# What inaccurate or flawed history, science, etc. lessons was I taught in school as a kid? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [May 18, 2010, 7:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-inaccurate-or-flawed-history-science-etc-lessons-was-i-taught-in-school-as-a-kid/539924 "2010-05-18T19:38:39Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 13
**Author:** ![PsyXe](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/54ee81/32.png) [@PsyXe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PsyXe)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2010, 2:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-inaccurate-or-flawed-history-science-etc-lessons-was-i-taught-in-school-as-a-kid/539924/241 "2010-05-22T14:36:38Z")
> [@md2000](#): > > even if you have the ruminant’s ability to convert cellulose into food. (DO giraffes have that?) Oh, yes they do! And naturally, like all other ruminants, they regurgitate a bolus of cud to chew. I remember reading someone’s (Gerald Durrell, maybe?) description of the stately passage of a ball of cud as it rose up a giraffe’s neck, visible from the oustide. ---
**Author:** ![beowulff](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/beowulff/32/542_2.png) [@beowulff](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/beowulff)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2010, 2:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-inaccurate-or-flawed-history-science-etc-lessons-was-i-taught-in-school-as-a-kid/539924/242 "2010-05-22T14:58:00Z")
> [@kfraser34](#): > > I never like posting unless I can add something to the original discussion… and I just had to point out how bad ass that giraffe was… S’wanyways… > > When I was in High School I got in pretty good row with a teacher when I tried to correct him about a “fact” he was teaching in class… > > He was telling the class [the freight tunnels that run under the Detroit](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michigan_Central_Railway_Tunnel) river between the US and Canada were originally “dug” as part of [the Underground Railroad](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_Railroad)… > > The teacher really didn’t like me to begin with and when I pointed out that the those tunnels were built in the early 1900’s and the Underground Railroad operated in the 1850’s our student teacher relationship began to end… > > he was quite condescending when he told me that I was wrong and the tunnel was much older and most definitely used to sneak slaves into Canada… I disagreed again pointing out the dates and he said to me, and I will never forget this, “shut your mouth and stop interrupting my class”… and I responded with “you’re an Idiot”… > > So he booted me… I waited in the “detention room” until the end of the class and then I saw him come into the main office and go directly into the VP’s office… then he left and I was called into the VP’s office… The Funny thing was that it wasn’t even my VP, we had two and the students were assigned alphabetically, but of course the teacher had me dealt with by the “meaner” of the two VPs… He started off on a yelling tirade about respect and what not and when I tried to explain to him what everything started over, he interrupted me saying that did not matter… eventually I convinced him to let me tell the whole story and after I told about the Underground Railroad and what and how the teacher spoke to me his tone changed… eventually I was told that if I wanted to continue in the class I would have to apologize… I refused to and just dropped the class, but there was no other punishment involved… That teacher could never look me in the eye again… > > It was a weird bittersweet moment in my life concerning my view of authority… On the bad side I was thinking how do they let this idiot teach… and it wasn’t just that one incident either, looking back on it now as an adult, that man wasn’t all that intelligent… > > but on the other hand I gained a huge amount of respect for the VP… obviously he had to chastise me for disrespecting a teacher, but in the end he listened to reason and respected the two sides of the story… [Leonard Neeble](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Mendelsohn,_the_Boy_from_Mars), is that you? ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2010, 3:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-inaccurate-or-flawed-history-science-etc-lessons-was-i-taught-in-school-as-a-kid/539924/243 "2010-05-22T15:12:16Z")
> [@](#): > > That’s the thing that makes it hard for me to understand how it could just be about slavery. I mean that if you went into say Boston in the 1860’s and asked “Should we continue to fight this war so we can free the black man” that large amounts of people would say something to the effect “Why would I want to risk death to free a bunch of n\*\*\*\*\*\*?” I guess I figure it’d be a tough sell even if you could implant modern attitudes into people at that time so I would think doing that with 1860’s attitudes would be miraculous. Most people went to war for the same reason most people always do - because their government went to war. The government of the United States went to war because the government of the Confederate States declared war on them. So the question is why did the Confederate government go to war? And the answer is they went to war over slavery. ---
