Uns was a Prussian motto that the Wehrmacht used.

Oh, and yeah ‘get on your tits’ just means get on your nerves, grinds your gears. But why use that when you can mention tits, that’s my philosophy.

[CalMeacham]

@Son_of_a_Rich

FWIW, according to Wiki, Hippocrates also makes the claim: “They have no right breasts…for while they are yet babies their mothers make red-hot a bronze instrument constructed for this very purpose and apply it to the right breast and cauterize it, so that its growth is arrested, and all its strength and bulk are diverted to the right shoulder and right arm.”

Ouch!

Interesting tidbit. There’s a journal article by a plastic surgeon about the Myth of the Amazon’s Missing Breast:

Karacalar, Ahmet. “The Amazons and an analysis of breast mutilation from a plastic surgeon’s perspective.” Plastic and reconstructive surgery 119.3 (2007): 810-818.

Here’s the Abstract:

Background: The Amazon philosophy has been increasing in popularity because of the evolving status of women in society. Many references point to Themiscrya on the southern coast of the Black Sea in Anatolia as the Amazon homeland. The primary objective of this article is to discuss the different femininity of the Amazons and their breast mutilation from the perspective of a plastic surgeon who has been living in this region that the Amazons inhabited.

Methods: Findings from archaeology, linguistics, anthropology, medicine, history, psychology, and the fine arts were integrated.

Results: The hypotheses that have been proposed to explain the method of breast mutilation include amputation, cauterization, breast searing, and breast pinching. It is generally believed that the primary purpose was to facilitate the efficient use of a bow. Another explanation would be that breast mutilation was performed for medical reasons, including the prevention of breast pain, the development of a tender lump, or cancer. There is another school of thought on this involving religious and sociological reasons that breast mutilation was a badge of honor for warrior women and a sign that a woman had become a real warrior and a sacrifice to Artemis as a sign of service.

Conclusions: Much indirect proof and archaeological evidence point to their historical existence. The Amazons, who lived in an autonomous and original social model, changed their image and function to suit the needs of the society and the times.

I know about it because apparently the article cites …Me! Through my book on Medusa, I gather.

There’s supposed to be an online copy, but I get an error message when I try to access it. I haven’t tried to get the article through interlibrary loan, or hitting the local medical school libraries.

[RivkahChaya]

This is very recent history, but it comes up a lot, and my tits are ample: it’s when people misunderstand what Dan White’s “Twinkie Defense” actually was. At no point did his lawyer claim that eating junk food, or sugar, or Twinkies specifically caused White to become homicidal. His lawyer claimed that White slipped into a deep clinical depression, and had diminished capacity due to his depression. As an example of the changes in White’s lifestyle, the lawyer said that a man who used to eat nothing but “health food” (a term that people in 1979, when the trial took place, would have immediately understood) had been recently living on junk food, although he didn’t mention Twinkies, or even sugar, specifically-- a reporter called it “The Twinkie Defense.” (As a Jewish kid who couldn’t eat them because they weren’t kosher, I can tell you that Twinkies were ubiquitous in the 70s; saying “Twinkies” for “junk food” was like saying “Coke” for “soft drinks.”)

Anyway, the fact of the murder of Harvey Milk and Mayor Moscone was not in question; it was manslaughter vs. murder, and premeditation was the question. The jury believed the diminished capacity defense, and found for manslaughter.

White was sentenced to seven years in prison (he could have gotten life), and paroled after five. He committed suicide two years after his release.

[Mr.Miskatonic]

@Locrian

“Hitler was an atheist.” – WHAAA???

I hear this much more frequently now that we have more tea-partying history-rewriting people with a microphone. Clearly they’ve never read Mein Kampf or noticed the SS belt buckles with “God With Us” engraved in German on there.

In fairness the German Army had that belt buckle for a while.

[Mr.Miskatonic]

@Soulcatcher

That the Sherman tank was nicknamed Ronson during the war after a lighter brand due to a propensity to burn. Also in general the exaggerations of its inferiority (not that it didn’t have its issues).

