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History isn't always what you learned in school... Join us as we debunk popular historical myths that many people still believe! From pyramid builders to Revolutionary War heroes, we're separating historical fact from fiction. Did Einstein really fail math? Were the Salem witches burned at the stake? Time to set the record straight!
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00:00We do know that there was a relationship between John Smith and Pocahontas.
00:05Was it romantic? Unlikely, but we can't be sure.
00:09Welcome to WatchMojo, and today we're counting down our picks for the top 20 historical inaccuracies that many people believe.
00:16It cannot be overstated how consequential this document was.
00:21Number 20. Pirates regularly buried their treasure.
00:25Everybody loves a good pirate story, not to mention the thrills of an adventure in search of lost treasure.
00:31Unfortunately, this image of swashbuckling pirates either digging holes to bury their loot or to find more is mostly fiction.
00:39The fact is, there is no case in history that anyone knows of, of pirates burying treasure and drawing maps with X's on.
00:47Real pirates had better things to do with their treasure, like spending it immediately.
00:52Most pirate crews divided their haul as soon as possible, and there is almost no evidence that they buried it for safekeeping.
00:59The myth likely stems from isolated stories, such as Captain Kidd's rumored stash, or has been popularized through tales like Treasure Island.
01:07So next time someone says X marks the spot, give them a history lesson.
01:11Pirates very rarely buried treasure, they prefer to spend it.
01:14Number 19. Brothers Grimm wrote many famous fairy tales.
01:18From Cinderella's Glass Slippers to The Witch of Hansel and Gretel, we've all heard about the tales written by the brothers Grimm.
01:25Except, they didn't.
01:27Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm weren't writing brand new stories.
01:30Instead, they were collecting old folklore.
01:33Their actual contribution was more about preserving the oral German storytelling traditions that had been passed down over several generations.
01:41It inspired the Grimm's to collect folk and fairy tales that had, until then, only been handed down orally.
01:47Today, we are well acquainted with these stories through adaptations such as Disney's animated and live-action versions.
01:54The early versions of these tales were much darker and more violent.
01:57So, while the brothers deserve their laurels for compiling the fairy tales, they were more likely spooky story editors as opposed to folklore writers.
02:06Number 18. Gladiators always fought to the death.
02:09We've seen Hollywood's gladiatorial bloodbats, but real Roman gladiator fights weren't always a death match.
02:16Gladiators were expensive to train and maintain.
02:19They were otherwise prized athletes and too costly to lose in a random duel.
02:24Too much death is not good for business.
02:26Most gladiatorial matches were fought according to rules, with referees present, and the option for surrender was available.
02:39The thumbs-up or thumbs-down gesture associated with life or death in gladiator combat is popularized by art and film.
02:46It was never a thing.
02:47Many gladiators had long careers.
02:54They won fame, fortune, and even freedom.
02:57Brutal fights existed, but matches to the death were one myth that the Coliseum didn't condone.
03:02Champions of Rome!
03:07Number 17. Princess Anastasia's Disappearance.
03:10The idea that Anastasia Romanov, the daughter of the last Russian Tsar, Nicholas II, somehow escaped her family's tragic fate, has been around for nearly a century.
03:20Hurry, Anastasia!
03:21Her story has spawned legends, imposters, and even animated musicals.
03:26But the harsh truth is that she did not survive.
03:29The remains of the Romanov family were discovered in 1991.
03:33This did not include Anastasia and her brother.
03:35The Tsar and Tsarina, three of their daughters, and four attendants are identified.
03:39But two of the youngest royal children aren't among the dead.
03:44That missing piece kept the mystery of her survival alive until 2007.
03:48DNA testing of a second grave identified the missing children.
03:52The fantasy of the lost princess was closed by modern science.
03:56Still, Anastasia's story remains a fascinating blend of myth, fiction, and tragedy.
04:02Anastasia, the youngest Romanov daughter, did not escape the firing squad.
04:07Number 16.
04:08Betsy Ross and the American Flag
04:11The American flag is one of the most recognizable symbols in the world.
04:15Its creation has often been attributed to one Elizabeth Betsy Ross, a Philadelphia seamstress.
04:21Betsy would be immortalized in a commemorative stamp in 1952, marking the bicentennial of her birth.
04:28The only problem is, she was not the actual designer.
04:31The more likely designer was Francis Hopkinson, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence.
04:37Francis would bill Congress for his work on the flag, and left behind a paper trail that spanned several years as he pursued payment.
04:44Betsy may have stitched some flags, but the legend of her most incredible creation is more myth than fact.
04:51Number 15.
