Memorizing details and dates in history class is something everyone can remember hating,
so let's add a little insult to injury: a huge number of those events never happened
at all.
It turns out that a lot of history is complete fiction, like these iconic events.
These days, real estate in Manhattan goes for over $1,700 a square foot, and that's
pretty hard to fathom.
It wasn't always that way, according one of the most commonly repeated stories from America's
colonial history.
That's the tale that says the whole shebang was once sold by the local Native American
tribes to Dutch colonists for a mere $24 worth of beads.
The point is an important one, and it's meant to illustrate what a historically bad deal
the Native Americans got when they traded some trinkets in exchange for what is now
some of the most valuable real estate in the world.
But, that's not exactly what happened, and the truth is a lot more complicated.
For one thing, that $24 figure has not been adjusted for inflation since historians first
reported it in the 19th century.
These days, the total would be about $1,000.
It's still not a fair price by any stretch, but not quite as low as the story goes.
Additionally, the original deed of sale has been lost, so we don't even know exactly what
goods were traded.
We can get an idea from the deed from the deed of sale of Staten Island, though, which
tell us that Native Americans got clothing, gunpowder, kettles, lead, axes, knives, and
other tools that would have certainly been more useful than beads.
Lastly, the Natives most likely saw this sale as giving usage rights to the Dutch, not relinquishing
the land wholesale.
Unfortunately, even this modestly better bargain didn't work out great for them, either.
If you ever failed a test, especially a math test, as a child, there's a chance some adult
told you to cheer up because even Albert Einstein failed math as a kid.
The lesson, supposedly, is that even though you don't know the difference between a trapezoid
and a rhombus now, one day you could have literally some of the most important ideas
of all time and revolutionize physics forever.
That's a great tale to console the fragile ego of a child, only, there's a problem.
According to the Washington Post, it seems that young Einstein's legendarily poor elementary
school performance has been somewhat overblown.
He in fact got very good grades in school, even though he didn't approve of methods of
teaching.
By age 11 he was studying college physics texts and at 13 he was talking about how much
he loved Immanuel Kant.
Unless you can boast the same, your F in math might just literally mean you're bad at math.
Did Einstein fail anything, though?
He did!
He failed the entrance exam to Zurich Polytechnic the first time he took it, but you'll have
to take into account he was still 16 and almost two years away from graduating high school.
It turns out the only reason he failed was because the exam was in French, a language
he had barely studied.
And while he had trouble with the language and biology sections, there was one part he
still aced.
Yeah, it was math.
Young Einstein definitely knew his trapezoids from his rhombuses.
Rhombi?
Rhombuses.
Catherine the Great was a German princess who gained control of Russia by staging a
coup against her own maniacal husband and making herself empress.
Under her rule, Russia prospered to a degree unmatched by most rulers before or since.
Catherine the Great was, in short, pretty boss.
And yet the only thing you probably "know" about her is that she died trying to do unspeakable
things with a horse.
How dare you.
Well, more accurately, how dare generations of rumor-spreaders going back to her own lifetime.
Accusations that Catherine's insatiable sexual appetite was at the heart of her political
success were incredibly common during her time, attempting to undercut her political
ability as a woman by showing her to be some ungodly freak of nature.
Such tales only grew upon her death, but here's the facts: Catherine the Great died of natural
causes, alone and with no horses in the vicinity.
On one morning in November 1796, she drank some coffee and sat down to write.
Three hours later, she was found on the floor, having suffered a cerebral hemorrhage.
Take that horse talk back to the barn where it belongs.
You might not know the beginning of the story: The tyrant Hiero suspects that a golden crown
he commissioned might not be pure gold due to the machinations of a greedy goldsmith,
so he commands a local mathematician to prove the crown has been laced with silver.
You probably know the rest, though: That mathematician, Archimedes, is pondering the problem when
he sits down in the bath.
The water rising around him causes him to realize that he can measure volume with water
displacement, and then he runs naked through the streets of Syracuse shouting "Eureka!"
This story has led to the word "eureka" being a common expression for discovery and epiphany;
it's even the state motto of California thanks to its long association with the gold rush.
There is, of course, just one problem: Archimedes never said this.
Well, okay, sure, yes, he probably said it at some point in his life, he just didn't
do it in what was likely history's only math-inspired streaking session.
As Scientific American points out, there is no record of this story until it's told by
Archimedes fanboy Vitruvius, almost 200 years after it is supposed to have happened.
But, it's hard to keep down a good story about nudity and displacement.
People just love nudity and displacement.
The story of the exodus is one of the central stories of Judaism, telling how the people
of Israel were freed from slavery in Egypt by God, entering into a covenant with him
and ultimately leading to their arrival in the promised land.
The story is spread out over the books of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy,
four of the five books of the Torah, the central scriptures of the Jewish faith.
