Welcome back to our cozy corner of history. Settle in for Unbelievable Myths History Got Wrong (Part 2) of our journey into the most unbelievable myths history got wrong.
▶ Missed Part 1? Watch it here: https://youtu.be/a9Z0KjG2T4E
Tonight, we continue our calm bedtime story, unraveling even more false history facts to gently guide you toward deep rest. From the Emperor Nero who didn’t fiddle while Rome burned, to the truth about Napoleon’s height, and the surprisingly lawful Wild West — this relaxing story blends curiosity and history in the perfect mix to help you unwind.
This video is designed to help you fall asleep fast, reduce anxiety, or simply enjoy peaceful storytelling while learning. Think of it as a blend of a bedtime story and a whispered history lesson — calming, cozy, and just a little bit curious.
Chapters
00:00 Intro – Another Cozy Welcome
01:30 Myth #1: Gladiators Always Fought to the Death
05:50 Myth #2: Nero Fiddled While Rome Burned
10:10 Myth #3: Roman Vomitoriums
14:30 Myth #4: Spartans and Weak Babies
18:55 Myth #5: Vikings and Horned Helmets
23:15 Myth #6: The Iron Maiden
27:35 Myth #7: Medieval Life Expectancy
32:00 Myth #8: Right of the First Night
36:20 Myth #9: Lady Godiva’s Ride
40:40 Myth #10: Napoleon’s Height
45:00 Myth #11: Burning Witches in Salem
49:20 Myth #12: Pirates Burying Treasure
53:40 Myth #13: Cowboys and Stetson Hats
58:05 Myth #14: The Lawless Wild West
1:02:25 Myth #15: Betsy Ross and the Flag
1:06:45 Myth #16: Great Wall of China from Space
1:11:05 Myth #17: Van Gogh’s Ear
1:15:25 Myth #18: Einstein Failed Math
1:19:50 Myth #19: War of the Worlds Panic
1:24:10 Myth #20: Lemmings Mass Suicide
1:28:30 Closing Thoughts for Deep Sleep
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Think you really know history? In our last video,
we took a hammer to some of the most cherished stories from our past. We learned that the
pyramids were a feat of paid skilled engineering, not slave labor. That Cleopatra, the icon of
Egypt, was actually Greek, and that the idea of a flat earthbelieving middle ages was a fiction
invented to make a later age feel superior. The response was overwhelming and it confirmed a
powerful truth. History is not just a collection of facts. It’s a story. And like any story, it can
be twisted, embellished, weaponized, or just plain misremembered. But if you thought we emptied the
vault, you couldn’t be more wrong. We’ve barely scratched the surface. For every myth we busted,
there are a dozen more lurking in our textbooks, our movies, and our collective consciousness.
These are the tales that are so good, so dramatic, they simply feel like they should be true. Today,
we’re going deeper. This isn’t just a sequel. It’s a full-blown historical investigation. We’re
going to fulfill the promises we made last time and finally tackle the legends of the gladiators,
the Vikings, and Napoleon. But we’re not stopping there. We will journey from the heart of the
Roman Empire to the shores of the new world, from the castles of medieval Europe to the
battlefields of the modern era. We will explore not just what the truth is, but why the myths
were born in the first place. So get comfortable. We’re setting the record straight again, and this
time we’re leaving no stone unturned. The past is about to look a whole lot different again. We
begin our journey in the ancient world, an era of epic empires, legendary warriors, and larger than
life rulers. These are the stories that form the very bedrock of Western civilization, taught to
us as foundational truths. But the foundation is riddled with cracks, and the truth is often buried
under centuries of legend. Picture the coliseum in your mind. The roar of 80,000 spectators, the
blistering Roman sun beating down on the sand of the arena. Two warriors sculpted by years of
training, circle each other. One wields a net and trident, the other a short sword and shield.
The clash of steel echoes through the stadium. Finally, one man is disarmed and brought to
his knees. He raises a single finger, a plea for mercy. All eyes turned to the emperor’s box.
The crowd is screaming for blood. The emperor with a cold and passive face gives the iconic gesture,
“Thumbs down.” The victor hesitates for a moment, then plunges his sword into the defeated man’s
heart. This is the image of gladiatorial combat that Hollywood has sold us for decades. It’s a
vision of relentless carnage, a state sponsored death match where only one man could walk out
alive. It’s a powerful and brutal story and it’s largely a fantasy. The truth is gladiatorial
combat was first and foremost a business and the gladiators themselves were the star assets.
These men were some of the most highly trained and specialized athletes in the ancient world.
A promoter known as a Leninista would invest a fortune into his gladiators. They were housed
in special training schools called Ludy where they received extensive coaching, a high protein
diet, and the best medical care available in the Roman world. A top gladiator was an investment
equivalent to a modern-day Formula 1 driver or a champion racehorse. To have that investment
killed off every time he stepped into the arena would be a catastrophic business model. No Linista
would stay in business for long. Because of this, most fights were knocked to the death. They
were governed by a complex set of rules and were overseen by experienced referees known as
summeruds who could stop a fight to prevent a fatal injury. The goal was to put on a show to
display incredible skill or ours. A fight would often end when one combatant was wounded, the
first blood, or when one surrendered by raising his index finger. At this point, the fate of
the loser was typically decided by the editor, the sponsor of the games, who would take the
crowd’s mood into account. But sparing a skilled, crowd-favored gladiator was common practice.
He could live to fight another day, and the fans could see their hero again. Archaeological
evidence powerfully supports this. At a recently discovered gladiator cemetery in Ephesus, Turkey,
forensic analysis of the skeletons revealed that while the men had suffered horrific injuries
in the arena, many of their bones showed signs of healing. These weren’t men who fought once and
died, they were veterans who fought, were wounded, received medical attention, and recovered to fight
again. So, what about the death rate? While still a brutal profession, estimates from historical
records suggest that in the first century C, a gladiator had roughly a 9 in 10 chance of
surviving any given match. And that famous thumbs down gesture for death. It’s a complete
myth invented for the 19th century painting Pice Verso by Gene Leander, which then inspired the
movie Gladiator. The actual Roman gesture for death is believed to have been a thumb pointed
up like an unshathed sword while a closed fist policresso or compressed thumb likely signified
mercy sheathing the sword and sparing the man’s life. The spectacle was in the skill, the drama
and the suspense, not just the certainty of death. It is perhaps the ultimate image of a depraved
and incompetent ruler. The year is 64C. Rome, the magnificent heart of the world’s greatest
empire, is being consumed by a sea of fire. For six days and seven nights, the flames rage,
leaping from wooden tenementss to opulent temples, turning entire districts into ash. And where
is the emperor during this catastrophe? The story we all know is that he was perched
safely on his palace balcony, not in despair, but with a liar in hand or a fiddle as the myth
evolved, composing a song about the fall of Troy, using the destruction of his own city as a twisted
artistic inspiration. This image of Emperor Nero, the artist tyrant, gleefully performing as
his people suffered, has cemented his legacy as one of history’s greatest monsters. It’s a
story of staggering narcissism and cruelty. It is also a masterful piece of political character
assassination crafted by his enemies to destroy his reputation for all time. To understand the
myth, we first have to understand the man and the city. Rome in 64 C was a tinderbox. A bustling,
overcrowded metropolis of over a million people. Its narrow, winding streets were packed with
multi-story wooden apartment blocks. Fires were a constant and terrifying feature of Roman
life. When this particular fire broke out in the merchant area surrounding the Circus Maximus, it
spread with terrifying speed. Now, where was Nero? He wasn’t on a balcony in Rome. The historical
accounts, even those written by his critics like the historian Tacitus, place him at his seaside
villa in Antium, about 35 mi away when the fire began. When word of the disaster reached him, he
didn’t stay to compose poetry. He raced back to the capital and immediately took charge of the
relief efforts. His actions upon returning were not those of a man. He opened his private gardens
and public buildings like the Pantheon to shelter the tens of thousands of people left homeless.
