Browsing: Misconceptions

A Brief History On October 26, 1881, Tombstone, Arizona was the site of what became known as “The Gunfight at the O.K. Corral,” probably the most famous shootout in the history of the Wild West.  Plenty of movies have been made about the incident, including one in 1957 by that same name, all of which got various aspects of the incident wrong.  Like most depictions of the gunfight, the 1957 film shows a long-ranged massive shootout whereas the real incident featured fewer guns, fewer shots and a much closer range in a fight that lasted perhaps 30 seconds.  Unlike the depiction…

A Brief History On September 22, 1692, eight people convicted of witchcraft during the Salem Witch Trials were executed by hanging.  The trials took place between February 1692 and May 1693 and resulted in the execution of twenty people, most of them women.  Contrary to the common belief that witches were typically burned, most of those condemned in Salem and the surrounding areas died by hanging. Digging Deeper As in our previous article on 10 Things History Got Wrong about Women, this article explores 10 more common misconceptions involving women in history.  These misconceptions may be due to legend, malicious gossip,…

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…