Memories make for a risky foundation: as events recede further and further into the past, the facts get distorted or augmented by entirely new details. So we have to keep ourselves in check! And there’s a thread on Reddit that’s perfect for that.

It started with the question “What historical inaccuracy is still taught often?” and people have been sending in their replies ever since it was posted. From famous people’s lives to wars and government decisions, here are those that have received the most upvotes.

• Read More: 30 False History Facts That Were Really Taught In Schools, But Did Not Stand The Test Of Time

#1

That Mother Teresa was a saint but in reality she was a racist money loader. Information about this topic can be found even from the New York Times archives.

Image credits: deimos_mars

#2

Tuskegee experiment.

The government did not inject men with syphilis, they took men who already had syphilis, and pretended to treat them so they could study how it ravaged the body over time left untreated.

Still just as cruel though.

Image credits: hannamarinsgrandma

#3

That only Europeans were colonizers or imperialists.

Image credits: anon

#4

That Native Americans were one homogenous group who all agreed upon who could live on which bit of land and always had peaceful arrangements with one another before the Europeans arrived. In actuality, there was tribal warfare often. Culturally, there was so much variety. People should learn more about the Cahokians who were unique in that they built a city rather than just a village or being nomads.

Image credits: Snooberry62

#5

My mother and all her siblings were taught at a Catholic school that men have one less rib than women and that’s to origin of the Adam and Eve story. Completely untrue. Men and women have the same number of ribs.

Image credits: Iloveargyll

#6

That Napoleon was very short. He was slightly taller than an average Frenchman of his time. Around 168-170 cm. It was English propaganda. He was also often surrounded by his Imperial Guard who used to be a  lot taller. Still, alot shorter than average Europeans these days.

Image credits: JakeDeLonge

#7

I don´t know if this is still up-to-date, but my history teacher always pointed out it was often falsely taught that the pyramids and temples of the ancient egyptian period were build by slaves. They were build by respected people that helped voluntrily.

Image credits: WattIsPhysik

#8

I don’t think it’s taught but the general American seem to believe that cowboys were mostly White people. When in actuality it was Mexicans and even Black people after they were freed. It was considered a lowly position in the Wild West. If a cowboy was White, he was a very poor White. White people were on the frontier farming and such. Asians (the Chinese) did laundry and were cooks. That’s where a lot of Chinese-American foods originated from. People also seem to forget that this time period, which was maybe only 30-50 years, had three pinnacle events unfold in US history—the Transcontinental Railroad was completed, The Chinese Exclusion Act went into law, and slavery was abolished. I may be wrong but I believe in that order too.

Image credits: AsianHawke

#9

“Only 8 percent of U.S. high school seniors can identify slavery as the central cause of the Civil War.” So 92% of students are taught an inaccurate account of one of the most critical and defining parts of US history.

Image credits: RyzenRaider

#10

The Vietnam War started in the mid-sixties when it started in the fifties.

apocalypse_chow replied: And lasted into the 70s. Good God, that was a disaster

SHIELD_Agent_47 replied: Some misinformed people still teach that the USA did not lose the war (by using the red herring of a slow withdrawal) when in reality North Vietnam succeeded in their goal of kicking out the occupying foreigners and reunifying Vietnam.

Image credits: Financial_County_710

#11

I always seem to see some school teachers talking about Pearl Harbor, and some of them say that thats how WW2 started, I remember when I corrected them once, then i got to sit in the timeout corner.

EingestricheneOktave:

Man, that must have been frustrating.

To be fair, that’s how WW2 started for the americans, but yes, it was already in full swing in other parts of the world.

There’s this ubiquitous photo of german soldiers removing the barrier that marked the german-polish border in 1939. It’s everywhere. It’s in documentaries, it’s shown in schools, it’s in history books etc. etc. and, correctly so, always in connection with the beginning of the war.

Almost every german has this photo drilled into their brain, and that it was taken in 1939, when the war started.

Image credits: anon

#12

Cortes and 500 Spaniards conquered the Aztec empire. It’s true that he only had a few hundred Spanish soldiers but he had tens of thousands indigenous allies who did most of the fighting.

Image credits: jorgespinosa

#13

The Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4, 1776. No, it was signed on July 2, it wasn’t announced until July 4 but regardless even Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, and others, wrote that they expected July 2 would be the date that would be celebrated with great festivities. That got lost to history.

Image credits: llcucf80

#14

In New Zealand, they sometimes seem to be taught that they had the highest casualty rate in both World Wars. I worked with a New Zealander who got genuinely angry when I said that it wasn’t even close to being true. I put it down to him being misinformed, but then I saw another NZer making the same claim on the Guardian website.

CookinFrenchToast4ya

They got confused.. They had the highest rate of deaths per 1 million people in the commonwealth (not the world). “Post-war calculations indicated that New Zealand’s ratio of killed per million of population (at 6684) was the highest in the Commonwealth (with Britain at 5123 and Australia, 3232).”

Image credits: jwelshuk

#15

This one is actually a common one: England’s king Ethelred was not nicknamed “Ethelred the Unready” because he wasn’t ready for a viking attack. His nickname was “Ethelred Unred”. Unred translates to ill-advised, while his name means well-advised. Nice one. It was mistranslated by some historians and stuck around.

Image credits: cappikirkoway

#16

Watch any kind of medieval docco or book on brewing and they will likely trot out that the people drank small ale because the water was not safe.

This idea was printed in some woman’s book published in the 70’s and everyone just kept repeating it and still do, it was never true.

Image credits: misterschmoo

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