He constructed temporary housing and ordered food supplies to be brought in from neighboring
ports, even lowering the price of grain to prevent starvation. These are the documented actions of
a leader responding to a crisis. So, how did this story of a fiddling uncaring emperor come to be?
The answer lies in politics and propaganda. Nero was deeply unpopular with Rome’s old money elite,
the senatorial class. He was a populist who loved the arts, acting, singing, and poetry, which the
stoic traditional aristocracy viewed as scandalous and deeply unroman. The historians who wrote
the definitive accounts of his reign, Tacitus and Swatonius, were members of this very class,
and they wrote their histories decades after Nero was dead and gone, recording every hostile rumor
they could find. Their propaganda was given a huge boost by what Nero did after the fire. On the vast
swats of land that had been cleared by the flames, he began construction on a new impossibly grand
palace, the doisora or golden house. It was an act of staggering extravagance. For his enemies, this
was the smoking gun. They crafted a new narrative. Nero must have started the fire himself,
intentionally destroying the city just to make room for his personal pleasure palace. The story
of him fiddling was the perfect slanderous detail to seal this image of a monstrous artist who would
burn the world for his art. The truth is, while Nero was certainly a brutal and autocratic ruler
in many ways, the enduring myth of him playing an instrument while his city burned is a powerful
lie born from a combination of political hatred and a timeless lesson. Never let a good crisis
go to waste. Let’s remain in the Roman world, but move from the bloody sand of the arena to the
decadent luxury of a noble’s banquet. The scene is one of almost unimaginable excess. Reclining
on couches, the Roman elite are presented with an endless parade of exotic dishes, roasted peacocks,
flamingo tongues, dormis stuffed with honey and nuts. The wine mixed with spices flows freely,
but the human stomach has its limits. What happens when a wealthy Roman is too full to continue?
But the feast has another dozen courses to go. The story we’ve all heard is that they had a
simple, if disgusting, solution. They would excuse themselves and head to a special room,
the vomitorium, where they would intentionally purge the contents of their stomach to make room
for more. It’s an image that perfectly captures the stereotype of Roman gluttony and decay.
It’s a fantastic story, a memorable detail, and it’s based on a complete misunderstanding of
a single Latin word. A vomitorium was not a room for vomiting. It was a crucial and brilliant piece
of architectural engineering. The name comes from the Latin verb vomra which means to spew forth
or to discharge but it had nothing to do with the stomach. A vomitorium was a wide passageway in a
large public venue like a theater or most famously the coliseum through which the massive crowds were
spewed forth into the streets after a spectacle. Think about the logistics of the coliseum. It
could hold between 50,000 and 80,000 spectators. Without an efficient way to get everyone in
and out, it would be a chaotic and dangerous nightmare. The Roman architects designed a system
of 76 public entrances and exits, the vomia, that allowed the entire crowd to exit the building
in a matter of minutes. It was a marvel of crowd control and public safety, a design so effective
that its basic principles are still used in the construction of modern stadiums today. So, how
did this architectural term become associated with purging at parties? The myth is a cocktail of two
ingredients. A grain of truth about Roman excess and a later linguistic mixup. Roman writers,
especially satists like Senica and Petronius, did indeed write scathingly about the gluttonous
habits of the super rich. They described lavish banquetss where hosts would spend a fortune on
a single meal and where some guests would indeed eat to the point of sickness. This was real, but
it was seen as shameful and grotesque behavior characteristic of a tiny morally corrupt sliver of
the elite, not a common or accepted practice. The term vomitorium in its architectural sense was
popularized by a writer named Macrobius in the fifth century. The connection to purging seems to
have been made much much later likely in the 18th or 19th centuries when writers rediscovered these
classical texts. They read the satirical accounts of gluttony. They saw this architectural term that
sounded too perfect to be a coincidence and they conflated the two creating a myth that has been
stubbornly lodged in our popular culture ever since. The Romans gave us many things. aqueducts,
roads, laws, but a designated room for throwing up at a dinner party was not one of them. Of all
the societies of the ancient world, none captures the imagination quite like Sparta. They were a
people who elevated warfare to a state religion, a society that valued discipline, sacrifice, and
the strength of the collective above all else. From the brutal training of the AOG that
began in childhood to the legendary last stand at thermopoly, the Spartan name has
become a byword for unyielding toughness. And at the very heart of this legend is
a story of unimaginable ruthlessness, a practice that supposedly forged their warrior
society from the moment of birth. The story is as simple as it is chilling. When a Spartan child
was born, it was not presented to its parents, but to a council of elders. These elders would
inspect the infant for any sign of physical imperfection, weakness, or deformity. If the
child was deemed fit and strong, it was returned to its family to be raised. But if it failed
this brutal inspection, its fate was sealed. The elders would order the baby to be taken to a
deep chasm at the foot of Mount Tattoos, a place known as the apothei or the deposits, and casted
into the darkness to die. This state sanctioned infanticide, we are told, was the cornerstone of
Spartan eugenics, the ultimate expression of their belief that only the strong deserve to live.
This powerful and disturbing image comes to us almost entirely from one source. The Greek writer
Plutarch in his life of Lyerus. But here is the crucial context. Plutarch was writing in the late
1st and early 2nd century C. A Greek intellectual living under Roman rule. He was describing Spartan
customs that were already ancient history. Writing over 700 years after the events he was describing.
He was a biographer and a moral philosopher, not a modern historian. And he often used the
Spartans as a romanticized example of virtue and discipline to critique the perceived softness
of his own time. His account was never meant to be a literal journalistic report. For centuries,
his story was taken as fact. But in the modern era, archaeologists decided to investigate. They
began a systematic excavation of the chasm at the apothei, the very spot where thousands of infants
were supposedly thrown. What they found was stunning. They did find human remains, but they
did not belong to newborns. The skeletal remains recovered from the chasm were exclusively those
of adolescents and adults, ranging in age from 18 to 35. The evidence strongly suggests that the
apothei was not a place for disposing of infants, but rather a pit of execution for criminals,
traitors, and prisoners of war, a grim practice, but a very different one. So, what is the truth?
Did the Spartans cherish all their children? Almost certainly not. The reality is likely a
version of a practice that was tragically common throughout the ancient world, infant exposure.
A baby that was unwanted, whether for perceived weakness, an illman, or simply because the family
couldn’t afford to raise it, would be abandoned and left to the elements. The key difference
in Sparta was that this decision was likely not left to the father, as it was in Athens, but
was made by the state, the council of elders. An infant deemed unfit was probably exposed,
but not in a dramatic ritualistic cliff tossing ceremony. The myth of the cliff persists
because it is a perfect, if horrifying, metaphor. It encapsulates everything we think we
know about Sparta, their obsession with physical perfection, their subordination of the individual
to the state, and their absolute ruthlessness. It’s a far more dramatic and memorable story than
the more mundane, though still tragic reality. The legend of the apothei is a powerful piece of
historical branding, but the evidence tells us it is a legend, not a literal truth. We now leave the
crumbling marble of the ancient world and enter the era that has arguably suffered more historical
slander than any other, the Middle Ages. The very name we use for it, coined by Renaissance thinkers
who saw it as a long barbaric gap between their time and the glories of Rome, paints a picture
of a thousand years of ignorance, superstition, and brutality. We imagine a world of constant
warfare where science and learning vanished and life for the common person was nothing but mud,
misery, and oppression. But the greatest myth of all is that the era was ever truly dark. This was
the age that saw the birth of the university, the construction of the great cathedrals, incredible
innovations in agriculture and engineering, and the preservation of classical knowledge and
monasteries across the continent. It was a complex and dynamic period, and the cartoonish stories we
tell about it often hide a much more fascinating and illuminated reality. Our first myth from this
era is perhaps the most iconic piece of historical costumeuming ever conceived. Ask anyone from a
child to a history professor to draw a Viking and the result will be almost universal. They will
draw a large bearded fearsome warrior perhaps holding an axe and on his head they will place a
helmet adorned with two magnificent curving horns. This image is the absolute quintessential
symbol of the Viking age. It’s in our movies, our comic books, our fantasy novels, and it’s the
proud logo of the Minnesota Vikings football team. It is so deeply embedded in our culture that
it feels like an unshakable historical fact. Yet, there is not a single shred of archaeological
or historical evidence to suggest that Viking warriors ever wore horned helmets in battle. Let’s
start with the archaeology. Over the last century and a half, thousands of Viking graves have been
excavated across Scandinavia and the British Isles. We have found their swords, their axes,
their shields, and their jewelry. We have even found their helmets. The most famous example,
the German helmet discovered in a chieftain’s grave in Norway, is a simple, practical iron cap
with a spectacle-like guard around the eyes and nose. Other fragments and depictions show similar
designs, simple rounded or conicle spansen helm style caps designed to deflect blows effectively.
