12 Stories From History People Keep Getting Wrong

The term “Middle Ages” likely doesn't conjure up images of clean, well-groomed people. Instead, it typically brings to mind people with filth-smeared faces and fingernails caked with dirt. While it's true that medieval Europeans didn't subscribe to germ theory or have access to antibiotics, they were not as unclean as Hollywood would lead us to believe. People in the Middle Ages practiced basic hygiene. Historian Eleanor Janega put it in these terms: In fact, the Middle Ages subscribed heartily to the adage “cleanliness is next to godliness.” Thinkers of the period considered physical beauty to represent spiritual purity, and they looked at hygiene the same way: If one's body was impure, it would by definition be unattractive and out of harmony. If it had any imperfections, one would best address them through cleansing. Bathing was a common occurrence. Although private baths may have been out of reach for most people, public baths provided a way for urban dwellers to keep clean. Even if people did not take a daily bath, they at least cleaned their face and teeth regularly and washed their hands before meals.

In February 1992 in Albuquerque, NM, a piping hot cup of McDonald's coffee spilled on the legs of 79-year-old Stella Liebeck, who went on to sue McDonald's and win $2.9 million in damages. The case Liebeck v. McDonald's is often regarded as a frivolous lawsuit, one in which consumers go to extreme lengths to squeeze money out of corporations. But that wasn't what it was about at all. For starters, Liebeck suffered significant injuries. This was unsafely hot coffee - served at 190 degrees Fahrenheit - and her resulting third-degree burns sent her to the hospital for eight days. Despite these health issues, she was initially modest in her demands. According to legal scholar Barry Levenson: Stella never really wanted to sue McDonald's, at least at the beginning. Without any lawyers, she wrote to McDonald's and asked only for her out-of-pocket expenses and the lost wages of her daughter who had to stay home with her. Twenty thousand dollars - and an assurance that McDonald's would turn down the temperature of its coffee - would have staved off the lawsuit. McDonald's offered $800. When the case went to trial, the jury sided with Liebeck, awarding her significantly more than her original ask. Unfortunately, damage to her public reputation was already done. McDonald's lawyers orchestrated a disrespectful PR campaign to discredit Liebeck's suit and position it as an example of consumer overreach and greed.

One of the deadliest pandemics in modern history began in 1918, when a virulent strain of influenza spread across the world, killing more than 50 million people globally. It was commonly referred to as the “Spanish flu." But there was nothing particularly Spanish about this virus. While no one knows for certain where it originated, some speculate it started on American soil. Wherever it began, outbreaks soon took hold during WWI and quickly spread among troops on the Western Front - and, from there, the world. Spain was one of the countries that sat out WWI. As a result, its press was not subject to the same censorship as the nations involved in the conflict. After all, governments at war understandably worried that reports of deadly flu outbreaks could impact morale. Consequently, Spanish newspapers freely reported on the outbreaks, and news of it trickled out from there. The flu became known as “Spanish” only because those were the newspapers reporting on it.

What elementary school student hasn't heard the story of the Pilgrims, the black-and-white clad English folk who journeyed across the Atlantic on the Mayflower in 1620 in search of religious freedom? According to this telling of history, English Separatists - radical Protestants who wanted to separate from the established Church of England, rather than purify it from within - turned to America as a refuge where they could practice their faith without fear of persecution. It is true that the Pilgrims faced persecution in England. However, they didn't come to the New World specifically for religious freedom. They had already found religious freedom in the Netherlands. What they didn't find there, however, was solid employment and cultural cohesion. That, more than anything else, prompted them to turn their attention to North America. It's also important to note that these religious separatists didn't call themselves Pilgrims; they referred to themselves as “Saints.” They weren't the only ones on the Mayflower, however. Around two-thirds of the people on the ship were what the Saints called “Strangers,” or folks who did not practice their brand of Christianity. Many were skilled workers traveling to North America to help build a new colony. Others were simply crew members of the Mayflower. Ironically, while many of the Pilgrims experienced persecution in England, they did not tolerate religious dissent within their own community and often persecuted those who adopted alternative beliefs.

