History Would Be Great If Were True

We rely on a historical record in order to have a sense of what has happened in the past, and we sometimes use this information in order to help us frame the future. However, the scary thing is the possibility that very little of what we learned in history class is true, as evidenced by the fact that it is constantly being changed.

There is also a lot of myth mixed in with what we think of as history. Much of it was probably inserted into the historical record for political purposes, although others may have been accidental or simply stories made up to fill gaps in what is actually known.

Today, this occurs even more quickly than in the past. We have historians correcting the record, and then we have other historians correcting the corrected record, and so on.

In school, I learned that Magellan circumnavigated the globe. Later, I learned (if it is true) that this wasn't even what he set out to do. Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese captain, set out in 1519 with five ships to determine a safe route to the Spice Islands. His three-year tour didn't go so well. He faced storms, mutiny, starvation, and war, and was finally killed by islanders in the Philippines. Most of his ships were burned and left behind, his crews captured, and only one ship managed to make it into a Spanish harbor, with only about twenty of the crew members he set out with.

Betsy Ross may not have designed the American flag. George Washington probably didn't visit her upholstery shop in June of 1776 with a rough sketch and a request for her to execute the design of the first U.S. flag. The first known telling of this story was in 1870 when William J. Canby told the story at a meeting of the Pennsylvania Historical Society. What makes this suspicious is that William Canby was Betsy Ross's grandson. It is possible that this was a story that was told to him by his grandmother, and it could possibly be true, but it wasn't known until then. Betsy Ross did sew uniforms and flags for the Continental Army, but there is no record of an approved US flag earlier than 1777. Some historians claim this story was made popular because Philadelphia was preparing for its centennial celebration in 1870, and the story matched the patriotic mood of the city.

Sad to say, it is not likely that Catherine the Great, the Empress of Russia, was crushed to death while having sex with a horse. She may have had her lovers, but they were probably all human. Apparently, she died boringly in bed, and she wasn't sharing her bed with a horse. This story was the result of an 18th-century smear campaign by the French soon after Catherine's death.

 

Marie Antoinette probably didn't say, "Let them eat cake."

As the story goes, France was going through an economic depression in 1789, and bread was scarce. A crowd of poor French women marched on Versailles to plead with Louis XVI. While the angry mob gave Louis a piece of their mind, Marie Antoinette supposedly said, "If they have no bread, let them eat cake."

Taken in context, what Marie would have meant was that, at the time, when bakers ran out of cheap bread, they were required by law to sell their better bread at the price of the cheaper bread. One type of expensive bread was brioche, which is often translated as "cake."

However, she didn't say it anyhow. The writer, Jean Jaques Rousseau, wrote in his book, Confessions, "I remembered the thoughtless saying of a great princess, who on being informed that the country people had no bread, replied, 'Then let them eat cake.'"

The "great princess" couldn't have been Marie Antoinette because Confessions was published twenty-three years before Marie was supposed to have said that. Probably, the rumor was started by anti-royalists.

 

I am sure that much of that will be incorporated into history. We've all read the stuff about the number of historians who, before he had served even a year of his term, have stated that Trump would go down in history as the worst American president ever. Although this was clearly a partisan political position, how many of these people will be contributing, if not to the history books, to the history that students will be learning in class?

On controversial issues, we're already seeing a rewriting of history, with the clear intent of making history support current political positions, such as gun control.

 

The US Pledge of Allegiance was written by a devout socialist, Francis Bellamy, a Baptist pastor who once delivered a sermon entitled, "Jesus Was a Socialist." He was a Christian socialist, and a cousin of Edward Bellamy, a socialist utopian novelist. The Pledge was originally a poem, that first appeared in a children's magazine in 1892, where it was used to sell flags to public schools as a way of boosting the magazine's circulation.

By the way, the original hand instructions for the Pledge called for the right hand to be removed from the heart upon the mention of the word "flag" and extended outward toward the flag. They quit doing this during World War II for reasons that might be obvious.

 

Lizzie Borden took an axe
And gave her mother forty whacks
And when she saw what she had done
She gave her father forty-one.

First of all, it was Lizzie's stepmother who was the victim here, and she only received eighteen whacks from the axe. Her father received only eleven. Although Lizzie Borden was accused of the murders, she was acquitted.

 

Manuel Elizalde, Jr., a Philippine government minister, announced to the world in 1971 that he had discovered a Stone Age tribe that had had no contact with the outside world. Known as the Tasadays, the tribe lived in caves, wore leaves for clothing, used stone tools, and didn't have a word for "enemy." The tribe was featured on the cover of National Geographic and received international attention.

When scientists started asking questions, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos declared the tribe off-limits. In 1986, after Marcos was deposed, a Swiss anthropologist and a group of journalists searched for the Tasaday tribe and found members of a local tribe who said they had pretended to be a Stone Age tribe at Elizalde's instructions. However, in another interview, two Tasaday members said they had also been bribed by journalists with cigarettes, candy, and other things if they would say what the journalists told them to.