**Author:** ![Lumpy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lumpy/32/446_2.png) [@Lumpy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lumpy)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2010, 4:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-inaccurate-or-flawed-history-science-etc-lessons-was-i-taught-in-school-as-a-kid/539924/244 "2010-05-22T16:13:54Z")
> [@notsoheavyd3](#): > > That’s the thing that makes it hard for me to understand how it could just be about slavery. I mean that if you went into say Boston in the 1860’s and asked “Should we continue to fight this war so we can free the black man” that large amounts of people would say something to the effect “Why would I want to risk death to free a bunch of n\*\*\*\*\*\*?” I guess I figure it’d be a tough sell even if you could implant modern attitudes into people at that time so I would think doing that with 1860’s attitudes would be miraculous. During the war the Union government bent over backwards NOT to portray the war as an abolitionist crusade, for fear of alienating support for the war. The Union fought first and foremost to preseve the unity of the states, and abolition only came in as a means to an end. The Emancipation Proclamation only formally ratified what was already the Union army’s policy of treating slaves escaped of rebel masters as “contraband”, subject to forfeiture. And the Thirteenth Amendment banning slavery guaranteed that the rebel cause would literally be lost, removing any possible impetus for further rebellion. ---
**Author:** ![SlowMindThinking](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/dc4da7/32.png) [@SlowMindThinking](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SlowMindThinking)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2010, 4:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-inaccurate-or-flawed-history-science-etc-lessons-was-i-taught-in-school-as-a-kid/539924/245 "2010-05-22T16:49:50Z")
> [@njtt](#): > > That does not seem right. The Catholic Church officially pronounced heliocentrism to be “formally heretical” in 1616. (“Formally” here seems to mean something like “technically”: they were saying that it is not really very bad, or very important, but, technically, yes it is heretical.) > … 1616 was a long time after Luther, Calvin, and Copernicus. Plenty of time for Protestants to adopt heliocentrism, and Catholics to ponder adopting geocentrism in response. I can believe it was Galileo who made it a big issue, though. ---
**Author:** ![DrDeth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b487fb/32.png) [@DrDeth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrDeth)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2010, 4:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-inaccurate-or-flawed-history-science-etc-lessons-was-i-taught-in-school-as-a-kid/539924/246 "2010-05-22T16:55:26Z")
> [@notsoheavyd3](#): > > That’s the thing that makes it hard for me to understand how it could just be about slavery. I mean that if you went into say Boston in the 1860’s and asked “Should we continue to fight this war so we can free the black man” that large amounts of people would say something to the effect “Why would I want to risk death to free a bunch of n\*\*\*\*\*\*?” I guess I figure it’d be a tough sell even if you could implant modern attitudes into people at that time so I would think doing that with 1860’s attitudes would be miraculous. Well, yes there were racists even in the North. But by and large, the North was strongly against slavery. However, the reason for the War is that the South seceded, and the South had one reason for that- the continuance of race-based slavery. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2010, 7:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-inaccurate-or-flawed-history-science-etc-lessons-was-i-taught-in-school-as-a-kid/539924/247 "2010-05-22T19:31:45Z")
> [@](#): > > Plasma’s another thing I wasn’t taught about in school. I learned that matter came in three types: solids, liquids, and gases. Which is not true. Most of the matter in the universe is actually a plasma. It’s only around planets that matters cools down enough to form into the other three states. Which means that a lot of what we learned about atoms is not generally true. It gets even more complicated than that. Lots of things are solid, liquid, or gas, but within those broad categories, there can be many distinct phases, depending on the substance. For instance, there are something like a dozen different solid phases of water. And then there are also substances that aren’t solid, liquid, or gas. A liquid is a fluid with the equation of state rho = constant, and a gas is a fluid with the ideal gas law equation of state (which, incidentally, includes most plasmas-- Plasmas are a subset of gases, not a completely separate category), but there are a multitude of other equations of state possible for a fluid, resulting in something that is unambiguously neither liquid nor gas, but something else entirely. ---
