Browsing: Misconceptions

A Brief History On September 11, 1297, Scottish forces led by William “Braveheart” Wallace defeated the English at Stirling Bridge.  Amazingly, in the 1995 Mel Gibson movie, the battle of Stirling Bridge is depicted without a bridge!  Hollywood movies regularly get history wrong, and here 10 such movies containing inaccuracies are listed.  Digging Deeper 10. One million Years B.C., 1967. A remake of a 1940 film, this one stars Raquel Welch (the leading sex symbol of the time) as a member of remarkably modern-looking cave people who interact with dinosaurs, although these died out at least 60 million years before cavemen actually…

A Brief History On September 10, 1939, with its torpedoing of its own submarine, the HMS Oxley, the British Royal Navy proved quite early in World War II that there is such as thing as “friendly fire.”  Digging Deeper In the military they play around with the words and say that “there is no such thing as friendly fire,” meaning that no fire is friendly, however, the true definition of “friendly fire” is the unintentional harming of one’s own troops or allied troops, basically one’s “friends.”  Bullets, rockets, bombs and torpedoes will kill your own people just as fast as they will kill the enemy, and sometimes…

A Brief History On September 6, 1620, the Mayflower sailed from Plymouth, England, headed for the “New World” in America.  Many Americans are under the false impression that these were the first white settlers of North America, but this belief is historically incorrect!  The Pilgrims are often treated as the real founding fathers of the United States, despite the fact that Spanish explorers and some settlers had arrived one hundred years before them and in complete disregard of the Native Americans who had already been there for at least 10,000 years.  Even the English first settled Jamestown, Virginia more than a decade earlier.  Although historians usually know what…

A Brief History On August 12th, 30 B.C., after the naval defeat of her and Mark Antony’s forces against those of Octavian, and in fear of the public humiliation of being dragged through Rome in chains, Cleopatra committed suicide by snake bite.  Cleopatra VII, last Ptolemaic Queen of Egypt, is one of the most written-about women in history, and she has been portrayed in numerous movies. Because she captivated and beguiled two of the most powerful men in the Roman world, it has long been assumed that she possessed beauty of epic proportions. Archaeological finds, however, indicate that this may…

A Brief History On August 9, 1945, a Boeing B-29 bomber named “Bockscar” dropped the second atomic bomb on Japan, incinerating 39,000 people within seconds.  In the following weeks, thousands more would die from exposure and their injuries, and more would keep dying from radiation-related illnesses for years to come.  The Japanese quickly surrendered after this second nuclear attack, but the question of whether or not this bomb was necessary still haunts Americans to this day. Digging Deeper “Bockscar” was part of a special B-29 unit specially trained for dropping atomic bombs.  The bombers were modified B-29s that had their bomb…