None of them have horns. Now, let’s think about it from a practical tactical perspective. A
horned helmet would be a catastrophic liability in the chaos of a shield wall. The horns
would serve no defensive purpose. Instead, they would act as perfect handles for an enemy to
grab and control your head. Or worse, they could catch the blow of a sword or an axe, preventing
it from glancing off and instead transferring the full neck snapping force of the impact directly to
the wearer. It is, in short, a suicidal piece of headwear for a warrior. So, if the Vikings didn’t
wear them, where did this incredibly persistent myth come from? The story begins not in the 9th
century, but in the 19th. The 1800s saw a huge surge of romantic nationalism across Europe and
artists and writers in Scandinavia and Germany became fascinated with their ancient Norse and
Germanic past. They began to paint epic dramatic scenes from the sagas and myths. In 1876, this
romantic vision reached its peak with the premiere of Richard Wagner’s monumental opera cycle during
Deniblangan. The costume designer for the opera, Carl Emil Dopler, created dramatic costumes
for his Norse characters. And for the villains, he designed intimidating helmets with horns. The
image was an instant sensation. It was powerful, theatrical, and visually unforgettable. It
perfectly captured the 19th century idea of the noble savage or the barbarian warrior.
The image spread like wildfire through popular illustrations, advertisements, and books, and
within a generation, the fictional opera costume had completely replaced the historical reality
in the public imagination. The horned helmet is a testament not to Viking culture, but to the power
of 19th century romanticism and the enduring magic of the theater. If the horned helmet is the most
famous symbol of the medieval warrior, then our next myth is the most infamous symbol of medieval
justice. It is a device that seems born from the darkest corners of the human imagination, a
machine of almost unparalleled cruelty. We are, of course, talking about the Iron Maiden. The image
is seared into our minds from horror movies and museum displays. A tall human-shaped iron cabinet,
often with a serene, motherly face sculpted on the front, stands waiting. The doors swing open to
reveal a horrifying interior lined with long, sharp iron spikes. The victim, a heretic or a
traitor, is forced inside. The heavy doors are slowly closed, and the spikes are strategically
placed not to kill instantly, but to puncture the body in numerous places. the arms, the legs,
the torso, the eyes, ensuring a slow, agonizing and terrifying death as the victim bleeds out in
the suffocating darkness. It is presented as the ultimate expression of medieval sadism, a perfect
symbol for the barbarity of the dark ages. It is a truly horrifying invention. And it has one
fundamental problem. It’s a complete fake. The Iron Maiden is not a medieval torture device.
It is a historical hoax, a Macob fantasy created centuries later to satisfy a morbid fascination
with a past that never existed. If you search the vast historical records of the Middle Ages, the
court documents, the legal codes, the chronicles, the personal letters, you will find no mention
of an Iron Maiden. Not one. For a device so spectacular and so terrifying, its complete
absence from the historical record is deafening. Medieval torture was certainly real and brutal,
but it was generally simpler, employing devices like the rack, the thumb screw, or the wheel. The
complex, mechanically sophisticated Iron Maiden is nowhere to be found. So where did it come from?
The story of the iron maiden begins not in the 14th or 15th century but at the end of the 18th
century during the age of enlightenment. In 1793 a German philosopher and archaeologist named Johan
Philip Cenkeis wrote a sensationalist story about a supposed execution that took place in Nuremberg
in the year 1515. He described in lurid detail a coin forger being killed inside an iron cabinet
with internal spikes. This was not a historical account. It was a piece of creative fiction,
a ghost story meant to shock and entertain his readers. But his story planted a seed. In the
early 19th century, as tourism began to flourish, museums and private collectors sought out
macob artifacts to attract visitors. The most famous example, the Iron Maiden of Nuremberg,
which became the blueprint for all others, was constructed around 1802. It was likely pieced
together from various unrelated objects. The body was probably an authentic medieval shame cloak,
a barrel-like device used for public humiliation, not torture, and the spikes and elaborate
head were added later to match CBenkees’s fictional description. It was a brilliant piece of
showmanship, a historical Frankenstein created to be a sensational tourist trap. The myth was so
successful because it perfectly confirmed what people of the 19th century wanted to believe
about the Middle Ages that it was a primitive, superstitious, and monstrously cruel time
from which they, the enlightened moderns, had thankfully escaped. The Iron Maiden tells us
nothing about the reality of medieval justice, but it tells us everything about the morbid
imagination and historical biases of the Victorian era. It is a ghost story that managed to convince
the world it was real. Let’s move away from the dungeons and battlefields and talk about the
everyday life of a person in the Middle Ages. If you were to ask a simple question, how long
did they live? The answer you most likely get is a grim one. The average life expectancy
was only about 30 years old. This single statistic paints a bleak and powerful picture. It
suggests a world where life was brutally short, where everyone was considered old by their mid20s
and where reaching the age of 40 was a remarkable achievement. We imagine a society populated almost
entirely by the very young. a world without the wisdom and experience of its elders. This image of
a fleeting, truncated lifespan is one of the most fundamental ways we misunderstand the medieval
world. The statistic isn’t a lie, but it is profoundly misleading and the truth it hides is
far more nuanced and interesting. The problem lies in the word average. That low number of 30 to 35
years is so skewed by one tragic and overwhelming factor. Incredibly high infant and child
mortality. In a world without modern sanitation, without antibiotics, and with a limited
understanding of germ theory, childhood was the most dangerous time of life. Diseases that we
now consider minor, like strep throat or diarrhea, could be a death sentence for a baby or a toddler.
malnutrition, accidents, and the immense dangers of childirth for both mother and child meant that
a staggering number of people never even made it to their fth birthday. Some estimates suggest
that as many as one in three or even one in two children died before reaching adulthood. When you
factor all of those tragic early deaths into the mathematical average, the overall number plummets.
It creates a statistical illusion. The key to understanding medieval life is not the average
at birth, but the life expectancy of someone who survived the gauntlet of childhood. If a
medieval person, whether a peasant or a nobleman, managed to survive the diseases and dangers of
their early years and reached the age of 21, their prospects for a long life changed dramatically. A
man who reached adulthood could reasonably expect to live into his 50s or early 60s. A woman who
survived her childbearing years had a similar life expectancy. And living well beyond that was
by no means a rarity. You only need to look at the historical record. We have countless examples of
prominent figures living what we would consider a full life. The famous medieval philosopher and
theologian Thomas Aquinus lived to be 49. The formidable Queen Eleanor of Aquitane lived to the
ripe old age of 82. The English King Edward III reigned for 50 years and died at 64. And these are
not just isolated cases among the well-fed elite. Parish records and archaeological evidence from
peasant cemeteries show that a significant portion of the working population who survived childhood
lived into their 50s and 60s. The medieval world was not a world without old people. It was
a world where becoming old was a hard one privilege. It was a society that tragically lost
a huge portion of its population before they had a chance to grow. But for those who did, the reward
was a lifespan not dramatically shorter than that of many people in the early 20th century. The myth
of the 30-year lifespan makes us see the past as a foreign country of fleeting lives when in reality
the fundamental human experience of growing up, growing old, and gathering wisdom was very much
the same. Of all the myths that paint the middle ages as a time of brutal oppression, few are as
powerful or as personal as the droid duenior or the right of the lord. The concept is as simple
as it is monstrous and it has been immortalized in countless books and movies most famously in the
film Braveheart. The story goes like this. Under the feudal system, a local lord held absolute
power over the surfs who lived and worked on his land. This power was so total that it extended
into the most intimate moments of their lives. When a young peasant couple got married, the
Lord had the legal right to take the place of the husband on the wedding night, sleeping
with the new bride before her marriage could be consummated. This alleged practice is presented
as the ultimate symbol of aristocratic tyranny and the complete dehumanization of the common people.
