Historical Lies
One thing I do not like to do is go against the accepted norm. I’m not saying that I don’t do it, because I’m one of those people who do it a lot, but I feel bad I have to do it, because there was a lot of things people believe which are just not true and sometimes when you correct these beliefs people get disappointed. This is especially true when certain groups of people get credit for something they didn’t actually do and even get holidays named after them for it. One of the first things which comes to mind is Columbus Day. We go to school and we are all taught Columbus discovered America. Nothing could be further from the truth. Many say there is proof that he never landed on what is now America during his first voyage and yet we have all sorts of proof that many different races from different time periods did. There is proof that Marco Polo landed in America with the Chinese fleet. There are Viking settlers who were here and we have found Roman and ancient Egyptian artifacts in North America which we believe show these people were here. We also suspect the ancient Polynesians and ancient Irish also landed in what is now America and that English fishermen were fishing the Grand Banks long before Columbus ever made his voyage, but since there was a great stock of fish they were keeping their profitable fishing grounds secret.
Sometimes a story is printed in the newspaper and yet there is nothing true about it at all. Let me give you an example of this. While I was at work one day a coworker called me over and said Ken, look at this story in the paper, it’s incredible. I read it and it said that a gorilla baby was missing in Africa and the guerrillas decide to go into the closest village and check with the inhabitants if the baby was there or they knew where it was, so they went from hut to hut checking. I have to tell you the truth, when I read this article I began to laugh and said to my coworker this cannot be true, but he replied it’s in the paper and I said I’m sorry I don’t believe a word of it. That was it until the next day when the paper printed a retraction saying somebody had fooled them with the story. You would think something so obviously absurd would have been checked a lot more closely before it was published.
In the late 19th century a French army officer named Alfred Dreyfus was convicted of selling secrets to the Germans. He was given a sentence of imprisonment on Devil’s Island, the harshest prison in the entire French prison system. It was said nobody ever escaped from it. Dreyfus served 12 years of an incredibly hard prison term, but a newspaper reporter named Emile Zola thought he was innocent and investigated the case. This was one of the biggest cases of all time in France and people were divided as to whether Dreyfus was innocent or guilty, that is until another officer named major Harvard Joseph Henry committed suicide, but before he died he stated that he had framed Dreyfus. A civilian court later set Dreyfus free and he was allowed to continue his military career. This was one of the biggest lies ever to take place in France.
I think most of us have heard about the reactor exploding in Chernobyl and what was the former Soviet Union. The accident happened in 1986. At that time 32 people had died. Several weeks after the explosion and after radioactive clouds had traveled all around the world Mikhail Gorbachev made a public speech declaring that the West was overreacting but it was said that the Communist officials evacuated their families from the area, but other civilians who lived in the same places were told to stay. Nobody really knows what the death toll turned out to be, but it had to be in the many thousands when you consider all the diseases which were caused by this radiation.
A story has been told for many years which involves Albert Einstein. It has been told to schoolchildren many times to try and inspire them. The story states Albert Einstein could not pass math no matter how hard he tried and some versions of the story state he even struggled with physics. I don’t know where this story comes from, but the truth is Einstein was a mathematical prodigy and when you think about it and think about all the theories he proposed one could hardly do this if they didn’t understand mathematics. His theories was so advanced even most scientists had a hard time understanding what he said and following them.
Sometimes you really have to wonder who starts some of the stories and why they have become ingrained in us. Take the story of Isaac Newton for example. All of us have been told at one time or another Isaac Newton discovered gravity when he was sitting under a tree and an apple fell and hit him in the head. It is said that Newton never said this and that it didn’t come out until 60 years later and that the person who said this was named John Conduitt. Some believe Conduitt added the part about the apple to the story to make it more memorable, but there was absolutely no proof for it.
We have all been told that there was 13 original colonies in the United States and our flag has 13 stripes representing them. Historians claim this is an error and as their proof they claim Delaware was never a separate colony and at different times it belonged to Maryland and Pennsylvania. It is said it eventually landed up under the control of Pennsylvania and remained a part of Pennsylvania until the Revolutionary war and was not even called Delaware. It was known as “The Three Lower Counties.”
Sometimes you just can’t believe everything you hear, even when it is taught to you in school.