It is especially amusing because the whole “They called it a Ronson because it lights every time” falls flat because Ronson didn’t use that slogan until after WW2.

The Sherman, as some recent analysts have been showing, was not the disaster some claim it was, especially after it was up gunned and ammo was stored by wet method.

An interesting note: http://ftr.wot-news.com/2013/07/28/please-dont-use-the-5-m4s-1-panther-myth/

[Trinopus]

@Fuzzy_wuzzy

The New Deal helped beat the Great Depression. I don’t think this myth is as widespread as it used to be but it’s still widespread enough. . . .

It did. It didn’t do the job, but it helped. The cutbacks of 1937 led to a deepening of the depression, which had been shallowing.

One problem in what you say is that the word “help” isn’t quantified. How much help counts? The New Deal did some good for the economy.

[thelurkinghorror]

Neil could’ve done “Pizarro the Killer” or something as he chose one of the least ambiguously brutal cultures to idealize (not that the Inca were saints!)
Real Amazons (centuries too late).

Historical fiction or polemics being treated as fact because it’s old: Suetonius and Shakespeare were buttering up their sponsors by knocking their predecessors. Plato named Atlantis in a fictional work; it’s like if people centuries from now future History Channel tried to find the secret location of Blefuscu.

Yes, Puritans vs. Pilgrims. Also the Salem Witch Burnings (zero suspected witches burned).
That the Medieval church and later was vehemently anti-science. Galileo was handled badly, but read up on what really happened. He was not tortured, and sentenced to glorified house arrest. His beliefs had many friends in the church, and many secular scientists opposed heliocentricism. But many clergymen were also scientists.

Paul Revere was mythologized in many ways. He wasn’t the only rider and it didn’t happen like most think it did, but thanks to that poem they made you memorize in middle school that was written decades later, the facts are muddied.

That national Socialism was a left-wing or socialist movement, because “it’s right there in the name!” Also the “America is a Republic, not a Democracy” meme that both certain right and left wingers love. This relies on very specific definitions of the word that most won’t agree with, and democracy != direct democracy.
Hitler certainly wasn’t religious in his later life and surrounded himself with fanatical anti-Christians, although many of these weren’t atheists but had very nutty beliefs (y’know, for Nazis).

[VarlosZ]

@nicky

Versailles was a terrible treaty which caused WW2.

@Acsenray

… it’s possible that the onerous conditions of Versailles would not have been imposed on Germany. Without those conditions, it’s at least arguable that 20 years later, the Nazis would not have found a public mood fertile for their appeal. Instead, the late arrival of the Americans allowed the Allies to pursue a harsh surrender.

This is more something that’s usually judged incorrectly than a straight-up Myth, but since it’s already been raised I’ll post this (again), from Gerhard Weinberg’s excellent A World at Arms:

@Weinberg

The terms of the peace settlement were attacked vehemently at the time and subsequently, and these attacks coincided with the general disillusionment about the new world which had emerged from the war and the peace among the former allies. There was a popular delusion, widespread at the time, sedulously fostered in the 1920s and 1930s by German propaganda, generally believed then and remaining the staple pabulum of history textbooks today, that Germany had been most terribly crushed by the peace settlement, that all manner of horrendous things had been done to her, and that a wide variety of onerous burdens and restrictions imposed upon her by the peace had weakened her into the indefinite future. On the basis of this view, a whole series of modifications was made in the settlement, all without exception in favor of Germany. The occupation was ended earlier than the peace treaty indicated, the commissions to supervise disarmament were withdrawn, the reparations payments were reduced and eventually cancelled, and the trials of war criminals were left to the Germans with predictable results, to mention only some of the most significant changes made. If at the end of this process, Germany – a bare quarter of a century after the armistice of 1918 – controlled most of Europe and had come within a hair’s breadth of conquering the globe, there was obviously something wrong with the picture generally accepted then and later.

