The entire point of going to school is to learn things.
In theory, that is.
But sometimes, those things that are being taught aren't quite true, and that's a huge
problem in history classes across the country.
Well, we're going to set the record straight with this look at false things your history
class taught you.
The period of European exploration into the Americas was an ugly, bloody time.
There was savagery on both sides, especially when it came to the subject of scalping.
However, many believe Native Americans never practiced the awful art of taking scalps until
their European enemies landed on their shores and showed them how it was done.
The reality is more complicated, and scalping has been practiced for a long, long time.
Archaeologists have discovered evidence of scalping being done in Europe from the Stone
Age into at least the 11th century.
And on the flip side of the ocean, in North America, archaeologists have found scalped
skulls dating back to 1325 A.D., long before Columbus, Europeans, and the relentless march
through Native American lands.
It's not clear just when scalping started, but historians have even discovered evidence
that it occurred before the Vikings sailed across the Atlantic.
And as historian James Axtell writes, by the time Europeans first showed up, they found
certain tribes like the Delaware, Mohawks, and Algonquins already had scalping down to
an art form.
Once the Europeans moved in, everybody stepped up their scalping game.
When white settlers arrived in the New World, they put out bounties for the hair and flesh
of their Native American enemies, encouraging tribes that had never practiced scalping before
to take up a bloody new hobby.
Scalping became widespread across North America, resulting in a whole lot of bloodshed on both
sides of the conflict.
The infamous Salem witch trials kicked off in 1692, and they remain one of the darkest
chapters in Massachusetts history.
Before it was over, around 200 people were accused and tried for the rather difficult-to-prove
crime of being witches, and many were executed in spite of a distinct lack of concrete evidence.
Twenty of the accused were found guilty and killed almost immediately, but none lost their
lives by being burned at the stake like most people think.
At least, none of the American victims did.
In Europe, witch trials were all the rage, and they executed most of their victims with
fire.
In Salem, though, different methods were used to bring about the end of a perceived reign
of witchy terror.
19 of the 20 victims were hanged on Gallows Hill, while the other victim, Giles Corey,
was crushed to death with heavy rocks.
Without Kennedy, we may never have had civil rights legislation, or so we've been taught.
But Kennedy had little to do with establishment of civil rights laws.
When he heard about the planned March on Washington, where Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his "I
Have a Dream" speech, Kennedy actually tried to stop it.
He even sent vice president Lyndon B. Johnson to Norway during the march because he didn't
like LBJ's pro–civil rights policies.
Kennedy was forced to act on civil rights after the Freedom Riders and the assassination
of Medgar Evers, but he thought the legislation would never get through and worried it would
hurt his chances of passing the bills he really cared about.
After Kennedy was shot, LBJ put all his efforts as president behind the Civil Rights Act.
Capitalizing on the fresh memory of the young president slain, LBJ used the people's grief
and frustration to get Congress to act.
And in the end, JFK got all the credit.
The minimal women's history you learn in school usually revolves around the idea that ladies
always had to stay at home and do all the housework.
They had a brief reprieve when they had to go to work in the factories during World War
II, but they went back home after the war until feminism came along.
But this is far from the full picture: it ignores the many other women who didn't have
the privilege of not working, and hides decades of history where men and women worked equally.
Before the Industrial Revolution, work was an extension of the household, and tasks were
split evenly between women and men.
Even by the turn of the century, women held a quarter of industrial jobs and half of agrarian
jobs.
Factory work at the time was incredibly dangerous, and gendered labor laws reinforced the growing
idea that men should earn the money and women should stay at home.
Even into the '50s, though, women workers weren't so rare.
Look magazine often profiled female workers, and radio programs talked to so-called "career
girls" who felt women should be able to find meaning and purpose outside the home.
Sure, the males on the panels tended to think she wasn't serious about having a career because
she occasionally thought of falling in love, but we're not here to debunk the idea that
'50s guys had issues.
Finally the career girls got erased from mainstream history, until they burned their bras and
sang Helen Reddy songs.
Or so we've been told.
But that didn't quite happen like it's taught, either.
When classrooms gloss through the Women's Liberation Movement, one of the topics that
almost always gets brought up is the Movement's protest of the 1968 Miss America pageant.
According to history, we were told that a bunch of protesters at the event took off
their bras and immediately set fire to them.
Well, according to Carol Hanisch, one of the organizers of the protest, that's not exactly
what went down.
The truth?
The women did want to burn their bras
police wouldn't let them set things on fire while they were in public and
standing on a boardwalk.