**Author:** ![Fair\_Rarity](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/fair_rarity/32/153_2.png) [@Fair\_Rarity](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fair_Rarity)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2010, 7:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-inaccurate-or-flawed-history-science-etc-lessons-was-i-taught-in-school-as-a-kid/539924/248 "2010-05-22T19:33:15Z")
I think the true causes of the Civil War are many and complex, but I think the key to this is that here in the North, we were generally taught it was ending slavery to preserve the Union ONLY, a noble quest by the Union to keep us together and help the slaves. So while slavery may or not be related to all the other reasons, it’s really the only reason we were taught. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2010, 7:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-inaccurate-or-flawed-history-science-etc-lessons-was-i-taught-in-school-as-a-kid/539924/249 "2010-05-22T19:38:20Z")
> [@](#): > > Well, yes there were racists even in the North. But by and large, the North was strongly against slavery. However, the reason for the War is that the South seceded, and the South had one reason for that- the continuance of race-based slavery. I don’t think that it was true that the North opposed slavery. I think the majority of the people in the northern and western states were mostly indifferent on slavery. There was no widespread support for the idea of abolishing slavery throughout the country. Most northerners were probably willing to let slavery exist in the southern states. But while the north and the west were not strongly anti-slavery, the south was strongly pro-slavery. It was the south that couldn’t accept the idea of a nation being half-slave and half-free; they insisted on it being all one. And if they couldn’t make the United States be all slave, they’d start a new country that would be. This is why Lincoln didn’t push abolition was a war goal. The South was willing to fight for slavery but the North wasn’t willing to fight against it. The South saw a threat that didn’t really exist. So they felt they were defending themselves. Meanwhile the North had no plans for attacking the South so they were angered when the South started fighting in “self-defense”. They saw Southern hostility as unprovoked. And this created the threat that the South had feared - the North now did want to fight the South. This is why there are two such divergent views on the war. Both sides think the other side started it. ---
**Author:** ![Spoke](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/a88e57/32.png) [@Spoke](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spoke)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2010, 7:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-inaccurate-or-flawed-history-science-etc-lessons-was-i-taught-in-school-as-a-kid/539924/250 "2010-05-22T19:57:20Z")
Could y’all start another thread for the Civil War debate? ---
**Author:** ![adhay](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/ecd19e/32.png) [@adhay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/adhay)\ **Post date:** [May 22, 2010, 8:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-inaccurate-or-flawed-history-science-etc-lessons-was-i-taught-in-school-as-a-kid/539924/251 "2010-05-22T20:19:59Z")
> [@spoke-](#): > > Could y’all start another thread for the Civil War debate? Amen. ---
**Author:** ![Mahaloth](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mahaloth/32/1079_2.png) [@Mahaloth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mahaloth)\ **Post date:** [May 23, 2010, 12:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-inaccurate-or-flawed-history-science-etc-lessons-was-i-taught-in-school-as-a-kid/539924/252 "2010-05-23T00:05:46Z")
> [@engineer\_comp\_geek](#): > > The U.S. Civil War was all about slavery. > > . When were you taught this? I was in elementary in the late 1980’s and we learned that slavery was one contributing factor to the war. Now, I think it’s swinging back the other way, teaching again that slavery was the main issue and the war may not have happened without the disagreement over it. ---
**Author:** ![TriPolar](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tripolar/32/3008_2.png) [@TriPolar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TriPolar)\ **Post date:** [May 23, 2010, 1:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-inaccurate-or-flawed-history-science-etc-lessons-was-i-taught-in-school-as-a-kid/539924/253 "2010-05-23T01:12:12Z")
i would really like to see a coherent argument that the civil war would have happened if there was no slavery. i don’t know of one, and kind of doubt there is one, but i’m not a student of history, so if someone has some real evidence please bring it forward. ---