The adoption of the national principle as the basis for peace settlement meant that the most recently created European major power, Germany, would survive the war, her population second in Europe only to Russia’s and her industrial and economic potential less affected than that of her European enemies, since it had been on the back of their, not Germany’s, economies that the war had been fought. Though weakened by the war, Germany had been weakened relatively less than her European enemies, and she had thus emerged relatively stronger potentially in 1919 than she had been in 1913. The same national principle, added to war-weariness, which had restrained the victors from using their armies to keep the new German apart, had equally restrained them from using their armies to refurbish the old or create some new larger structure in Central and Southeast Europe. The very portion of the peace treaty that all the Germans found most obnoxious, the revival of Poland, protected Germany from her potentially most powerful and dangerous adversary, Russia. The various argument over the details of the new boundaries between Hungary and Romania, between Poland and Czechoslovakia, between Bulgaria and Greece, between Austria and Yugoslavia, all only underline two facts of supreme importance: that Germany was now actually or potentially infinitely more powerful than any of her eastern and Southeastern European neighbors, and that there was practically no likelihood of those neighbors ever joining together against Germany.

The modifications introduced into the peace settlement reinforced rather than mitigated the stronger relative position of Germany. The prime example of this was the reparations question. The Germans shook off their reparations payments by simple refusal to pay, by destroying their own currency – in part to demonstrate inability to pay – and by more than off-setting what payments were made through borrowing abroad, followed by repudiation of most of these loans in the 1930s.

This process and the international public discussion of it fed an illusion of fateful significance. Because Germany did not pay reparations, it came to be widely believed that no or almost no reparations were paid at all. This, of course, is nonsense. All the reparations were paid: the devastated towns were rebuilt, the orchards replanted, the mines pumped out and all the pensions to survivors were paid (with some still being paid). This bill was simply shifted to other shoulders, primarily the very countries that had seen their economies suffer the most from the war. This shifting of the burden of repair costs from the less damaged German economy to the more damaged economies of others thus served to redouble rather than off-set the impact of the war itself. Only when a realistic perspective is restored to an examination of the peace settlement, its nature, its impact, and its modifications, can one begin to understand how a period of supposed German enfeeblement could culminate within less than two decades in a Europe, even a world, again terrified of German might.

[Mr.Miskatonic]

@Fuzzy_wuzzy

The New Deal helped beat the Great Depression. I don’t think this myth is as widespread as it used to be but it’s still widespread enough.

I don’t think it was ever a myth that the New Deal beat the Great Depression, but it sure helped a lot of people with problems. It also went a long way in keeping the nation from devolving into a left or right wing dictatorship (look at what the CCC did, for example: took young men away from their homes and gave them work to do so they weren’t idle and volatile meat for revolutionaries).

That the rich were upset by this spending showed how shortsighted they were being. FDR was saving their asses even of they never knew it.

[harmonicamoon]

More on the Amazon women…

National Geographic

[AK84]

Neil Armstrong was chosen as CDR of Apollo 11 and first man on the moon because he was a civilian.

No, he got it because in the normal rotation his crew just happened to be the ones who would be in the seat for the first landing attempt.

Most terrorists are poor and uneducated. Actually, most of them seem to (weirdly and dangerously) have higher than normal levels of education, political involvement and social integration.

[Nava]

@AK84

Most terrorists are poor and uneducated. Actually, most of them seem to (weirdly and dangerously) have higher than normal levels of education, political involvement and social integration.

So did most of the leaders of almost any revolution you care to name, history has a lot more Bolívares than Panchos Villa. For some reason we keep finding that strange when it’s actually the norm.

[Tamerlane]

@AK84

Most terrorists are poor and uneducated. Actually, most of them seem to (weirdly and dangerously) have higher than normal levels of education, political involvement and social integration.

Depends on the milieu. But an interesting little paper - Engineers of Jihad.