 

It's hard to know which parts, though.

For most of us, I think, history is what we learned in school during history class, or social studies, or whatever they call it now, or what we may have read in various historical texts. For every significant fact, there is likely to be an alternative fact that is also published and taught.

I don't even mean to imply that what I state here as truth is actually true, because it is very hard to tell. Many issues have been so politicized that each side has a stake in rewriting history so that it might seem to support their side of it. Although liberals have been pretty much in control of our history in this country in past decades, I think it's fair to say that both sides are participating in the deception. I am sure that such people exist but, for the most part, we don't have historians who are interested in telling our story objectively, and solely for the purpose of preserving the record, just as we don't have scientists who participate in pure science, if there is such a thing. Everything is divided into sides and factions, and everyone is engaged in bolstering their side. As I mentioned before, when X number (I forget the number) of historians feel the need to come forward with the statement that Trump will go down in history as the worst American president ever, and to do this a year or less into his first term, is there any reason to think we're going to get an accurate telling of history from these people?

 

This occurs in medicine and medical research too. Whenever the results of a study are published showing a possible breakthrough in cancer research, or some other disease or disorder, the newspapers and television news shows will report this as if it's only a matter of the time it will take to get it on the market. Most often, subsequent studies yield different results or, for whatever reason, it doesn't really pan out the way the initial study suggested it might.

 

About a decade or so ago, my wife and I published a newspaper that was distributed throughout most of Maine. During that time, I looked into the text that was used as the guideline for the teaching of social studies and history of the United States. I am drawing a blank on the title right now, but it was some patriotic-sounding phrase. This was the book that other books had to conform to in order to be accepted into the curriculum of most schools.

I ordered copies of the student and teacher's editions for elementary, junior high school, and high school. Although I am sure they've been replaced by another text, or at least another edition by now, I have them in my library. In the section on the Amendments to our Constitution, the amendments were not covered in order, as they are in the actual document (1st Amendment, 2nd Amendment, and so on), probably because they didn't want students to notice that the 2nd Amendment (the right to bear arms) wasn't mentioned at all in the elementary and junior high school texts. In the high school text, it was framed in such a way as to imply that the signers felt that it was necessary, at that time, for people to own a weapon, suggesting that this is no longer the case. In the teacher's edition, it gave the talking points, in the event that an elementary or junior high school student might ask what happened to the 2nd Amendment, that much of the country was still wild at that time, and law enforcement was not available everywhere, and people needed to hunt in order to eat, so that it was believed at that time that people did have a reason to own a weapon, but that was no longer the case today.

In other matters, the US history text downplayed the roles of white people who were involved in founding the country, exaggerated the negatives, and may have inflated the roles played by blacks, women, and Muslims, and clearly took sides on several issues, such as the roles of labor unions, communists, etc.

Today, I understand that they are suggesting that the teaching of history begin after the Civil War, so that it would be more relevant to students today. While this surely has political implications, which were probably at the forefront in making the decision, there are some good arguments for it. When I was in school, every year that US history was taught, we covered the colonial era, the Revolutionary War, glossed over the War of 1812 (probably because we lost, and weren't the good guys, in any case), spent a long time on the Civil War, and by then the year was almost up, so we would hurriedly skim through the rest of history, with some focus on World Wars One and Two.

Added later, the text referred to above is entitled, "We the People."

 

There probably was no William Tell, and he probably didn't shoot an apple off of his son's head.

 

The role of Paul Revere was greatly exaggerated in American tradition, once taught as history. Of course, he did play a role, but his name is known to everyone mostly because "Revere" rhymes with "hear" and "year" in the poem written by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in 1861.

Listen, my children, and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere.
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-Five;
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.

Wadsworth's poem was treated as history for about a century. It appeared in textbooks and historians referred to it. However, Wadsworth used a poet's license to make a lot of stuff up. He got the lantern signals mixed up and had Revere riding all the way to Concord, although he never made it that far. Worse, he neglected to mention the other forty or so messengers, who played as much of a part in it as Revere. We know of Paul Revere because his name rhymed a lot better than "Dawes" or "Prescott."

On the night of April 18, 1775, Revere and William Dawes were told to ride from Boston to Lexington to warn John Hancock and Samuel Adams that British troops were on their way to arrest them and to confiscate weapons that were being stored in Concord. Revere and Dawes both made it to Lexington, and they did warn other patriots along the way, although it's unlikely that Revere yelled, "The British are coming," as that would have alerted British patrols that were in the areas they were riding through.

On the way to Concord, Revere was captured, while Dawes and Samuel Prescott, who had joined them on the ride, were not. Only Prescott made it to Concord in time to alert the militia there.

As many as forty other messengers were sent to various places along the way to give the same warning.

Revere wasn't known as the great hero of the midnight ride until Wadsworth wrote his poem, about forty years after Revere's death. Revere's obituary didn't even mention it.