It's a trope Hollywood loves to repeat: Someone steps into a corset for the first time, and the overly restrictive laces squeeze all the air from their lungs. The wearer can barely move, and might even faint. For centuries, corsets shaped women's figures. Made from materials including whalebone and steel, stays and corsets were fixtures of women's fashion in European society from the 16th to the early 20th centuries. Were these garments torturously tight? The majority of women - even working-class ones who performed physical labor - did not overly tighten their corsets, and could move about their day without fainting or suffering. At the same time, corsets became a flashpoint for medical and political concerns. Physicians did plenty of hand-wringing about the dangers the garb posed to women's health. Over-tightening corsets truly could reshape the rib cage and reduce lung capacity. But this seemed to have been the exception, not the rule. Indeed, some companies manufactured and promoted comfortable corsets. By the end of the 19th century, a new women's movement was gaining traction, and corsets came to represent a woman's limited place in society. Reformers campaigned to end the use of the garments.

“The British are coming! The British are coming!” Early American patriot Paul Revere shouted these famous words as he raced from town to town during his midnight ride in April 1775, right? Alas, he did not. Revere's midnight ride really did happen, though. As a revolutionary, he was involved with protest and intelligence networks that sought to challenge British authority in the North American colonies. In April 1775, British regular troops were on the move, and Revere had the job of alerting fellow patriots to their movement. Because his mission was supposed to be under the radar, he did not shout the intelligence, and likely referred to the troops as “regulars.” Moreover, the communities he passed through were technically British, so saying “the British are coming” would not have made sense. The public owes its imagining of Revere's famous ride to 19th-century American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. In 1860, he published the poem “Paul Revere's Ride,” which ensured that the nearly forgotten Boston patriot would always be remembered.

Of all the many myths about American presidents, among the most ridiculous is that 27th President William Howard Taft was so large that he got stuck in his bathtub. There is no evidence this ever happened. Although he never got stuck in the bath, Taft reportedly enjoyed a good soak and built large bathtubs to accommodate his body - he was 6 feet tall and may have weighed more than 300 pounds during his presidency. He even had a tub that weighed a ton installed on a ship for his personal use.

On December 16, 1773, the Sons of Liberty - a group seeking an end to what they considered unfair taxes and rule by the British in North America - helped organize a protest in which dozens of men rushed into Boston Harbor and dumped 342 tea chests into the frigid waters. Why did those daring Bostonians do it? Contrary to popular belief, they weren't only protesting higher taxes. Several years earlier, Parliament's Townshend Acts taxed tea and provoked the ire of colonists. The taxes led to movements urging merchants not to import British goods. Some even took up smuggling and imported Dutch tea to the colonies. The more immediate cause of the Boston Tea Party was the Tea Act, which essentially gave the East India Company - a giant British corporation - a monopoly on tea in the colonies along with a tax break. This spelled trouble for tea smugglers, as the price of East India Company tea would be more affordable than tea that had been illegally imported. American merchants were livid at what they interpreted as an assault on their business. Why should the East India Company get a monopoly on tea? So, they took matters into their own hands in what became a legendary political act.

Bushranger Ned Kelly was an Australian outlaw turned folk hero. After graduating from stealing horses and cattle to robbing banks, he and his gang gained notoriety and soon became some of Australia's most wanted criminals in the late 1870s. Their crime spree sputtered to a spectacular halt in June 1880, when a police shoot-out ended in the gang's arrest. Kelly himself only survived because he donned an iron suit that deflected some of the bullets. He was sentenced to execution in November 1880. According to popular lore, Kelly mounted the gallows and uttered his final, wistful words: “Such is life.” In actuality, those may not have been his last words after all. None of the men physically close to Kelly at the time of his execution recorded hearing him man those words. Moreover, different journalists at the scene reported different things, suggesting they may have filled in the gaps at their own discretion.

It's a common misconception that when Europeans began to colonize North America, they discovered a pristine Eden that very few people inhabited. Because it was relatively empty and unspoiled, so their thinking went, the so-called New World was ripe for the taking. When Christopher Columbus made landfall in 1492 and kickstarted European colonization of the western hemisphere, the Americas had robust and diverse cultural regions inhabited by an estimated 60 million people - a number in the same ballpark as Europe's population in 1500. As historian Charles C. Mann told NPR: From southern Maine down to about the Carolinas, you would have seen pretty much the entire coastline lined with farms, cleared land, interior for many miles and densely populated villages generally rounded with wooden walls. And then in the Southeast, you would have seen these priestly chiefdoms, which were centered on these large mounds, thousands and thousands of them, which still exist. And then as you went further down, you would have come across what is often called the Aztec empire… that had one of the world's largest cities as its capital, Tenutchtitlan [sic], which is now Mexico City. Contact between Europeans and Americans irrevocably changed these worlds. As more European traders, fishermen, and traders of enslaved people trolled the Atlantic seaboard, they introduced illnesses that rapidly spread through Native communities, which had no immunity to them. Entire villages became ghost towns. On the coast alone, plagues killed roughly 90% of the people by the early 17th century. When the so-called Pilgrims arrived in what would become Massachusetts, they came upon the remains of an abandoned Wampanoag village that had once belonged to the Patuxet. There were cornfields around the village, which proved the previous inhabitants had tended to the land and farmed. Still, the colonizers understand that something tragic had happened on the site, as they often stumbled upon human bones and skulls, noting it was “a sad spectakle to behold.” What had happened to the Patuxet? The same thing that happened up and down the coast: disease had wiped everyone out. The English newcomers built their home, initially called Plimoth, on Patuxet land. The land that the Pilgrims encountered wasn't a coincidence - it was the result of more than 100 years of contact that brought devastating diseases to America's shores.