04:52Emancipation Proclamation
04:54The Emancipation Proclamation never actually ended slavery.
04:58Issued by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863, it didn't free anyone.
05:02That preliminary proclamation said you have 100 days to either come back into the Union, or I'm going to free your enslaved laborers.
05:10This is because it only applied to Confederate states that were still in rebellion, and not to the slave-holding border states loyal to the Union.
05:18To make matters worse, nobody took the decree seriously.
05:21The Emancipation Proclamation was a fit and necessary war measure, but when the war was over, it was no longer a legal measure.
05:28The actual legal death of slavery only came two years later, in 1865, when the 13th Amendment was made to the United States Constitution.
05:37Lincoln's proclamation was a turning point and a bold political move, it just didn't legally abolish slavery on its own.
05:44History classes may skip this footnote, but we don't.
05:46He is determined that this amendment is going to pass Congress, and it does.
05:53Number 14. How We Remember the Alamo
05:55The Alamo is a symbol of Texas pride, but the real story is a bit more complicated and a lot darker.
06:02The Alamo is part of American culture, the most widely visited historical site in the state of Texas.
06:10The Battle of the Alamo had more to do with slavery than just Texan independence.
06:13Mexico banned slavery in 1829.
06:17This did not go well with American settlers in Texas, who continued to keep slaves.
06:22The 1836 battle was in part about defenders fighting to preserve the rights of slaveholders.
06:28The brutal siege ended after 13 days when Mexican forces won the battle.
06:33And this is the imagery that most Americans have, that they were overrun by these brutal Mexican forces.
06:40Unfortunately, they would be defeated later at the Battle of San Jacinto.
06:44The winners continued to use slaves.
06:47Remember the Alamo sounds noble, but once you dig deeper, you find the darker truth beneath the slogan.
06:53And so they raced into subsequent battles, saying, Remember the Alamo.
06:57Number 13 Cowboy Hats
06:59When you picture a cowboy, you probably imagine men on the American frontier wearing those wide-brimmed Stetsons and riding a horse along a dusty trail.
07:09The cowboy hat is the most iconic piece in the Western attire.
07:14Guess what?
07:14Real cowboys had no interest in wearing cowboy hats.
07:18They were too bulky.
07:19Instead, cowboys in the 1800s preferred to wear bowler hats.
07:23These hats stayed on their heads during windy conditions.
07:26Even better, they were cheaper.
07:28Photos of gunslingers like Wyatt Earp show him in practical headgear.
07:32The cowboy hat is undoubtedly an iconic accessory, but not historically based.
07:37We have Hollywood westerns and marketing to thank for that.
07:40When are you going to look good?
07:41You're going to feel better.
07:43And you'll get a woman.
07:45Number 12 Benjamin Franklin and Birds
07:48Ben Franklin didn't like the bald eagle.
07:50He felt it had a bad moral character.
07:53It's one of those fun facts that isn't quite fact.
07:56In a letter to his daughter, Franklin jokingly criticized the bald eagle and expressed his preference for the turkey, deeming it to be a, quote, much more respectable bird.
08:06That did not mean he fully endorsed the bird.
08:08He didn't like the turkey either.
08:10Franklin was, in modern terms, a troll.
08:13His statement was more satire than political stance.
08:16To this day, the bald eagle has stuck around, bad character and all.
08:20The turkey, on the other hand, takes the cake.
08:22Or, instead, becomes one on Thanksgiving.
08:25Number 11 Pocahontas and John Smith
08:27Pocahontas was 10 years old when John Smith arrived in Virginia.
08:32Furthermore, Pocahontas wasn't even her real name.
08:35Their supposed romantic relationship?
08:37That is all Disney.
08:39Pocahontas.
08:40What?
08:41What did you say?
08:43My name is Pocahontas.
08:46The absolute truth can be derived from oral histories of the Matapunai tribe and various other sources.
08:53Pocahontas did help build peaceful relations between her people and the settlers, but her relationship with John Smith is a myth.
09:00She initially married Cocuam, the younger brother of the chief of the Potomac tribe.
09:05Pocahontas was later forcibly taken to England, where she married John Rolfe, not Smith.
09:10Pocahontas converts to Christianity, taking the name Rebecca.
09:15She marries a settler, John Rolfe.
09:17The idea of a cross-cultural romance was invented to romanticize colonialism.
09:22Sadly, there was no windswept love ballad by Grandmother Willow, just historical distortion.
09:29Listen with your heart.
09:32You will understand.
09:36Number 10 Washington's Wooden Teeth
09:39George Washington suffered from horrible dental disease for many, many years.
09:44It plagued him his entire life.
