The Willow Springs Tuesday Study Club met at the Willow Springs Senior Center for a regular business meeting on March 19. Mary Knott and Kathleen Carel were the hostesses with the assistance of Pauline Cape. Following a business meeting, Kathleen gave a presentation titled “American History Myths You Learned in School.”
Many of us moaned and groaned during high school geometry, asking our teachers, “When will I ever need to use this in real life?” But during history class, there wasn’t that same pushback — it seemed like if it was written in a history lesson, it must be fact. But not everything we learned about U.S. history really happened. Here’s a look at some of the biggest myths disguised as facts that you learned about in school.
Remember when your history teacher told you about young George Washington proudly telling his father, “I cannot tell a lie?” Well ... they lied to you. The story of 6-year-old Georgie getting a hatchet as a gift and cutting down his father’s cherry tree before tattling on himself was completely made up by one of the former president’s first biographers, Mason Locke Weems. Weems fabricated the incident in his retelling of Washington’s early years just to enhance readership and profitability of his book, “The Life of Washington.”
Stories of witches burned at the stake in Salem, Massachusetts, are eerie and influential but not true. In 1692, a doctor diagnosed a group of young girls as victims of witchcraft after they began having screaming seizures. The allegations led to 20 people being executed after being found guilty of black magic. But despite what your teachers may have told you, the so-called witches weren’t burned at the stake; they were hanged. The remaining killing was by pressing a man to death with stones.
Paul Revere’s “midnight ride” is often an entire lesson in high school history classes, discussed as the start of the American Revolution. The part about Revere being dispatched to warn John Hancock and Samuel Adams that the British soldiers were headed their way is true, but according to the website for The Paul Revere House, a sentry at the house where Adams and Hancock were got mad when Revere arrived because he was making too much noise, causing Revere to reply, “Noise! You’ll have noise long enough before. The regulars are coming out!” That quote just doesn’t slide off the tongue the way, “The British are coming!” does.
We know that this famous American document says “July 4, 1776,” but that’s not when it was signed, and it’s not even when the country gained its independence. In reality, the Continental Congress voted for independence on July 2, 1776 and the signing of the document actually happened Aug. 2, although not all 56 of the delegates who signed were there that day.
You probably figured that Disney’s version of Pocahontas’ life wasn’t biographically perfect. More than likely, her best friend wasn’t a raccoon named Meeko and she didn’t seek guidance from a willow tree with a face. But even the love story popularized by the movie wasn’t real. Real life has been so muddled with myths that most people don’t know “Pocahontas” is her nickname rather than her real name (which was Amonute). It was Smith who played his relationship with Pocahontas off as a romantic one, historian Camilla Townsend says, while what the pair had was a friendship — and a hefty age gap that put her at 12 when he was 28.
Despite what you’ve been told time and time again, Thomas Edison did not truly invent the lightbulb. Since 1761, plenty of people had been making incandescent wires. Several inventors demonstrated versions of incandescent lights and patented some. In 1878, Edison simply improved the lightbulb. “Edison did not look for problems in need of solutions; he looked for solutions in need of modification,” The New Yorker says.
The Great Chicago Fire roared for two days in 1871 — one of the worst disasters in U.S history. And for years, the fire was said to have been started by Catherine O’Leary, an Irish immigrant who sold milk for a living, and her cow, of course. It was said that either O’Leary or her cow knocked over a lantern, which caused the first flames. But historians find no real evidence for the story, just as firefighters in 1871 didn’t, and the Chicago City Council has since exonerated them of the charge.