**Author:** ![engineer\_comp\_geek](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/engineer_comp_geek/32/504_2.png) [@engineer\_comp\_geek](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/engineer_comp_geek)\ **Post date:** [May 23, 2010, 3:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-inaccurate-or-flawed-history-science-etc-lessons-was-i-taught-in-school-as-a-kid/539924/254 "2010-05-23T03:37:42Z")
> [@spoke-](#): > > Could y’all start another thread for the Civil War debate? Excellent idea. Here it is. > **[Was the U.S. Civil War all about slavery?](https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=564220)** > > In this GQ thread, it was suggested that the Civil War discussion be spun off into another thread. I think that’s a good suggestion, so here it is. If you haven’t already done so, you may want to read the other thread (warning - long) before... ---
**Author:** ![md2000](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/73ab20/32.png) [@md2000](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/md2000)\ **Post date:** [May 23, 2010, 3:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-inaccurate-or-flawed-history-science-etc-lessons-was-i-taught-in-school-as-a-kid/539924/255 "2010-05-23T03:42:20Z")
> [@Peter\_Morris](#): > > It’s not clear from your post whether you still think this is true or not. > > From what I’ve read, the British press gangs were authorized to only impress British merchant seamen. Non-British and anyone with no experience of sailing were safe. > > There were a few cases where British seamen took American citizenship. This was not recognized by the British authorities, who regarded them as still being British, hence fair game for impressment. > > There were perhaps a few Americans impressed by error. But it was also possible to appeal against impessment. A recruit who could make a good case that he wasn’t British would be released immediately. > > So, basically, your dad was misinformed. In _Billy Budd_, the movie at least, the guy was an American-born sailor but in the tradition of the uneducated class of the time, did not really know what year he was born or anything much else about his early life. In the days before official identification, this was apparently pretty common for orphans and abandoned children. As a result, the British simply claimed he was one of theirs. They had the guns, they took anyone who could not cogently argue they were not British. Obviously it was common enough that someone wrote a book about it. Thank you for the supporting information, Dr. Deth. My dad went to English school and university, and had a lot of unflattering things to say about British history. OTOH they did abolish and attempt to enforce the end of the slave trade 30 years before the USA. However, there’s a cute rhyme in Punch at the time of the civil war: _Tho’ with the north we sympathize, It must not be forgotten That with the South we’ve stronger ties That are composed of cotton._ After the war, the British paid some reparations to the USA for assistance they gave to the Confederacy naval forces. Maybe eventually some other issue would have come between the industrial north and the unindustrialized south, but at the time the majority of intellectuals (those pinko liberals of the north) believed that enslaving another human being could not be justified. When that caused the south to attempt to secede, yes, a Civil War started over the issue of whether a atate could unilaterally withdrawl once they had joined the union. Even in Canada, what we learned in grade 2 or 3 was the simplified version, what we learned about grade 7 or 8 was the more complex version. (Just as we learned that Canadian Confederation was a “grand dream” of the Fathers of Confederation" in the early grades; by grade 7 or 8 it was time to delve into deeper issues like the Americans wanting to take over the whle continent, seperatism, etc.) Perhaps that’s all this is… the “mistruths” are simplifications taught in the early grades or in those 10-minute public service films we were shown in the early grades. ---
**Author:** ![njtt](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/ecd19e/32.png) [@njtt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/njtt)\ **Post date:** [May 23, 2010, 3:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-inaccurate-or-flawed-history-science-etc-lessons-was-i-taught-in-school-as-a-kid/539924/256 "2010-05-23T03:46:14Z")
> [@SlowMindThinking](#): > > 1616 was a long time after Luther, Calvin, and Copernicus. Plenty of time for Protestants to adopt heliocentrism, and Catholics to ponder adopting geocentrism in response. I can believe it was Galileo who made it a big issue, though. Well, there might have been plenty of time for that to happen, but it bears no resemblance to what actually _did_ happen. Protestants had not adopted heliocentrism, and Catholics never “pondered” adopting geocentrism. Geocentrism was the default position, and had been for at least two thousand years, backed by observation (both casual and systematic), common sense, and