As kids, we’re taught to believe everything our teachers tell us.
But with age comes wisdom, and with wisdom comes the unfortunate realization that, well,
teachers don’t exactly know everything.
Here’s a look at some of the most well-known historical events that never even happened,
even though your history teacher said they did.
"Listen, my children, and you shall hear / Of the made-up ride of Paul Revere!"
The legendary image of Paul Revere blasting through the Massachusetts countryside and
warning American colonials that the British were coming has its origins in an 1860 poem
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who greatly rearranged and simplified much of the real
historical narrative of the night of April 18th, 1775.
For one thing, Paul Revere didn't receive the famous "one if by land, two if by sea"
lantern signals, he sent them.
He also wasn't a solo rider; he was just one part of a larger warning system including
Dr. Samuel Prescott, who actually warned the militia at Lexington and Concord after Revere
was arrested outside Lexington.
Oh, and he didn't shout "The British are coming!" either.
The one quote we do have from him was his reply to someone telling him he was making
too much noise: "Noise!
You'll have noise enough before long!
The regulars are coming out!"
Revere was important, and a hero, but his deeds have been much exaggerated.
So why did Longfellow turn Paul Revere into his solo hero?
Probably because "Listen, my children, and you shall hear / Of the midnight ride of Samuel
Prescott" doesn't rhyme.
There are three things every red blooded American knows about George Washington: He was the
first President of the United States, his face is on Mount Rushmore, and he had a gnarly
set of wooden teeth.
If you’re big shot who likes to impress people at parties with your boundless knowledge
of American history, you probably also know the story of the cherry tree.
It goes as follows: When Washington was a kid, he was given a hatchet as a gift by his
father, and promptly used it to chop away at a cherry tree.
When Washington’s dad confronted him about the tree, the little future president replied:
"I cannot tell a lie.
I did cut it with my hatchet."
What a little rebel!
"Oh yeah, he said, ‘I cannot tell a lie.
I did it with my little hatchet.’
That boy loves to tell the truth all the time."
"He does."
However, as The Digital Encyclopedia of George Washington points out, that didn't happen.
The story was introduced in the fifth edition of a biography of Washington from 1806 by
an author named Mason Locke Weems, who wanted to tie Washington's political success to a
life of virtue.
The book was a bestseller, and now the story is everywhere.
We all know the story of Benjamin Franklin and his kite.
"You know I invented electricity."
"I know."
"Well, I’m sensing a little electricity right here."
Whoa, whoa, whoa, not so fast, Ben.
The story goes that Benjamin Franklin discovered electricity by flying a kite with a key tied
to it in a storm.
According to tale, Franklin was shocked, quite literally, when he touched the key after his
kite was struck by lighting.
But, as Mental Floss explains, the story definitely didn't happen that way, if it even happened
at all.
First of all, Franklin didn’t discover electricity, he merely experimented with it.
Most likely, the whole kite business was just an experiment Franklin devised to determine
whether lightning was indeed electricity, an idea he proposed in a letter to a friend.
When the letter was later published in France, French scientist Thomas-Francois Dalibard
performed an experiment with a lightning rod proving Franklin's hypothesis correct.
Whether or not Franklin subsequently flew a kite in a lightning storm is a matter of
some debate among historians.
What is not up for debate, however, is the bit about him touching a charged key and getting
a shock.
Even a much less powerful charge than an actual lightning strike would have fried Old Ben
to a crisp.
The story is pretty well known: Lady Godiva, the wife of Leofric, the lord of Coventry,
England, felt sympathy for the exorbitant tax burden placed on the peasantry of the
medieval town.
Leofric tells his pleading wife that he will lower taxes when she rides naked through the
town, which she does.
In a side element to that tale, as a sign of respect, all of the villagers stay indoors
while she rides.
However, one randy boy named Tom decides to take a look, getting struck blind and inspiring
the phrase "peeping Tom" at the same time.
As interesting as this story is, most of it is probably untrue.
The story is based on a real person, a woman named Godifu, which is the Anglo-Saxon name
that the Latin "Godiva" comes from, and she was the wife of Leofric, the real count of
Coventry.
But as Harvard Magazine explains, historians of the time did not indicate there was anything
notable about this woman outside of being married to an important man, and you'd think
that, "Oh yeah, there was that one time she and a horse streaked the town to lower taxes,"
would have at least garnered a mention.
It wasn't until two centuries later that monks started recording this legend, likely as a
way of explaining certain historical acts of generosity on the part of Leofric.
Pretty much every kid in America learns on their first day of history class that America
was discovered by the Italian explorer Christopher Columbus who sailed the ocean blue in 1492
in an attempt to reach Asia and subsequently prove that the world was round.
"I thought he directed Home Alone."
However, as the Washington Post notes, almost none of what we learned about Christopher
Columbus as kids is true.
For one thing, the ancient Greeks had already figured out that the world was round, Columbus
simply thought it had to be smaller, due to some bad math.
He definitely didn't "discover" America, either.
Aside from the fact that there were millions of people already living there, Columbus wasn’t
even the first European to land in the Western Hemisphere.