The Civil War remains one of the most significant events in American history. Historians have written academic tomes to mark every signpost on the road to war and parse every nuance that led to the clash between the federal government and rebel secessionists. Some history students distill these nuanced debates into digestible (if over-simplified) conclusions: states' rights, economic conditions, and a cultural clash between the North and South. But these arguments really boil down to the same thing: slavery. It was an economic system, and the question of slavery had long been treated as a states' rights issue. Slavery was also a social system that produced and symbolized cultural differences between the North and South. It's true that President Abraham Lincoln had a complicated relationship with abolitionism and that many soldiers enlisted in the Federal Army simply to preserve the Union, rather than to end slavery. But the simple fact remains that seceding states specifically cited slavery as a reason why they were leaving the Union. In December 1860, South Carolina became the first state to secede, announcing its rationale in its Declaration of Secession. The signatories made no bones about their reasons: [A]n increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution. […] A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common Government, because he has declared that that ‘Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free,’ and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction. As the saying goes, when someone tells you who they are, believe them. South Carolinians made it clear: They feared the institution of slavery was under threat, and that motivated their decision to secede. At the end of the day, slavery was central to the Civil War.

One stubbornly persistent myth that circulates on social media claims that Africans were not the only people forced into Atlantic slavery - Irish folks, so the claim goes, were enslaved too. Where did this myth come from? It appeared in the book To Hell or Barbados by Sean O'Callaghan - a journalist, not a historian - and his claim that Irish people were enslaved in the Caribbean is flat-out wrong. The Irish were never legally enslaved in the Caribbean; instead, they were indentured servants. Indentured servitude was one form of unfree labor in the Americas, in which immigrants, some of whom came from Ireland, were transported to the Americas and worked for a fixed term. Some indentured servants willingly entered into these contracts to gain passage to the New World. In other cases, the servitude was a form of punishment for convicts or political prisoners. It's important to remember that indentured servitude was not the same as slavery. The centuries-long Atlantic slave system remains one of the most horrific chapters in human history. Traders captured, enslaved, and transported more than 12 million Africans across the Atlantic to labor in violent and dehumanizing conditions in the Americas. By the end of the 17th century, this system was explicitly based on race. Indentured servants didn't expect to be indentured forever; when the term of their labor expired, they would be free to make their way in the world. For enslaved Africans, however, there was no exit point for themselves or their children - they could be born into slavery and would likely pass that way too. As historians Jerome S. Handler and Matthew C. Reilly explained, indentured servitude and African slavery were two distinct entities: The two labor systems in Barbados, servitude and slavery, were early recognized in the island's laws… and significant differences emerged in how European and African laborers were categorized and governed, in addition to how racial features were associated with laboring status. These laws provide clear evidence of the explicit distinctions between servants and slaves, regardless of how the laws were enforced in practice. The myth of Irish slaves isn't just a bit of mistaken history; it has become a damaging myth that hate groups have used to prop up their own agenda. As Alex Amend pointed out for the Southern Poverty Law Center, White supremacist groups embrace and spread the myth: Predictably, the revisionism has attracted Neo-Nazis, White Nationalists, Neo-Confederates, and even Holocaust deniers, while racist trolls have deployed the myth to attack the Black Lives Matter movement. More worrisome, though, is its widespread adoption by principally American Internet users as if it were a point of “Irish pride.” History professor Ciaran O'Neill agrees: “They want to create false equivalence between the Atlantic slave trade and the phenomenon of indentured Irish labour in the Caribbean.”