It’s a story of institutionalized sexual assault, a perfect encapsulation of the phrase power
corrupts absolutely. It is a truly vile and disgusting concept. And for that we should be
thankful that it is a complete and utter myth. There is not a single shred of credible verifiable
evidence that the droid du senior ever existed as a legally recognized right in medieval Europe.
For centuries, historians and legal scholars have scoured the vast archives of the medieval
period. They have examined feudal law codes, court records, land charters, and personal
correspondence from across the continent, and they have found nothing. There is no law on the books.
There is no record of a court case where a peasant sued his lord for exercising this right or where
a lord was punished for failing to do so. For a practice so widespread and so fundamental to the
feudal system as the myth suggests its complete and total absence from the historical and legal
record is the most powerful evidence against it. So if it never existed, where did this incredibly
persistent and lurid story come from? The myth of the first knight is not a medieval reality, but
an early modern invention. Its origins can be traced to the 16th century, but it truly gained
its power during the enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries. Writers and philosophers of
that era like Voltater were engaged in a fierce intellectual and political battle against the
absolute monarchies and the entrenched aristocracy of their own time. To make their case for liberty
and reform, they looked to the past. They created a caricature of the Middle Ages, painting it as
a time of superstitious ignorance and barbaric tyranny. The fictional droid doo senior was the
perfect weapon in their arsenal. They presented it as a historical fact to prove that the aristocracy
had always been corrupt and depraved and that their power was fundamentally illegitimate.
It was a brilliant and effective piece of anti-aristocratic propaganda. The story was so
scandalous and so memorable that it took on a life of its own. It was repeated by later writers,
picked up by novelists and playwrights and eventually it became so ingrained in our popular
culture that it was accepted as a genuine medieval practice. While there is no doubt that powerful
medieval lords could and certainly did abuse their subjects in countless ways, including sexually,
this was a brutal abuse of power, not the exercising of a legally sanctioned right. The myth
of the first night tells us nothing about the laws of the Middle Ages, but it tells us a great deal
about the political battles of the enlightenment. We end our journey through the so-called dark ages
with a story that is less about brutality and more about bravery, a tale of civic virtue and female
empowerment that has become one of England’s most enduring legends. It is the story of Lady Gdiva.
The legend, as it’s famously told, takes place in the 11th century Anglo-Saxon town of Coventry.
The town’s people are suffering under the weight of oppressive and crippling taxes levied by their
ruler, Leafric, the powerful Earl of Mercia. His kind-hearted wife, Lady Gdiva, is moved by their
plight and repeatedly pleads with her husband to show mercy and lower the taxes. Leafric, annoyed
by her persistence, finally agrees. But on one seemingly impossible and humiliating condition,
he will grant her request if she agrees to ride on horseback completely naked through the
town’s marketplace at midday. He assumes this will silence her for good. To his astonishment,
she agrees. In an act of incredible courage and solidarity with the people, she lets down her long
hair to act as a cloak, covering most of her body and makes the famous ride. The town’s people, in
a display of immense gratitude and respect for her sacrifice, all agree to stay inside their homes,
shutter their windows, and avert their eyes as she passes. All that is, except for one man, a tor who
would later be named Tom. Overcome by curiosity, he bores a hole in his shutters to catch a glimpse
of the noble woman. As the legend goes, he is immediately struck blind by a divine power for
his voyerism, becoming the original. Keeping Tom Leafric, humbled and true to his word, abolishes
the harsh taxes. It is a magnificent story. It has everything. A cruel ruler, a virtuous heroine,
a dramatic public act, and a satisfying moral conclusion. It has inspired countless paintings,
poems, and even a brand of chocolates. It is a cornerstone of English folklore. And it is almost
certainly just that, a story. The first problem is the timeline. The historical lady Gdiva or Gajifu
in old English was a real person. She and her husband Leafric were powerful and wealthy nobles
in the mid 11th century and they were known for their piety and generosity especially as patrons
of the Benedicting monastery in Coventry. However, the story of her naked ride does not appear in any
of the contemporary chronicles written during her lifetime. The first written account of the ride
emerges nearly 100 years after her death in the chronicles of Roger of Wendover, a monk writing in
the early 13th century. As the story was retold by later chronicers, it was embellished and expanded
with new details being added over time. The most famous part of the story, the character of Keeping
Tom, is an even later invention. He doesn’t make an appearance in any version of the legend until
the 16th century, a full 500 years after the supposed event. This gradual addition of dramatic
elements is a classic sign of a story evolving from a historical memory into a popular folk
tale. While the historical Gdiva was undoubtedly a respected and generous figure, the story of her
ride is likely a moral fable, a piece of folklore that attached itself to her name long after she
was gone. It’s a legend that celebrates the power of a noble individual to stand up against tyranny
and the importance of civic duty and respect. It’s a powerful and inspiring tale, but it belongs to
the realm of folklore, not documented history. We now move forward in time into an age of upheaval
and transformation. The world is expanding, old empires are clashing, and new nations
are being forged in the fires of revolution. This is an era defined by larger than-l life
figures, ambitious monarchs, swashbuckling pirates, and visionary founders. Their actions
shaped the modern world, and their stories have been polished into shining legends. But as we’ve
learned, the more polished the legend, the more likely it is to be hiding a much more complex and
often much more interesting truth. Our first myth from this era concerns one of the most towering
figures in history who has been forever defined by the idea that he wasn’t towering at all. There
are few names in history that command as much attention as Napoleon Bonapart. A military genius,
a brilliant administrator, a boundless egoomaniac, he rose from obscurity to become the emperor of
France and the master of continental Europe. His ambition redrrew the map of the world. Yet for
all his monumental achievements, the single most famous physical detail about him is that he was
short. Comically, famously short. The image is a cultural staple. We picture a tiny, petulent
tyrant stuffing his hand in his waist coat, perpetually angry at the world. His supposed small
stature has given us a psychological term, the Napoleon complex, used to describe an inferiority
complex that causes people, especially shorter men, to become overly aggressive and doineering.
This caricature of a miniature, angry general is one of the most enduring in all of history. It
is also one of the most successful and brilliant pieces of enemy propaganda ever devised. The
myth of Napoleon’s height is a classic case of a lie being lost in translation. At the time of
his death in 1821, an autopsy was performed and his height was recorded by his French physician as
sink pits dupuses or 5’2 in. And if you take that at face value, he does indeed sound very short.
However, the crucial detail is that this was measured using the pre-revolutionary French system
of measurement, the pi stroy. The French foot and therefore the French inch was significantly longer
than its British imperial counterpart. When you convert Napoleon’s recorded height of 5t, two
French in the modern or British imperial system, it comes out to approximately 5’6.5 in or about
1.6 69 m. Now, how does that stack up? The average height for a French man in the early 19th century
was around 5’5 in. This means that Napoleon, far from being a tiny man, was actually slightly
taller than the average citizen of his country. So, if he was of average height, why does the
myth of his smallness persist so stubbornly? The answer lies with his greatest enemies, the
British. While Napoleon was conquering Europe, the British, safe on their island, fought him not
just with cannons, but with cartoons. The golden age of British political satire, led by brilliant
and vicious artists like James Gilray weaponized Napoleon’s image. In hundreds of popular and
widely circulated prints, they depicted him as a tiny infantile figure, often no bigger than
a child. They nicknamed him Little Bony and drew him being disciplined by the towering figure
of John Bull, the personification of England, or throwing tantrums at the feet of British
admirals. This visual propaganda was incredibly effective. It cut the terrifying Corsican ogre
down to size, making him seem ridiculous and non-threatening to the British public. The image
was so powerful and so relentlessly repeated that it completely overrode the reality. This
was compounded by the fact that Napoleon was often surrounded by his elite imperial
guard who were all required to be men of above average height which would have made him appear
shorter by comparison in official portraits. The legend of the tiny emperor is a masterclass
in propaganda, a testament to the old saying that the pen, or in this case the cartoonist think, is
mightier than the sword. We now cross the Atlantic to the fledgling English colonies of North
America to a dark and infamous chapter in American history. The year is 1692. In the small isolated
Puritan community of Salem Village, Massachusetts, a strange affliction befalls a group of young
girls. They convulse. They scream. They claim to be tormented by invisible forces. Under pressure
from local magistrates, they begin to name names, accusing members of their community of witchcraft.
