20 Famous Stories From History You Probably Learned Wrong

Christopher Columbus, a Genoese explorer working for Spain’s Queen Isabella I and King Ferdinand II, left in 1492 to find a western trade route to Asia’s spice markets, and he wound up landing on a Bahamian island that he named San Salvador. Europeans had already learned that the earth was spherical. Columbus’s error was assuming it was smaller than it really was. The idea that he embarked to prove the roundness of the earth was made popular by Washington Irving in his biography of Columbus written in 1828.

Paul Revere was a Boston silversmith and a patriot messenger. On the night of April 18, 1775, he rode out with fellow courier William Dawes to warn patriot leaders that British troops were marching toward Lexington. Revere said he never yelled “the British are coming!” as many of the American colonists still thought of themselves as British subjects. The two were joined by Dr. Samuel Prescott as they neared Lexington. All three were stopped by a British patrol. Revere was captured and released, but only Prescott made it to Concord.

Before Rosa Parks refused to yield her bus seat to a white passenger in December 1955, she had served as the secretary of the Montgomery, Alabama, local of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, a civil rights group, for 12 years. She was arrested and found guilty under the city’s segregation law. Earlier that year, a girl named Claudette Colvin had also been arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a bus, but organizers deemed her case less appropriate for a public legal battle. Parks’s credentials made her the ideal figure for such a case, and her arrest sparked the Montgomery bus boycott.

Delegates from the thirteen colonies that had gathered at Philadelphia in the Second Continental Congress voted to approve independence on July 2, 1776. They approved the final wording of Jefferson’s draft and sent it to the printer two days later, on July 4. It took several more weeks to prepare the formal handwritten copy of the document, which most delegates signed a month after independence had been declared, some even later than that. John Hancock, president of the Congress, signed first.

In April 1912, the White Star Line steamship RMS Titanic hit an iceberg and sank, resulting in more than 1,500 deaths. Brochures published by White Star and a trade magazine both referred to the ship as “designed to be unsinkable” and “practically unsinkable,” referring to its watertight compartments. The claim was a qualified one, not an absolute one. The unqualified statement of “100% unsinkable” that gained wide currency came from the headlines of news stories about the disaster, and not from White Star.

The Emancipation Proclamation was an executive order issued by Abraham Lincoln, the 16th U.S. president and commander in chief, on January 1, 1863, during the Civil War. However, only slaves residing in rebel states were freed. Slavery stayed legal in four slave states that were not rebels, Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri, and Delaware, and in those parts of the Confederacy occupied by Union forces. Since it was based on the war powers of the commander in chief, the proclamation could only be applied in places where the Union had military authority. Slavery wasn’t abolished nationwide until the 13th Amendment a few years later.

While Edison was not the first to invent a light bulb, as more than 20 other inventors, including British inventor Joseph Swan, had made working bulbs that would burn out in hours or less, making them impractical for general use, he invented an electric lighting system at his Menlo Park lab that was practical enough to be sold to the public. In 1879, Edison’s crew developed a carbonized cotton thread filament that lasted for several hours, and a year later they had developed a bamboo filament that lasted for more than 1,200 hours. Edison also designed the electrical generators and wiring necessary to make electricity a sellable commodity.

Charles Lindbergh, an American airmail pilot, flew the Spirit of St. Louis non-stop and alone from New York to Paris in May 1927, winning a cash prize. But though he’s often remembered as the first person to cross the Atlantic by air, British aviators John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown made the first non-stop transatlantic flight years before him, and airships had already carried passengers across. Lindbergh’s record was narrower than his legend implies, but it remains a genuine one: he was the first to do it alone, without stopping.

In December 1773, members of the Sons of Liberty, a protest organization led by Samuel Adams, boarded three ships in Boston Harbor and tossed hundreds of crates of tea belonging to the British East India Company into the sea. Though commonly thought to be an outrage over a new tax on tea, the Tea Act passed by Parliament actually made legal tea cheaper by reimbursing the company for its export tax. The act was unpopular among colonial merchants and smugglers, who feared that the influx of cheap, tax-advantaged East India Company tea would drive them out of business and give the company a monopoly.

In 1876, Scottish-born inventor Alexander Graham Bell was in Boston, where he managed to transmit speech using a liquid transmitter in March. “Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you,” said Bell. His lawyer had submitted Bell’s patent application only hours before rival inventor Elisha Gray filed a caveat for a similar device. An Italian immigrant named Antonio Meucci also had built prototypes for transmitting voices, but couldn’t afford to renew his patent. Bell’s patent would eventually survive more than 600 court challenges, making it the most litigated patent in U.S. history.

