13 Accepted Notions Of History That Are Wrong

There's a fine line between history books and fairy tales.
13 Accepted Notions Of History That Are Wrong

The more time passes, the more stories become myths, especially if those stories are dramatic or horrifying. The more salacious the history, the more likely it gets spread as a real occurrence. These lies can happen in order to make things seem more interesting, make the current day seem less barbaric, or just because history was written by the winners and the losers get shortchanged in our history books.

Take the burning of Salem witches at the stake (didn't happen), or medieval people getting drunk on wine because they had no clean water (no more so than today). Those poor folk from the Middle Ages have gotten a bad rap thanks to tall tales posing as history. Still, it's good to know that Spartans didn't kill their sick infants by tossing them off a cliff.

So let's clear up some supposed facts about history that are just a bunch of made-up lies.

No, stock brokers didn't all jump to their deaths following the Wall Street crash of 1929 and there wasn't a suicide wave. BLACK THURSDAY! This was
No, Victorian physicians didn't use vibrators to treat female hysteria. GE5E This claim was first published in 1999 by a scholar through Johns Hopki
No, Vikings did not drink from the skulls Of their enemies. That was simply a mistranslation of a poem. This belief was derived from an Old Nordic poe
No, medieval executioners weren't all black-hooded brutes. First off, these weren't uneducated people. Executioners had a high literacy rate (uncommon
NO, Cleopatra probably didn't die of suicide-by-snake. The legend goes that Cleopatra deliberately held a snake to her breast and was then bitten and

Spartan Children

No, spartans didn't throw their sick newborn babies off a freaking cliff. This myth was easily debunked when they did an archaeological dig at the inf
NO, Iron Maidens weren't used as torture devices in medieval times. They didn't even exist at the time. It seems that this mythical device was made up
No, old-timey cartographers didn't draw dragons on maps. And those weird sea monster creatures were just symbols Of the unkown. We're just as disappoi
NO, people in the Dark Ages didn't think the Earth was flat. Not even then. The few examples of people who did voice their doubts (compared to the hun
NO, CHRISTIANS WEREN'T PERSECUTED EN MASSE FOR 2000 years FOLLOWING THE DEATH OF CHRIST. It is widely believed that the Romans targeted and murdered C
No, the one-handed flail was not a military weapon. It also didn't exist. A product of the imaginative minds of artists and later actually made by ima
NO, AMERICANS DIDN'T GO INTO A MASS FIGHT-OR-FLIGHTI PANIC WHEN THEY HEARD THE RADIO PLAY BROADCAST OF The War of the Worlds. You'd swear the US popul
NO, virgins weren't forced to wear chastity belts in medieval times. These belts didn't even exist except as a satirical joke. It's believed that the

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