09:46Don't believe the myth that George Washington didn't do all he could to prevent the loss of all of his teeth.
09:52He's pouring money into dentistry.
09:56He's getting teeth pulled.
09:57At least Washington could afford better than the wooden false teeth that most people believe to be his signature.
10:02He had four dentures made from premium material for the time, certainly not including wood.
10:09Animals, cows, were used.
10:11Their teeth were filed down.
10:13It is generally assumed that Washington had stained his preferred ivory sets, giving them a wooden appearance.
10:20You'd think he would keep these costly chompers in better condition.
10:24Perhaps the first president of the United States had other priorities.
10:27Number 9 Let Them Eat Cake
10:30The royal family was held very much to blame for the famine that was afflicting the country.
10:34Marie Antoinette supposedly sealed her fate during the French Revolution, when she suggested that peasants end their famine with cake or brioche.
10:43Such nonsense.
10:44I would never say that.
10:45Of course, those who think this reflected how out of touch she was with her subjects, are out of touch with history.
10:52Qu'il mange de les brioches was coined by Jean-Jacques Rousseau's autobiography, attributed to an unidentified, quote, great princess.
11:01The book was released when Antoinette was only nine years old and still living in Austria.
11:07Nonetheless, revolutionaries inspired by Rousseau's philosophies misappropriated the quote in campaigns to defame the queen.
11:14Still, to this day, many believe Let Them Eat Cake says everything about the elitism that led to Antoinette's execution.
11:22She certainly spent a great deal too much money on dresses and jewels, but she really didn't say anything quite so callous.
11:28Number 8 Viking Helmets
11:30Medieval Norse raiders were known to be devils on the battlefield.
11:34But of all the fearsome helmets that these Vikings wore in combat, there's no evidence that any of them had horns.
11:47This belief goes back to the artistic liberties among 19th century romanticists in Scandinavia and Germany.
11:54It's believed that the visual was widely popularized by Richard Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung cycle.
12:07The horned helmet myth stuck in pop culture that quickly.
12:10Now, 21st century artistic depictions of Vikings are starting to undo it.
12:15Research does suggest that Scandinavians wore horned helmets for ceremonies during the Nordic Bronze Age.
12:22Of course, as skilled as Vikings were in battle, such headgear would be too impractical there.
12:32Number 7 Napoleon Complex
12:34Napoleon Bonaparte led France out of a revolution into one of the most powerful empires in the world.
12:40The English forget that my strength is speed.
12:44In 20 days I will be in the heart of Germany.
12:46It sounds like he was compensating for something.
12:48This is the idea behind the Napoleon Complex, which attributes a man's ego trips to insecurity about his short stature.
12:56The thing is that Napoleon stood somewhere between 5'6 and 5'10.
13:01That was actually above average height for a man of this era.
13:04Belief to the contrary originated from British propaganda, which belittled the empire's nemesis by literally belittling him.
13:12The campaign may have had no real impact on Napoleon's conquest, but it seriously distorted his legacy.
13:19With greater sensitivity to history and height, the public is finally starting to reject this tall tale.
13:25And though he never achieved his dream of conquering Europe, he undoubtedly left his mark on it.
13:31Number 6
13:32The British are coming
13:33Let's admit it.
13:34We love Paul Revere because he's America's first action hero.
13:38The American Revolution might never have been had the Massachusetts Provincial Congress not been warned of a British attack.
13:45This heroic image is enhanced by Paul Revere shouting,
13:48The British are coming!
13:49Throughout his ride from Boston to Concord.
13:52Thanks to Revere, America isn't caught napping at the outset of the war that will win our independence.
13:58Well, that wouldn't be particularly smart espionage.
14:01Revere and William Dawes, in fact, covertly passed the intelligence to other riders before Revere was apprehended in Lincoln.
14:09There were as many as 40 messengers by the time word reached Concord.
14:13Henry Wadsworth Longfellow just found it more romantic to credit the original riders in his 1860 poem, Paul Revere's Ride.
14:21The idea that Revere galvanized a Massachusetts devoid of crown loyalists is pretty absurd.
14:28In playing to patriotic ego, however, Longfellow's poem is popularly taken as fact.
14:33This idea of him riding alone, the dead of night, sounding the alarm, raising the troops, is the most enduring feature of this myth that we've really bought into as Americans.
14:44Number 5. Rosa Parks' Seat.
14:46Rosa Parks sat down on the bus and began what we know today as American Civil Rights Movement.
14:52The Civil Rights Movement flourished with Rosa Parks' arrest on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama.
14:57Many believe that her act of defiance was the first of its kind.
15:01More naively, some think Parks took a white person's seat first.