What follows is a wave of paranoia and hysteria that engulfs the entire region. Over the next
year, more than 200 people are accused of colluding with the devil. Neighbor turns against
neighbor. Reason gives way to fear and the legal system is twisted to serve a terrifying moral
panic. At the heart of our memory of this event is a single horrifying image. The accused, mostly
women, being dragged to the center of the village, tied to a wooden stake as the righteous Puritan
community lights a p at their feet, burning the evil out of their midst. This image of witches
burning at the stake is a powerful and archetypal one. It is the scene we see in countless movies
and television shows about the Salem witch trials. It is the definitive punishment for a witch in our
collective imagination. There is just one problem. It never happened in Salem. Not once. The myth of
the Salem burnings is a classic case of historical conflation where we take a practice from one time
and place and incorrectly apply it to another. The practice of burning heretics and witches at
the stake was indeed common in continental Europe, especially during the height of the Inquisition.
Under the legal systems of the Holy Roman Empire, witchcraft was considered a crime of heresy. A
betrayal of God and purification by fire was seen as the appropriate symbolic punishment. Thousands
of people were executed this way across Germany, France, Switzerland, and Italy. But the colony
of Massachusetts Bay in the 17th century was not part of the Holy Roman Empire. It was an English
colony, and it operated under English law. And under English law, witchcraft was not treated
as a religious crime of heresy. It was treated as a secular crime, a felony, specifically
the crime of conjuring spirits. As such, the prescribed method of execution was the same as
for other serious felonies like murder or piracy, hanging. The historical record of the Salem
witch trials is tragically clear. Of the hundreds accused, 19 people were convicted and
executed. All 19 of them, 14 women and five men, were taken to a place called Gallows Hill
just outside of town and hang. A 20th victim, an elderly and defiant farmer named Jiles Corey,
suffered a different but equally horrific fate. He refused to enter a plea of guilty or not guilty,
a tactic to prevent his trial from proceeding and thus prevent the state from legally seizing
his property and disinheriting his sons. For his refusal, the court subjected him to an archaic
and brutal legal procedure called painforte or hard and forceful punishment. He was laid on
the ground. A wooden board was placed on his chest and heavy stones were slowly piled on top
of him over two days in an attempt to force him to plead. He refused to the very end, his last words
famously being, “More weight.” He was pressed to death. The Salem witch trials were a horrific and
shameful event, a perfect storm of social stress, religious extremism, and legal failure. The
reality of what happened, the hangings and the crushing, is gruesome enough. The myth of
the burnings is a powerful but inaccurate echo, a story that confuses the specific history of
colonial America with the broader and bloodier history of the European witch hunts. Let’s
leave the grim shores of colonial New England and head south to the warm turquoise waters of
the Caribbean during the golden age of piracy. This was a brief but spectacular era from roughly
1690 to 1730 when infamous figures with names like Calico Jack Rackom, Blackbart, Roberts,
and the most fearsome of them all, Blackbird, ruled the waves. Our modern image of these pirates
is a rich tapestry of adventure and romance. We picture them with parrots on their shoulders,
walking on peg legs and speaking in a thick west country accent. But the single most
important element of the pirate legend, the very goal of their swashbuckling existence is
the treasure. We imagine chests overflowing with gold, the balloons, silver pieces of eight, and
glittering jewels. And what did they do with this fabulous wealth? The story we all know is that
they sailed to a deserted island, a secret cove, and buried the chest deep in the sand, marking
the spot with a cryptic X on a secret map to be recovered at a later date. This idea of buried
pirate treasure is the engine of some of our greatest adventure stories, from Treasure Island
to the Pirates of the Caribbean film franchise. It is the ultimate pirate fantasy. And that’s
precisely what it is, a fantasy. The historical reality is that pirates almost never buried
their treasure. To understand why, you have to understand the reality of a pirates’s life and the
economy of a pirate ship. First, a pirate’s career was on average brutally short. Most pirates were
active for only a year or two before they were captured, killed in battle, or succumb to disease
or accident. They lived for the moment, not for long-term financial planning. The idea of burying
their wealth for a far-off retirement that would almost certainly never come was completely alien
to their mindset. Treasure wasn’t for hoarding. It was for spending, and spending it as quickly and
as lavishly as possible. As soon as a pirate ship made port in a friendly haven like Nassau or Port
Royal, the crew would descend upon the taverns, brothel, and gambling dens, often blowing their
entire share of a hall in a matter of days or weeks. The treasure was the fuel for a massive
fleeting party before they headed back out to sea to risk their lives again. Second, a pirate ship
was a surprisingly democratic institution. Before a voyage, the crew would draw up and sign a set of
articles which laid out the rules of the ship and most importantly the exact distribution of any
loot that was captured. The captain typically received only one and a half or two shares, the
same as the quartermaster. Every crew member got their designated portion. For a captain to try and
secretly bury a portion of the ship’s collective treasure would be a direct violation of the
articles. It would be seen as theft from his own crew, an act that would almost certainly lead to
a mutiny and a swift violent death. So where did this incredibly powerful myth come from? It can be
traced almost entirely to one, possibly two real world cases that were then wildly sensationalized.
The most famous is the case of Captain William Kidd, a Scottish privateeer who was commissioned
to hunt pirates, but eventually turned to piracy himself. In 1699, knowing he was a wanted man, Kid
did bury a small cache of treasure on Gardener’s Island off the coast of New York, likely as a
desperate last ditch attempt to hide evidence and use it as a bargaining chip. The treasure
was quickly located by the authorities and used as evidence against him at his trial. This single
real life case of a pirate burying treasure became the seed of a legend. It was then watered and
grown into the mighty oak of myth by fiction writers, most notably Robert Lewis Stevenson
in his 1883 masterpiece Treasure Island. His story with its unforgettable characters like Long
John Silver and its central plot device of Captain Flint’s treasure map single-handedly invented the
modern pirate genre and forever cemented the idea of buried treasure in the popular imagination.
It’s a brilliant story, but it’s not history. From the high seas of the Caribbean, we now travel to
the dusty plains of the American West. It is the late 19th century. The era of the great cattle
drives, a time of rugged individualism and the forging of the American frontier. And at the
center of this era is its most iconic figure, the Kba. Try to picture a cowba in your mind. What
does he look like? He’s probably sitting tall in the saddle, wearing leather chaps, scuffed boots
with spurs, and most importantly on his head, he’s wearing a wide-brimmed high-crown hat. For
most of us, that hat is a Stson, the legendary boss of the plains. It is the single most defining
piece of western wear, an unmistakable symbol of the American cowba, as essential to his identity
as his horse or his revolver. It is the crown of the king of the west. This image is so powerful,
so ingrained in our culture through a century of movies, television, and advertising that it feels
like an absolute truth. But if you could travel back in time to a real cattle drive on the Chisum
Trail in the 1870s and take a look at the men working the herd, you would find that the iconic
Stson Cowba hat was a rare sight indeed. The most popular, most common, and most practical
hat in the American West was something far less romantic. The bowler hat. That’s right, the
bowler, or the derby, as it was known in America. The stiff rounded hat we associate with Victorian
city dwellers in London or New York was the true king of headwear on the frontier. You only need to
look at the photographic evidence from the period. Take a look at a picture of the famous Wild
Bunch gang. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid are not wearing Stsons. They are wearing bowler
hats. Look at the legendary lawmen of the era like B Mastersonson or Wyatt. In their most famous
portraits, they are almost always pictured wearing a bowler. The reason was simple practicality. The
West was a windy, dusty, and often violent place. A wide-brimmed hat like the Stson was easily
caught by the wind and blown off a rider’s head. The bowler, being smaller, stiffer, and fitting
more snugly on the head, was far more likely to stay put during a gallop or a gust of wind.