Leif Erikson is believed to have landed and made a settlement in North America 500 years
prior.
Last but not least, Columbus never set foot on continental North American soil, but only
various islands in the Caribbean.
If you feel like you’ve been lied to all your life, well, you kind of have.
An enormous fire hit the city of Rome during the early days of its empire in 64 C.E.
The fire burned for six days and consumed 70 percent of the city, leaving about half
the people without homes.
Popular legend states that the emperor Nero spent the time during the fire playing music
and singing about Rome's destruction.
Nero thought himself to be a visionary artist, so visionary in fact, that his last words
were allegedly “What an artist dies in me!”
Dramatic, much?
This story gave rise to the popular expression, "Nero fiddled while Rome burned," which has
gone on to describe anyone who acts ineffectually during a time of crisis.
However, this saying is rooted in lies.
As historians have noted, the fiddle did not exist until about a thousand years from the
time of the fire.
If Nero was playing anything at all, it would have been a cithara, an instrument similar
to the lyre whose name is the source of the guitar we know today.
But wait!
There’s not actually any evidence that Nero was cithara-ing while Rome burned, either.
The closest report comes from the Roman historian Tacitus, who says there were claims that Nero
sang about the destruction of Troy during the fire, but even Tacitus found this story
to be contrived.
The cold, hard truth is that Nero was still kind of a jerk about the fire even if he didn't
fiddle during it.
He blamed the whole thing on the still-obscure religious cult called Christians and then
built a big house for himself on the ruins.
Like we said, dramatic.
Why did the angry peasant class of the French revolution cut off the head of their queen,
Marie-Antoinette?
According to popular knowledge, it was because she said they should eat cake.
Apparently, these folks didn’t have a sweet tooth.
The story goes that someone told the queen that the people of France had no bread, to
which she responded:
"Let them eat cake."
The statement is pretty much exactly the kind of thing an out-of-touch, oblivious person
would say.
"It's just that she never actually said, 'Let them eat cake'."
However, as you’ve probably guessed by now, there is no historical evidence that Marie
Antoinette ever said any such thing.
"Um, well, that depends on who you ask."
"Well, I asked Kirsten Dunst, who played her in the movie."
Encyclopedia Britannica explains that variations of that story used to poke fun at rich people
had existed around the world in other languages for centuries before Marie-Antoinette was
even born.
The first French-language occurrence appeared in print in a book by French philosopher Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, who attributes the quote to an anonymous princess.
Marie-Antoinette was a princess at the time, but too young for anyone to care about her
culinary opinions.
Rousseau-inspired revolutionaries likely applied her name to the story as a form of propaganda.
The story goes that on All Hallows' Eve in 1517, an obscure monk named Martin Luther
from the small German town of Wittenburg strolled up to the Castle Church and hammered to the
door a list of his soon-to-be-famous 95 theses, which laid out grievances with the Catholic
church, primarily centered on the sale of indulgences, or, in other words, the church
exchanging forgiveness of sin for money.
Martin Luther’s bold and risky act subsequently kicked off the Protestant Reformation and
would go on to change the world.
So, what’s the real story?
Did this brassy monk stroll up to the church door, hammer in hand, and ring out revolution
across the land?
According to Martin Luther researchers: “Nah.”
For starters, this story was first written by someone who could not possibly have witnessed
it, and it was first published after Luther died, who, by the way, had gone his whole
life without mentioning the story to anyone.
Additionally, Luther considered himself to be a good and loyal Catholic up until his
dying breath, so it’s extremely doubtful that he would have ever done anything to so
dramatically provoke his superiors in the church hierarchy.
Of course, Martin Luther did actually deliver his 95 theses to church leaders asking them
to cease the sale of indulgences, but he was much more subtle about it, likely delivering
a politely worded letter with the theses attached.
But you’ve gotta admit that the image of a man nailing his complaints to the door of
a church is so striking that it puts the true, less exciting story to shame.
It's easy to say, "Well, of course people believed these fake stories in falcon times.
They didn't even have Snopes to fact-check."
But not all fake historical events happened, or didn’t happen, in the distant past.
There are major, world-shaking events reported in living memory that completely, actually,
weirdly didn't happen.
One such occurrence was the Gulf of Tonkin incident, a confrontation between ships in
the Gulf of Tonkin near North Vietnam that led to the U.S. becoming more directly involved
in the Vietnam War.
According to reports, an American destroyer was pursued and attacked by North Vietnamese
torpedo boats in 1964 on two separate occasions.
The result of these reports was the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which authorized President
Johnson to more or less go buckwild on Vietnam, which, as you likely know, turned into a national
disaster.
Well, as it turns out, we were all punked.
As reported by the U.S. Naval Institute, declassified documents have revealed that the U.S. ship
fired the first warning shots in the initial encounter, but failed to report said shots,
which made the Vietnamese appear to be the aggressors.
And the second incident?
Yeah, it never even happened at all.
Instead, U.S. ships motored around in a storm shooting torpedoes at tall waves, which could
look like ships on radar, for hours.
It was initially reported as an attack to the higher-ups, but when they realized the
mistake, they decided to go with it anyway.
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