15:05She actually was seated in the black section of the bus, but broke Jim Crow laws by refusing to defer her seat after a white passenger section reached capacity.
15:13When Rosa Parks decided to stay seated in December of 1955, I was two and a half years old.
15:21I know that what Rosa Parks did made a huge difference in my life.
15:25Black people, of course, were entirely barred from white-only spaces.
15:30Though this particular incident sparked the Montgomery bus boycott, Irene Morgan, Claudette Colvin, and others did the same thing earlier.
15:38Lasting over a year, the Montgomery bus boycott was an overwhelming success and inflicted substantial revenue losses.
15:45Parks nonetheless deserves praise for showing how many people were willing to take a stand against the lie of separate but equal by staying seated.
15:54Number 4. Thomas Edison invented the light bulb.
15:57It's not hard to invent a light bulb that lasts for just 15 seconds. The problem is to get it to last for many, many hours.
16:02American inventor Thomas Edison accrued more than 1,000 U.S. patents, with the incandescent light bulb being considered his masterpiece.
16:10While one can reasonably assume he didn't come up with the idea entirely, the invention of the light bulb is complicated.
16:17People around the world were working on electric light. People announcing to the press, Eureka, I have it. But, you know, the press was kind of focused on Edison.
16:26The concept of producing light with an electric arc was first realized by Humphrey Davy in the early 1800s.
16:32Edison's carbonized filament design may be considered groundbreaking, but English inventor Joseph Swan coincidentally patented a near-identical model at the same time.
16:43Inquiries found no evidence of intellectual infringement.
16:46Edison and Swan ultimately merged their companies to help spread light bulbs throughout the world.
16:51Though American mythos gives Edison all the credit, all visionaries need some guiding light.
16:58There was a sense in which we were entering a brave new world.
17:02Number 3. Einstein's math grades.
17:05Like many great innovators, Einstein was a rebel, a loner, but deeply curious.
17:11It's hard to overstate Albert Einstein's brilliance.
17:14His academic underdog story, on the other hand, has been inflated by the notion that one of the greatest scientists of the modern age flunked math and science in secondary school.
17:24His published final report card shows a 6 in algebra, geometry, and physics.
17:30That was the lowest grade possible at the Cantonal School of Araw before Einstein's day.
17:36During his last year, the school inverted its grading system, meaning that Einstein got the highest marks in the fields he went on to reinvent.
17:46Granted, he did have trouble with organic sciences.
17:49Still, with a history score to match math and physics, Einstein's grades alone are a lesson in the importance of proper research.
17:56Number 2. Salem Witchburning.
17:58America's puritanical foundation was first shaken in 1692.
18:04Colonial Massachusetts had to reassess its values after the mass conviction and execution of people, mostly in Salem, for supposedly practicing witchcraft.
18:13Anyone and everyone among them might be a witch and Satan's willing helper.
18:22At least they didn't import Europe's common practice of burning convicted witches at the stake.
18:28Nineteen of the thirty people found guilty were hanged.
18:35Giles Corey was crushed with stones for refusing to enter a plea to his charge.
18:39American folklore has since conflated these trials with European ones, which regularly featured fatal witch tests and executions by immolation.
18:49The Salem witch trials were more solemn than the sensational fables.
18:52Whatever people have come to envision with this infamous episode, it's more important to remember the tragedy of superstition and neighbor's betrayal.
19:00We've gone a long way from here.
19:03Due process, presumption of innocence, burden of proof.
19:07Criminal law became more civilized in the time following the Salem witch trials.
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19:251. Pyramids built with slave labor
19:30Though ancient Egyptian civilization lasted for nearly 3,000 years, its kings only built huge tombs like these for a few centuries.
19:40Ancient Egypt built so much of modern civilization.
19:43Many systems have also been inspired by the premise that this world was partly built on slave labor.
19:49The mighty pyramids of Giza are particularly associated with such atrocities.
19:56But overwhelming archaeological evidence suggests that slavery was not involved in their construction.
20:03It sure wasn't aliens either.
20:05The builders were ostensibly skilled Egyptian laborers who were paid fairly.
20:10Ancient Greek historian Herodotus spread the theory that these laborers were enslaved.
20:14This myth was finally cemented by misinterpretations of the Book of Exodus,
20:19which never explicitly claims that the Israelites built the pyramids that predate their culture.
20:25With modern historians enabling us to admire the Giza pyramids guilt-free,
20:29they're also a monument to the power of historical inaccuracy.
20:33History is not always written by the winners.
20:36It can also be written by Hollywood.
20:38The implication is, to John Smith, that he could have made a difference and did not.
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