sophisticated scientific and mathematical theory. The evidence that had been offered in support of heliocentrism by 1616 was extremely weak, and there was a good deal of seemingly strong evidence against it (I don’t mean the Bible, I mean real scientific evidence, such as the fact that no sign of the stellar parallax motions predicted by Copernicus could be detected by the most careful measurements). In 1616 you could probably have counted all the supporters of heliocentrism in the world on the fingers of two, hands, and there were really only two living heliocentrists of any prominence: Galileo and Kepler (Descartes was about 20, and probably not a heliocentrist yet). Furthermore (and ironically), the reasons that originally seem to have convinced Galileo and Kepler of the truth of heliocentrism were mostly just wrong. Kepler believed because of his attraction to Hermetic mysticism, and his wacky theory about the Platonic solids being between the planetary orbits; Galileo (so far as I can tell) believed because he thought, quite wrongly, that the motion of the Earth explained the ocean tides, and perhaps because he had begun to form a conception of angular momentum, but had falsely concluded from this that “natural” (i.e., unforced) motion was circular. It took the lifetime’s work of Galileo and Kepler combined to create even a moderately convincing case for heliocentrism that was actually based on fact and sound argument, and that attracted supporters in any numbers, and, even then, it was not until Newton showed that heliocentrism follows from his vastly improved system of mechanics (also rooted in Galileo’s innovations) that the matter was clinched. It is no doubt true that, in the wake of Galileo’s trial, in 1632, Catholics were inhibited, for a while from making any arguments for heliocentrism (in 1633, Descartes, who was Catholic, was about to publish his heliocentric work, _[Le Monde](http://www.princeton.edu/~hos/mike/texts/descartes/world/worldfr.htm)_, but quickly withdrew it when the news of Galileo’s condemnation reached him), whereas Protestants were still freely able to do so. As was the case in the Catholic Church before Galileo stirred things up, most Protestants did not regard astronomical theory as having much religious relevance, one way or the other. My impression, however, is that it really was not very long before the case in favor of heliocentrism was strong enough that it became a _de facto_ acceptable view even in the Catholic world, and efforts to suppress it were probably quietly abandoned long before the anti-heliocentric policy was officially overturned. Galileo’s _Dialog_ (the book that occasioned his arrest) effectively refuted most of the major arguments against heliocentrism, and the Inquisition were not quick enough to seize all the copies before some got into Protestant hands, and were pirated and made widely available. In the same period, it began to become apparent that the unprecedented predictive accuracy of Kepler’s _Rudolphine Tables_ (1627) was excellent positive evidence in favor of heliocentrism. Word got out about Descartes’ heliocentrist arguments too, even though they were not published until after his death (and even though his arguments were mostly wrong, they did persuade a lot of people). ---
**Author:** ![Irishman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/b487fb/32.png) [@Irishman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Irishman)\ **Post date:** [May 23, 2010, 5:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-inaccurate-or-flawed-history-science-etc-lessons-was-i-taught-in-school-as-a-kid/539924/257 "2010-05-23T05:52:19Z")
**digs** said: > [@](#): > > I always say (and my students will attest to the fact that I say it far too often) that I believe in a relativistic\* world, but I live in a Newtonian one. > … > \*(or quantum mechanical, or Einsteinian… how should I say this?) Good question. I was once participating in a discussion and I brought up “Newtonian fluids”. The other person assumed I was discussing Newton vs Relativity, and (a) was confused, and (b) was trying to talk about radioactive materials. I had to explain that Newtonian as a description for fluids is a totally different topic than Newtonian as a description for gravity. Durned polymaths playing in multiple science fields. Why couldn’t he specialize in 1 major discovery? I’m not sure which boundary you are trying to denote - the Newtonian/Relativistic one for gravity and motion, or the macroscopic/atomic one for quantum mechanics. The problem for you is that relativity and quantum mechanics don’t mesh well, so there’s no one label for you. 