The story might be familiar to you, as it is foundational to much of Western culture.
The Jewish people are held in slavery in Egypt, Moses utters a few famous lines,
"Let my people go."
… there are some plagues, they walk across the sea, they wander in the desert, etc.
At any rate, while it might be easy to dismiss the more magical aspects of the story, you
might similarly conclude that, well, it's likely that the Jewish people were held in
servitude in Egypt for a while and then escaped or were let go and wandered around looking
for a place to settle.
However, as Rabbi David Wolpe points out, there is precisely zero archaeological evidence
that the Israelites were ever in the Sinai Peninsula.
Double however, he also points out that the historical fact of the situation pales in
the face of the emotional and spiritual truth the story provides people.
Who founded Rome?
Most schoolchildren could answer this question: It was Romulus, after whom Rome was named.
He had a twin brother, Remus, and both were said to have been raised by a wolf who nursed
them as babies.
Their father, of course, was the god Mars, and Romulus himself became a god after he
disappeared in a magical whirlwind to save him from the murderous jealousy of Roman senators…
long after he killed his brother and set a pretty bad example for future Romans.
As cool an origin story as that is, it's just not true.
Historians agree that Romulus was almost certainly a completely legendary figure, whose name
was likely a back-formation from the name Rome, not vice versa.
And that's in spite of the New York Times' coverage of the fringe beliefs of archaeologist
Andrea Carandini, who has said that excavations uncovering signs of Roman settlement in the
eighth century B.C. supposedly included a cave under the Palatine Hill that tradition
says is where Romulus and Remus gobbled up wolf milk.
Still, no dice, the overwhelming scholarly consensus is that there's no actual proof
Rome's most famous wolf boys were a real thing.
The image is an indelible one, indeed one of the best known in science history: A young
Isaac Newton sits under an apple tree when suddenly an apple drops on his head, and presumably
as soon as he stops hollering at the tree, he has discovered gravity, thereby ensuring
his place in history.
But while the image has come to be considered the quintessential "aha!" moment, things didn't
happen exactly that way.
Newton was forced to leave Cambridge University in 1665 thanks to a little bit of plague going
around.
He returned to his childhood home of Woolsthorpe Manor and, while wandering through its orchard,
saw an apple fall from a tree and drop to the ground.
This caused him to ponder why an apple, as well as other things like cats and plants
and pumpkins and buckets of sand, always fall down and not up or sideways or whatever…
and that's what led him to develop his theory of universal gravitation.
Sure, yes, Benito Mussolini was a brutal, Machiavellian dictator whose fascist regime
had no underlying philosophy other than to use violence, deception, and terror to subjugate
the people of Italy under the heel of its nationalist leader, But hey, at least he made
the trains run on time, right?
Nah.
He didn't.
As Snopes explains, "fascist efficiency" was a myth propagated by Mussolini and his followers,
and a rumor spread by fascists to convince people that fascism was a system that was
good for them and benefited them in concrete, everyday ways.
The fact of the matter is that while the Italian rail system had in fact fallen into disrepair
during World War I, most of the repairs and improvements that happened were done in the
1920s before Mussolini rose to power, though he was happy to take credit for them.
That said, the trains didn't even run on time despite these non-Mussolini repairs.
People who lived in Italy at the time have widely attested to the fact that Mussolini's
far-famed railway punctuality was a bunch of bologna.
Who was the first person to sail all the way around the world?
Chances are good you said Ferdinand Magellan.
Chances are also pretty decent that you may have just shrugged and said Christopher Columbus,
though it's important to remember he actually only made it halfway around and tried to convince
everyone that he had made it the whole way by calling Haiti "India".
Points for optimism.
But let's get back to Ferdinand Magellan.
He's the guy that tends to get credit in history books and trivia flashcards for being the
first person to circumnavigate the globe.
There's a big footnote here, and Ferdinand Magellan was just almost-the-first to circumnavigate
the globe.
While Magellan did set out in 1519 and managed to lead his dudes across the Atlantic, through
South America, and over most of the Pacific Ocean, he got killed by natives in the Philippines
during a scuffle there.
So while it's true that his ship made it back to Spain in 1522, Magellan was not there to
cross the finish line.
In fact, only 18 of Magellan's original crew of 260 men made it back home.
If you want to get technical, it's probably better to give the credit to Juan Sebastian
Elcano, who took over command after Magellan's death, though you could also make an argument
for Magellan's Malay slave Enrique, who may have completed the journey in a piecemeal
fashion before any European.
It just goes to show, history really only applies to a certain sort of person.
Check out one of our newest videos right here!
Plus, even more Grunge videos about history are coming soon.
Subscribe to our YouTube channel and hit the bell so you don't miss a single one.