They were also more durable and offered better protection in a fight. They were the practical,
everyday choice for a working man on the frontier. Other common styles included flatbrimmed pork pie
hats, old civil war caps, or simple floppy wool hats. So, how did the Stson become the undisputed
symbol of the West? The answer lies not in history, but in Hollywood. The Stson company
was a brilliant marketer and its boss of the planes model, introduced in 1865, was certainly
available. But its legendary status was cemented in the early 20th century with the birth of the
western movie genre. The first great western movie star Tom Mix adopted the Stson as his signature
look. Later towering figures like Gary Cooper and most famously John Wayne made the high crown stson
their trademark. Hollywood filmmakers weren’t interested in historical accuracy. They were
interested in creating a powerful and instantly recognizable heroic archetype. The wide-brimmed
Stson framed the hero’s face perfectly, creating a silhouette of rugged authority against the vast
western landscape. The image was so effective that it completely overwrote the more mundane
historical reality. The Stson is a magnificent piece of American iconography, but it is a symbol
of the myth of the West, not the reality of the working Calba. Following directly from the myth
of the Kba’s attire is the myth of the world he inhabited, the American Wild West. The very name
conjures a vivid and violent picture. We imagine a land of untamed, lawless frontiers where life
was cheap and disputes were settled by the speed of a man’s draw. We see dusty main streets and
towns like Dodge City and Tombstone, where tumble weeds roll past swinging saloon doors, and where
high noon gunfights between steelyed law men and blackhated outlaws were a regular occurrence.
This vision of a society teetering on the brink of anarchy where justice came from the barrel of a
cult 45 is the foundational premise of the entire western genre. It is a world that has captivated
audiences for over a century. It is also for the most part a dramatic and exciting work of fiction.
The real American West was for the most part not nearly as wild as its reputation suggests. Let’s
look at the famous cattle towns, the supposed epicenters of frontier violence. Places like Dodge
City, Abolene, and Tombstone are legendary as hotbeds of conflict. But the historical reality
is that these towns were in many ways far more orderly and regulated than we imagine. One of
the first things that happened when a town was established was the passage of strict ordinances
to control the very violence we imagine was rampant. And the most common of these ordinances
was gun control. That’s right. Gun control was a fact of life in the Old West. Upon entering the
city limits of a town like Dodge City, a cowboy on a cattle drive was legally required to disarm. He
had to check his firearms at the sheriff’s office or at his hotel to be picked up only when he was
leaving town. Signs were posted at the entrance to town with messages like the carrying of firearms
is strictly prohibited. The most famous gunfight in American history. The gunfight at the OK
Corral in Tombstone was not a random shootout. It was a direct result of Marshall Virgilerp
and his brothers attempting to enforce the town’s ordinance against carrying weapons within
the city limits against the Clanton and McClory gangs who had refused to disarm. So what about
the body count? Historians and researchers who have dug into the actual data have discovered
that the homicide rates in these frontier towns were surprisingly low. The historian Robert Dystra
in his definitive study of the Kansas cattle towns found that over the 15-year peak of the cattle
drive era from 1870 to 1885 the total number of homicides in all five of the major towns Abene
Ellsworth Witchah Dodge City and Caldwell was only 45. That’s an average of just 1.5 murders per town
per year. You were far more likely to die from a disease like chalera, a work-related accident,
or even a bar fight involving fists and furniture than you were to be killed in a classic Hollywood
style gunfight. The myth of the lawless, violent West was a product of the 19th century publishing
industry. Dime novels, cheap sensationalist paperbacks, churned out exaggerated tales of real
life figures like Billy the Kid and Jesse James, transforming them into larger than-l life folk
heroes and villains. This foundation was then built upon by the 20th century film industry,
which found that stories of constant conflict and clear-cut morality made from much more exciting
cinema than the more complex reality of community building, legal regulation, and relatively low
crime rates. The Wild West is a powerful and enduring piece of American mythology. But the real
West was a place where the rule of law was not just a goal, but a daily and largely successful
practice. We end our tour of this revolutionary era with a story that lies at the very heart of
American patriotic folklore. It is a tale taught to school children for generations. A charming
and inspiring account of the birth of the nation’s most sacred symbol. It is the story of Betsy Ross
and the creation of the first stars and stripes. The scene, as the legend goes, takes place in
Philadelphia in the spring of 1776, just before the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
Three distinguished gentlemen, members of a secret committee from the Continental Congress,
pay a visit to the humble upholstery shop of a local seamstress and flag maker named Elizabeth
Betsy Ross. The men are the commander and chief of the Continental Army, George Washington, the
wealthy financer of the Revolution, Robert Morris, and a respected statesman, George Ross, the
uncle of Bets’s late husband. General Washington himself unfurls a rough sketch of a flag they have
designed for the new nation. It features 13 red and white stripes and 13 stars representing the
13 colonies. Their design, however, has one small flaw. The stars have six points. Betsy Ross, a
skilled and practical artisan, looks at the design and suggests an improvement. She demonstrates how
a five-pointed star can be cut with a single snip of the scissors, making the design cleaner and
easier to produce. The committee is impressed by her ingenuity and commissions her to sew
the very first flag for the United States of America. It is a wonderful story. It provides a
tangible human moment for the birth of the flag and it elevates a workingclass woman to the status
of a key figure in the American founding, a female counterpart to the famous founding fathers. It is
a tale of quiet patriotism and female ingenuity. Unfortunately, there is not a single piece of
contemporary historical evidence to suggest that any of it ever happened. The story of Betsy Ross
does not appear anywhere in the historical record of the 18th century. There are no letters
from George Washington, no diary entries, no congressional records, no bills of sale, and no
personal correspondence from anyone involved that mentions Betsy Ross, a flag committee, or this
famous meeting. The first time the story was told publicly was in 1870, nearly a century after the
supposed event. It was relayed by Bets’s grandson, William Cami, in a speech to the Historical
Society of Pennsylvania. He claimed it was a story that had been passed down in his family for
generations, a piece of oral history that he was now sharing with the nation. While Cani genuinely
believed the story to be true, he had no evidence to support it beyond family lore. Historians have
since pointed out numerous problems with the tale. The Continental Congress did not form a flag
committee until 1777, a year after the supposed meeting. And the person who most likely deserves
credit for the flag’s design is not Betsy Ross, but a man named Francis Hopkinson. Hopinson was a
New Jersey delegate to the Continental Congress, a signer of the Declaration of Independence,
and a talented artist and designer. In 1780, he submitted a detailed bill to Congress
for various designs he had created for the new government, including, in his words, the flag
of the United States of America. While his claim for payment was ultimately denied over a billing
dispute, his initial claim is the strongest and most direct piece of evidence we have for the
flag’s origin. The story of Betsy Ross emerged at a perfect time in the years leading up to the
nation’s centennial celebration in 1876. It was a period of intense patriotism and a desire for
inspiring national stories. The tale of the humble seamstress who helped create the nation’s banner
was a powerful and appealing piece of folklore that quickly captured the public’s imagination and
became cemented as fact. It is a beloved legend, but a legend nonetheless. We now arrive in the
modern age, an era defined by technological marvels, global communication, and unprecedented
scientific discovery. You might think that in a world with photography, film, and eventually the
internet, historical myths would become harder to create and easier to debunk. But you’d be wrong.