🙂 **adhay** said: > [@](#): > > Also, the idea that that we have been spreading democracy and free enterprise thruout the world by our military “interventions” since the Spanish American War into Afghanistan and Iraq today ignores the fact that our help to the poor in these endeavors has always been on behalf of Capital at the expense of the US taxpayer and the indigenous folks unlucky enough to have been born on exploitable resources. While there is certainly some truth to that, your conclusion is too extreme. I mean, the US has plenty of reasons to exploit the indigenous folk of other countries for our own gain. I mean, what “resource” was “Capital” trying to exploit in Viet Nam? Or Korea? Those were geopolitically driven events, not resource exploitation events. **Porlock Junior** said: > [@](#): > > “Formally heretical” is one of those historical usages that trip people up. According to Annibale Fantoli in _Galileo: For Coperrnicanism and for the Church_, > “… ‘formally heretical’ is not an attenuation of the qualification ‘heretical’ … but, on the contrary, it gives it a more explicit and stronger meaning.” Right. It’s something along the lines of, “In the past there has been some debate on this matter, so let me set the record straight. This is heretical, and I do hereby formally declare it so, so you have been warned.” **adhay** said: > [@](#): > > Corporate America had a good stake in Hitler (I will not cite in this thread). Right. There were a lot of things going on up until Hitler decided to march his army across Europe. That kinda changed the game a little. > [@](#): > > How does a self-declared Jew hater who in Mein Kampf declared a war of vengeance on the world for the indignities Germany had suffered at its hands, first rise to power and then come to “secretly” assemble a world class military and Jew collector, to everyone’s surprise? Wait, Germany’s military was a secret before the war? **Little Nemo** said: > [@](#): > > My own contribution would be that I was not taught about a major portion of World War II - the War in Asia. Most people never learn that Japan had already been at war with China for several years before Pearl Harbor brought the Americans and Europeans into it and this was a bigger war than the one going on in Europe at the same time. If World War II was the merger of these two continental wars into a single global conflict, then that war began in 1937 not 1939. Wow, I was not aware of that. How big a role was the conflict between China and Japan? I do not recall hearing anything about the US and China collaborating against Japan. Why did they not? **beowulff** said: > [@](#): > > Leonard Neeble, is that you? What’s the connection to what **kfraser34** said? ---
**Author:** ![njtt](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/ecd19e/32.png) [@njtt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/njtt)\ **Post date:** [May 23, 2010, 9:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-inaccurate-or-flawed-history-science-etc-lessons-was-i-taught-in-school-as-a-kid/539924/258 "2010-05-23T09:20:16Z")
> [@Irishman](#): > > Wow, I was not aware of that. How big a role was the conflict between China and Japan? I do not recall hearing anything about the US and China collaborating against Japan. Why did they not? During WWII, Churchill, Stalin, Roosevelt and Chiang Kai-shek were known as [The Big Four](http://www.hoover.org/publications/digest/6731746.html), the four chief allied leaders. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [May 23, 2010, 5:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-inaccurate-or-flawed-history-science-etc-lessons-was-i-taught-in-school-as-a-kid/539924/259 "2010-05-23T17:36:58Z")
> [@](#): > > Good question. I was once participating in a discussion and I brought up “Newtonian fluids”. The other person assumed I was discussing Newton vs Relativity, and (a) was confused, and (b) was trying to talk about radioactive materials. That may even have been me. The first time I encountered the concept of Newtonian fluids was in a discussion on this board, where I did in fact think “Newtonian” meant “not relativistic or quantum”. I don’t remember radioactivity being part of it, though. ---
**Author:** ![Cheshire\_Human](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/5f8ce5/32.png) [@Cheshire\_Human](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cheshire_Human)\ **Post date:** [May 23, 2010, 7:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-inaccurate-or-flawed-history-science-etc-lessons-was-i-taught-in-school-as-a-kid/539924/260 "2010-05-23T19:14:36Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > If anyone else made astronomical observations with the telescope before him, I’ve never heard of it. Actually, I just read in a recent issue of Astronomy magazine that there was a guy in England who did before Galileo, but he never published his observations, so didn’t get credit. It’s known that he did from personal papers in the archives of the university he was affiliated with. I don’t remember his name, or the university, and I can’t find the issue of the magazine to look it up. If you’re interested, find a library with a subscription. It will be within the last 6 months. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-inaccurate-or-flawed-history-science-etc-lessons-was-i-taught-in-school-as-a-kid/539924.md?page=12) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-inaccurate-or-flawed-history-science-etc-lessons-was-i-taught-in-school-as-a-kid/539924.md?page=14)