They were forced to throw a bunch of iconic items like bras, girdles and Playboy magazines
into a garbage can, and that was finally set on fire.
Hanisch told NPR:
"The media picked up on the bra part.
I often say that if they had called us 'girdle burners,' every woman in America would have
run to join us."
First used in 1792, the guillotine hacked off around 15,000 heads during the French
Revolution.
It was so efficient its final kill wasn't until the 1970s.
It got its name from Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, but despite what most think, he didn't actually
invent the machine.
In fact, he didn't even like the idea of capital punishment.
But in the early days of the French Revolution, Guillotin hoped to make the death penalty
more humane by proposing a machine that could cleanly chop off someone's head in mere seconds,
avoiding the prolonged suffering that came with most executions of the era.
He pitched his idea in 1789, but the job of actually inventing the device fell to Dr.
Antoine Louis, and the construction came thanks to one Tobias Schmidt.
The completed product was labeled the "Louisette" or the "Louison" after its actual inventor,
and it was tested on human bodies before claiming its first victim in 1792.
However, because Guillotin was the man who originally proposed the idea, and thanks to
a popular song incorrectly asserting he was the creator, people soon started calling the
device "le guillotine."
Guillotin himself never approved of the use of his name.
Although most schools taught us that slavery was solely found in the southern US, Southerners
actually didn't get a patent on racism.
People of the North also have a bad history of owning others.
The colonial North thrived on the slave trade in the 1700s.
During the Revolution, George Washington even told Northern and Southern colonists alike
that they needed to fight the British so they didn't become
"as tame and abject slaves as the blacks we rule over with such arbitrary sway."
By 1804, slavery was abolished in the North, but not all at once.
Some states left in provisions to slowly free slaves over time, and as late as 1840, Connecticut
still had 17 slaves listed on the census.
In New York city.
A fifth of the city's population were enslaved in 1740, and New York had the second-highest
rate of slave ownership in the country behind only Charleston, South Carolina.
A shocking 42 percent of the population owned slaves, and slave labor built much of the
city.
Even during the Civil War, New York City came close to joining the secession after South
Carolina.
Though the city wanted to side with the South mostly for economic reasons, they still weren't
worried about the idea of fighting alongside slaveholders.
The Watergate cover-up is possibly the most notorious political scandal in U.S. history,
and when people recall the incredible events that led to Richard Nixon's resignation, they
often picture a mysterious man lurking in the shadows of a parking garage, a secret
informant who helped Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein uncover a
real-life conspiracy.
For years, this undercover agent was known solely as "Deep Throat", and this enigmatic
figure became a permanent part of the American consciousness.
His true identity was finally revealed in 2005 as Mark Felt, the second highest-ranking
member of the FBI during the 1970s.
But even if Felt had never come forward, Deep Throat would have always been remembered as
the mysterious informant that toppled a president... only that's not exactly how it happened.
While Deep Throat was an important player in the Watergate story, his role in Nixon's
downfall has been massively overblown.
As it turns out that for the most part, Deep Throat didn't provide Woodward and Bernstein
with information they didn't already know.
Instead, as Bernstein explained,
"Deep Throat largely confirmed information we had already gotten from other sources."
Both reporters also made it clear they already had numerous sources pointing them in the
right direction,
"this portrait of [Deep Throat] as 'the man who brought down the White House' just isn't
accurate."
Martin Luther King Jr.'s name is synonymous with noble ideas like "civil disobedience"
and "nonviolent resistance."
King wrote the playbook on how to peacefully resist a totalitarian government, as demonstrated
by his historic campaigns in Birmingham and Selma.
During these marches, King and his followers never fought back, and while he eventually
became America's most famous pacifist, Dr. King wasn't always so eager to turn the other
cheek.
King first became a national figure thanks to the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
After Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat for a white passenger, King organized the
resistance movement that forced the city of Montgomery to integrate its bus systems.
Needless to say, the boycott didn't win King any fans in the racist community, and as a
result, someone bombed the reverend's house in February 1956.
But instead of letting things slide, King decided he would be ready the next time someone
came for him or his family.
After the attack, armed guards kept a vigilant eye on King, and he applied for a concealed
carry permit.
As you might expect, his application was denied, but that didn't stop King from stockpiling
guns.
UCLA professor Adam Winkler says one of King's advisers described his place as "an arsenal",
and once a journalist visiting the King home almost sat on the pastor's loaded pistol.
Eventually, King would change his mind on the matter and get rid of his weapons, but
for a brief moment, one of the most peaceful men on the planet was packing a whole lot
of heat.
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