The last 150 years have seen the birth of some of the most stubborn and widespread misconceptions of
all. These are the myths that feel like scientific facts. The urban legends that have taken on a
life of their own, and the stories that have been shaped and amplified by the very mass media that
was supposed to give us a clearer picture of the world. Our first myth from this era is one that
attempts to bridge the ancient and the modern. A story that takes one of humanity’s greatest
ancient wonders and elevates it to an astronomical scale. It is a fact that many of us learned
in school. It has been repeated in textbooks, travel guides, and trivia games for generations.
The Great Wall of China, a monumental feat of engineering stretching for thousands of miles
across the rugged landscape of northern China, is so vast, so immense that it is the only
man-made structure that can be seen with the naked eye by astronauts looking down from space.
This statement serves as the ultimate testament to the scale of human achievement. It links the
ancient world’s most ambitious construction project with the modern era’s greatest adventure,
the exploration of space. It creates a powerful and awe inspiring image of the wall as a landmark
not just for our world but for the cosmos. It is a beautiful and poetic idea and it is completely
unequivocally false. The problem with the myth is a simple matter of physics and optics. While
the Great Wall is incredibly unimaginably long, it is in relative terms extremely narrow. At
its widest points, the wall is only about 30 ft across. For the most part, it is much narrower.
Now, consider the distance. Low Earth orbit, where astronauts on the International Space
Station live and work, is at an altitude of about 250 mi. Seeing the great wall from that
distance would be the equivalent of you trying to see a single human hair from over two miles
away. It is simply impossible. The walls color and materials also work against its visibility. It
was built from local stone and earth and its muted gray brown color blends in almost perfectly with
the surrounding terrain. It does not stand out as a distinct feature against the landscape. But
we don’t have to rely on theory. We can just ask the people who have actually been there. Since the
dawn of the space age, astronaut after astronaut has been asked this question, and their answer has
been consistently the same. Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon, confirmed he could not see
it. The American astronaut [ __ ] famously said, “We’ve flown over China hundreds of times, and
I’ve never seen it. Perhaps most definitively, in 2003, China sent its very first astronaut, Yang
Lewi, into orbit. Upon his return, he was asked if he could see his nation’s most famous landmark.
His answer was a simple and honest no. So, what man-made objects can be seen from space?
With the naked eye, astronauts can see large scale features, especially those with high contrast
to their surroundings. They can see the lights of major cities on the night side of the Earth.
During the day, they can make out large airports, the grid patterns of major cities, and massive
structures like the pyramids of Giza, not because of their height, but because they are a distinct
geometric shape in the middle of a plain empty desert. But the Great Wall remains elusive. The
myth itself actually predates the space age by several decades. It seems to have originated
in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, most famously in the 1932 Ripley’s Believe It
or Not cartoon. It was a hypothetical statement, a romantic notion about the grandest structure
on Earth. The idea was so compelling that when the space age began, people just assumed it must
be true. It’s a myth that speaks to our desire to believe in the monumental. But the view from
orbit tells a different story. We now turn to the world of art and to one of its most brilliant,
tortured, and mythologized figures, Vincent Van Go. His vibrant, swirling, and emotionally charged
paintings like the starry night and sunflowers are some of the most beloved and recognizable works of
art in the world. But for all the fame of his art, his life story is equally famous, defined by a
narrative of poverty, a lack of recognition, and a descent into madness. And the single defining
event of that madness, the ultimate symbol of the tortured artist is the story of his ear. The
legend is as famous as his paintings. On the night of December 23rd, 1888 in the town of Alls in the
south of France, Van Go was living and working with his fellow artists, the volatile and arrogant
Paul Bogan. Their relationship, once hopeful, had soured into a series of bitter arguments.
After one particularly explosive confrontation, Goan stormed out of their shared home, the
yellow house. Van Go, in a fit of despair, rage, and mental anguish, took a straight razor,
went to a mirror, and sliced off his own ear. He then wrapped the severed ear in newspaper,
went to a local brothel, and presented it to a prostitute named Rachel before staggering
home and collapsing in his blood soaked bed, where he was discovered by the police the next
morning. This act of extreme self-mutilation has become the cornerstone of the Van Go legend.
It is the ultimate proof of his insanity. A shocking and gruesome act that has been endlessly
analyzed by art historians and psychologists. It is a powerful and unforgettable story. But the
version we all know, the story of the entire year, is an exaggeration that has distorted the true
and arguably more tragic reality of the event. For decades, the only evidence came from conflicting
accounts, including those of Goan, who had every reason to portray Vincent as completely unhinged.
But in the 21st century, new and more definitive evidence has come to light. In 2016, a researcher
named Bernardet Murphy, while writing her book Van Goir, uncovered a crucial document in an American
archive. It was a drawing made by Dr. Felix Ray, the physician who treated Van Go in the hospital
in all immediately after the incident. The drawing sketched on a prescription pad was made by
the doctor to illustrate the exact nature of the wound for a biographer. It shows clearly
and unambiguously that Van Go did not cut off his entire ear. He severed almost the entire
earlobe and possibly a small part of the lower cartilage of the ear itself. The injury was
horrific, bloody, and undoubtedly the act of a man in the throws of a severe mental health
crisis. But it was a mutilation of the lobe, not a full amputation of the entire ear. Why does
this detail matter? Because the myth of the whole ear creates a caricature. It turns Van Go into a
one-dimensional mad man, a monster of insanity. The reality, while still shocking, is more
medically and psychologically plausible. It was a desperate symbolic act of self harm, likely
committed during a psychotic episode, possibly triggered by a combination of his deteriorating
mental health, the conflict with Goan, and his heavy consumption of absin. The story of
the entire ear was likely born from a combination of sensationalist newspaper reporting at the time
and the natural tendency for a shocking story to become more extreme with each retelling. It was
a better, more dramatic story. But the truth as revealed by the doctor who treated him gives
us a slightly clearer and more human picture of the real tragedy that unfolded on that
terrible night in alls. From the world of art, we turn to the world of science and to the man
whose very name has become synonymous with genius, Albert Einstein. His theories of relativity
fundamentally reshaped our understanding of space, time, and gravity. His equation equals MC²
is the most famous in the world. He is the undisputed archetype of the brilliant scientist,
the frizzy-haired, deepthinking titan of the intellect. But there is another equally popular
story that we tell about Einstein. It’s a tale of encouragement, a comforting fable that is often
told to struggling students. The story goes that the great Albert Einstein, the future Nobel Prize
winner, was a terrible student in his youth. He was a daydreamer, a rebel who chafed against the
rigid discipline of his German school masters. And most famously, he was so bad at mathematics that
he actually failed the math exam in school. This myth is incredibly appealing. It’s a classic
underdog story. It tells us that it’s okay to struggle, that a slow start doesn’t preclude a
brilliant finish. It suggests that genius can be hidden, that it doesn’t always conform to
the rigid standards of the classroom. It is a wonderful, inspiring, and motivational tale. And
Albert Einstein himself would have told you it was complete nonsense. The myth seems to have started
in the 1930s when a Ripley’s Believe It or Not column printed the fact that the world’s greatest
living scientist had failed math. The story spread so widely that it eventually made its way back to
Einstein himself. When he was shown the article, he is reported to have laughed and said, “I
never failed in mathematics. Before I was 15, I had mastered differential and integral calculus,
and the historical record backs him up completely. Far from being a poor student, the young
Einstein was an exceptionally gifted one, particularly in the fields of mathematics and
physics. He consistently received the highest marks in these subjects. The confusion seems
to have arisen from a change in the school’s grading system. In 1896 when Einstein was 17 and
studying at the canel school in Ar Switzerland, the school reversed its marking scale. A six which
had been the lowest grade became the highest and a one which had been the highest became the lowest.