In autumn 1621, the Wampanoag chief Ousamequin (also known as Massasoit) and roughly 90 of his men joined the Plymouth Colony Pilgrims, English separatists who had settled in Massachusetts, for a three-day harvest feast. As recorded by the Pilgrim Edward Winslow, the celebration was also a show of strength in the wake of a defensive pact with the Wampanoags earlier that year. It was not a religious fast day, which is what Pilgrims would have actually called a “thanksgiving,” and the celebration was never an annual one. That didn’t come until more than 200 years later, with President Abraham Lincoln’s declaration.

In 1626, Peter Minuit, the director of the Dutch West India Company’s colony of New Netherland, struck a deal for Manhattan Island with nearby native inhabitants, possibly Munsee-speaking Lenape or visiting Canarsee people. A contemporary letter describes the value of the trade goods as 60 guilders, a considerable amount at the time, paid in goods such as iron tools, kettles, axes, and cloth, not glass beads. The $24 price tag originated with a currency conversion in 1846 by historian John Romeyn Brodhead, who did not account for inflation. It’s also likely that the natives viewed the deal as a shared use of the land, rather than a permanent sale.

Pheidippides was an Athenian long-distance courier who ran during Greece’s war with Persia in 490 BC. Herodotus, the Greek historian who wrote closest to the events, recounts that Pheidippides ran some 150 miles across mountains from Athens to Sparta seeking military help before the Battle of Marathon. He makes no mention of any run afterwards. Stories of the runner racing from the battlefield to Athens, proclaiming that he had won before collapsing and dying, were fabricated hundreds of years later by writers such as Lucian and Plutarch.

In 1215, King John of England issued Magna Carta at Runnymede to quell a revolt by English barons angered by his imposition of arbitrary taxes and expropriation of their lands after a disastrous loss of territory in France. Rather than guaranteeing individual rights, the document served to uphold feudal privileges held by the nobility. Around ten weeks later, Pope Innocent III pronounced the charter illegal and null and void, which exacerbated tensions that led to civil war between the monarch and the barons. Magna Carta survived solely because subsequent monarchs reissued the document with revisions after receiving tax grants from Parliament, including Henry III, King of England.

The teenager Romulus Augustulus, the final Western Roman Emperor, was deposed in 476 AD by a Germanic officer named Odoacer who served in the Roman army. He declined to appoint himself emperor, instead sending the imperial regalia to Constantinople and acknowledging the Eastern Roman emperor as the sole ruler, while assuming rule over Italy as a client king. Roman civil law, the Senate, and local government continued functioning. The eastern half, later known as the Byzantine Empire, accounted for more than half of the empire’s total population and survived for another thousand years.

Woodrow Wilson was the 28th U.S. president. He helped negotiate the Treaty of Versailles, signed June 28, 1919, which ended World War One and created the League of Nations. Senate Majority Leader Henry Cabot Lodge led the group that wanted 14 amendments to the treaty before they ratified it. The amendments would protect Congress’s war powers. Lodge wasn’t against the treaty. The harder-line Irreconcilables were. Wilson would not compromise. The Senate voted against ratifying the treaty twice, and the U.S. never joined the League of Nations.

A mariner of mixed African and Wampanoag blood, Crispus Attucks was one of five colonists shot to death in Boston in March 1770 by British sentries led by Captain Thomas Preston. Paul Revere’s engraving depicted a massacre of unarmed civilians, but court documents from the trial reveal that the soldiers were besieged by a mob of colonists who threw snowballs, chunks of ice, rocks, and clubs at them. Patriot attorney John Adams, who would become America’s second president, defended the soldiers, and most of them walked free.

On June 17, 1775, Colonel William Prescott, commander of the colonial militia, encamped not on Bunker Hill itself, but on nearby Breed’s Hill. The bulk of the fighting in this first great battle of the Revolution happened here. The British, under Major General William Howe, finally seized the hill, but only after the defenders ran out of gunpowder and withdrew. Even so, the British suffered more than 1,000 men killed or wounded.

In October 1781, British general Lord Cornwallis surrendered his army to the Americans and the French after a siege in Yorktown, Virginia. Cornwallis was reportedly too ill to attend the formal surrender ceremony, sending Brigadier General Charles O’Hara in his place to offer his sword to Washington. Washington declined to accept the sword from a subordinate and pointed O’Hara toward Washington’s own deputy, Major General Benjamin Lincoln. The surrender meant that thousands of British soldiers would be taken prisoner, although fighting would continue elsewhere for nearly two years.

In 1928, Alexander Fleming, a Scottish bacteriologist, saw that Penicillium mold had killed the bacteria that contaminated a petri dish in his London lab. He published the discovery, but was unable to extract and purify enough of the compound for use as a medication, and largely abandoned research on the fungus. More than a decade later, an Oxford University team of pathologist Howard Florey, biochemist Ernst Chain, and biochemist Norman Heatley developed the processes that turned penicillin into a medicine. They conducted the first human tests in 1941. Fleming, Florey, and Chain shared the Nobel Prize.

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