Looking at Einstein’s transcript without knowing about this change, it might appear that he was
suddenly getting terrible marks in his final year when in fact he was excelling. There is one
specific event that the myth often latches on to Einstein’s failure of an entrance exam. In 1895 at
the age of 16, two years younger than the normal applicants, he did take the entrance examination
for the prestigious Federal Polytenic School in Zurich and he did fail it. However, when you
look at the details, the story changes. He passed the mathematics and science sections of the exam
with flying colors. The parts he failed were the non-scientific subjects, French, literature, and
history. The school’s director was so impressed with his performance in the science sections
that he encouraged Einstein to attend a local high school to round out his education and then
reapply the following year, which he did, passing with ease. The story of Einstein failing math is a
classic example of a comforting myth. It’s a piece of historical wishful thinking. The reality is
that Einstein wasn’t the late bloomer who overcame a mathematical deficiency. He was a prodigy who
was a master of the subject from a very young age. Our next myth takes us to the evening of October
30th, 1938. It’s the night before Halloween, and millions of Americans are gathered around
their radios, the primary source of news and entertainment in the home. That night, a young,
ambitious, and already famous radio dramatist named Orson Wells and his Mercury Theater on the
air are performing a special holiday broadcast, an adaptation of HG Wells’s classic science
fiction novel, The War of the Worlds. The story we have all been told is that Wells’s production was
so terrifyingly realistic, so cleverly formatted as a series of live news bulletins interrupting
a program of dance music that it fooled a huge portion of the American public into believing
that the Earth was actually being invaded by Martians. The result, the legend says, was a
night of unprecedented nationwide mass hysteria. People screamed in the streets. Roads were clogged
with families trying to flee the alien invaders. Phone lines were jammed as terrified citizens
called the police and newspapers for information. It was supposedly the night that a radio show
panicked a nation. This story of mass panic has become a landmark in the history of media. It
is held up as the ultimate example of the power of broadcasting to influence and manipulate the
public. It’s a cautionary tale about the dangers of fake news and the gullibility of the masses. It
is a dramatic and unforgettable event and it has been profoundly and demonstrably exaggerated. The
idea of a nationwide panic is a myth that was born and nurtured by the newspaper industry. In the
1930s, radio was a new and disruptive technology, and it was siphoning advertising revenue away from
traditional print media. Newspapers saw radio as a dangerous and unregulated rival, and the war of
the world’s broadcast was the perfect opportunity to discredit it. In the days following the
broadcast, newspapers across the country seized upon the story, running sensationalists, front
page headlines like radio listeners in panic, taking war drama as fact and radio
fake scares nation. They cherrypicked the most extreme examples of frightened
listeners and presented them as the norm, creating the impression of a widespread national
hysteria. The reality was far more subdued. First, the audience for the broadcast was in relative
terms quite small. The Mercury Theater was a highbrow sustaining show, meaning it didn’t have a
commercial sponsor, and it was scheduled opposite one of the most popular and beloved programs
in the country, The Chase and Samborn Hour, a comedy variety show starring the ventriloquist
Edgar Bergen and his dummy Charlie McCarthy. The vast majority of the radio listening
public was listening to Charlie McCarthy, not Orson Wells. Second, the show itself contained
multiple clear disclaimers. It was introduced as a dramatization of HG Wells’s novel. There
were announcements at the commercial breaks identifying it as a production of the Mercury
Theater. While the news bulletin format was clever, many listeners who tuned in late and
missed the introduction were simply confused, not terrified. They called their local stations
or police departments to ask what was going on, which contributed to the stories of jammed phone
lines. But a call for information is not the same as a call of panic. There were certainly some
people who were genuinely frightened, particularly in a few specific areas like Grover’s Mill, New
Jersey, which was named in the broadcast as the Martian landing site. But the idea of millions
of people running for the hills is a fiction, a mediadriven exaggeration that served the interests
of the newspaper industry. The panic was not a national event. It was a media event, a legend
that Orson Wells, a master showman, was more than happy to play along with for the rest of his
career. We end our entire journey with a myth not from human history, but from the natural world.
It is a story that has become a powerful and often used metaphor in our language. When we want
to describe a group of people blindly following a leader or a trend towards a disastrous outcome, we
say they are acting like lemmings. The image this phrase conjures is a dramatic and tragic one. We
picture the vast frozen landscapes of the Arctic tundra. A massive horde of small furry rodents
called lemmings is on the move. Driven by some mysterious, innate, and self-destructive instinct,
they march in a straight line, an unstoppable river of fur. Their march leads them to the edge
of a towering seaside cliff. Without hesitation, the leaders plunge over the edge, and the
thousands behind them follow suit, a cascade of bodies tumbling into the churning ocean below.
It is a spectacle of mass programmed suicide, a bizarre and unsettling ritual of nature. This
idea of lemming suicide is one of the most famous and enduring myths about animal behavior. It has
been referenced in countless cartoons, movies, and even video games. It is a powerful metaphor
for mindless conformity. It is also a complete and utter fabrication, a cruel piece of cinematic
fraud that has slandered the reputation of a small rodent for over 60 years. The myth can be
traced directly to a single influential source, the 1958 Walt Disney Nature documentary, White
Wilderness. The film, part of Disney’s True Life Adventures series, won an Academy Award for best
documentary feature. It contains the now infamous sequence that created the myth. The narrator, in
a somber tone, describes the Lemmings mysterious death march to the sea. We see dozens, then
hundreds of lemmings scurrying across the tundra, culminating in the shocking scene where they
plummet from a high cliff into the water below. But the scene was a lie. The entire sequence
was staged. An investigation by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in the 1980s revealed
the truth. The segment was not filmed in a coastal area, but in landlocked Alberta, Canada, a region
with no native lemming population. The filmmakers had imported a few dozen lemmings from Manitoba.
To create the effect of a massive migration, they used clever camera angles and placed the
animals on a large snow-covered turntable that was spun around to make them look dizzy and frantic.
The final horrifying scene of this suicide was created by the film crew physically hurting and
chasing the terrified animals off the edge of a cliff into a river below. So, what is the real
story of lemming behavior? Lemmings are small rodents whose populations experience dramatic
boom and bus cycles. Every 3 to four years, their numbers can explode, leading to
overcrowding and a scarcity of food. When this happens, they are forced to migrate
in large groups to find new, less populated areas with more resources. During these frantic
migrations, they are focused on moving forward. They can swim and will often cross rivers or lakes
to get to the other side. The suicidal behavior is a tragic misinterpretation of these migrations.
When a massive group of lemmings reaches a body of water too wide to cross or the edge of a steep
cliff, the sheer pressure from the thousands of lemmings pushing from behind can accidentally
shove the ones at the front over the edge. It is not a conscious act of suicide, but an accidental
death caused by the momentum of a desperate crowd. The Disney film took this natural, albeit
sometimes tragic behavior and twisted it into a sensational and completely fictional narrative
of self-destruction. And so our journey comes to an end. We have traveled from the sands of the
Roman coliseum to the plains of the American West, from the halls of Versail to the surface
of the moon. We have seen how propaganda, misunderstanding, folklore, and pure fiction can
become cemented in our minds as historical fact. The myths we’ve explored today are more than just
trivia. They show us that history is not a static collection of names and dates, but a living,
breathing story that is constantly being told and retold. And like any story, it can be shaped
by the biases, the motives, and the imaginations of the storytellers. The real lesson is not just
that Vikings didn’t wear horned helmets or that Einstein was great at math. The real lesson is
the importance of curiosity and critical thinking. It’s a reminder to always ask questions, to look
for the evidence, and to be willing to challenge the stories that we think we know best. because
the truth is often more complex, more nuanced, and far more fascinating than the myth. Thank
you for joining us for part two of Unbelievable Myths History Got Wrong. If you enjoyed this
journey down the historical rabbit hole, please be sure to like this video and subscribe
to the channel. And let us know in the comments what other historical myths do you want to see
us tackle next. Until then, keep questioning.
1 Comment
Hello, fellow sleepyheads! Thank you so much for joining me for Part 2. I'm so curious, which myth in this video surprised you the most?
For anyone who missed it, you can find the first journey into history's myths right here: https://youtu.be/a9Z0KjG2T4E
Sweet dreams