History being what it is (old, full of facts), perhaps it's not surprising that what people tend to remember best are certain spectacular stories: the Trojan Horse, Lady Godiva, Nero fiddling while Rome burned.
But much of the history we remember the most clearly never happened the way we think it did, says Rick Shenkman. And most of it never appeared in history books. It's just part of our popular culture.Shenkman, a former Salt Lake TV reporter, is on a crusade to set us straight. He has just written his third book - "Legends, Lies and Cherished Myths of World History" - a sequel to his best-selling "Legends, Lies and Cherished Myths of American History.
In the new book we learn, for example, that there is no historic evidence that Lady Godiva ever rode naked on a horse so that her husband, Leofric, would lower taxes. "The only part of the story that's true is that Leofric was rich, Lady Godiva was his wife, and the couple lived near Coventry."
Shenkman, who now lives in Seattle, spent over a year in the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Washington libraries trying to sort out fact from fiction. "I sludge through these turgidly written books," he says of his research technique. "I see myself as a middleman between academics, whose books are so unreadable that the only people who read them are other historians, and the general public."
Shenkman points out that his biographies are not balanced profiles. "This is not biography, this is debunking," he says. So in his profile of Gandhi, for example, he glosses over the mahatma's accomplishments and heads straight for the darker side of his character - his belief that married couples should have sex only three or four times in a lifetime, his refusal to let his wife or his sons get an education, his less than pure pacifism ("I would not flinch from sacrificing a million lives for India's liberty," he once said).
Shenkman, who has a degree in history from Vassar and did graduate work at Harvard before deciding to become a TV reporter, originally became excited about history because of a book cover.
He was a high school junior in Ridgewood, N.J., in 1970 when he wandered in one day to Trilby's bookstore and was attracted to the red, white and blue cover of a history book called "The Age of Reform." He was also "blessed," he says, to have had three excellent history teachers, "one a communist, one a right-winger and one a New Dealer. They all taught the truth as they saw it."
The point of his book, he says, is that "we ought not to be wedded to inherited notions of the past."
We don't have the myths we do because the truth is not known, he adds, "but because we want to believe in an oversimplified world." A world that, in actuality, is "complicated, impenetrable and gray."
And who's to say Shenkman's versions of the truth are right? Certainly not Shenkman himself, who is quick to point out that "you shouldn't trust anybody who writes history. Despite the work of thousands of Ph.D.'s, the truth in history is as difficult to ascertain today as it ever was."
The following are excerpts from Shenkman's debunked myths:
DON'T TAKE ANY WOODEN HORSES
The myth about the Trojan War is that there was one. There wasn't. At least there wasn't one that we know of. In the thousands of years that have elapsed since Homer's epic appeared, nobody has ever produced any evidence that the war he described took place. All the faithful have going for them is hope.
That Troy once existed is true. Indeed, from archeological evidence unearthed in the 19th and early 20th centuries there would appear to have been at least nine Troys piled one atop the other (located in what is now Turkey). But there is no proof there was ever a war between Greece and Troy involving a beautiful queen named Helen, a big wooden horse or a hero weakened by an Achilles' heel.
Much of the story is patently implausible. That the war lasted 10 years is inconceivable; army discipline never could have been maintained that long (no other war at the time is known to have lasted more than a few months). And nobody believes that the Greek soldiers camped out on the beach all those years, their Greek kings right along with them. The business about Helen - that she'd supposedly eloped with a Trojan prince and that the Greeks went to war to get her back - is attractive but unsubstantiated.
Anyway, nobody knows if Helen ever even lived. To be sure, tradition has it that the beauty whose face "launched a thousand ships" actually lived and actually served as a queen. But tradition also has it that she was the daughter of Zeus and that she was "hatched from a swan's egg."
As for the story of the Trojan Horse, nothing substantiates it. Out of the thousands of objects that have turned up in repeated excavations of Troy, not one lends any credence to the existence of a big wooden horse.
Those who claim the story of Troy is true insist it doesn't matter if some of the details are implausible or unsupported. What counts are the plausible details. But by this method any poem could be found to be historically sound.
Homer has long been credited with the story but nobody knows who he was, where he lived, whether he really existed, or how he possibly could have come by reliable information about Troy's early history. If he lived it was in the eighth or ninth century B.C., some four centuries after the was he described was fought.
MAGNA CARTA NOT SO BIG AFTER ALL
Some people say the Magna Carta is the "fountain of our liberty." Others say it isn't. After 750 years or so you'd think maybe the experts could have decided by now what to make of the document, but they haven't. All I know is, if it's the "fountain of our liberty" we're in trouble.
Remember the heinous medieval practice of trial by combat? Under Magna Carta it was legal. Trial by ordeal? It was also legal. (In a trial by ordeal the accused was allowed to prove his innocence by surviving a dunk in a vat of boiling tar.)
How about the right to be tried by a jury of one's own peers? This indeed is a right everybody ought to have and you can find it in Magna Carta just as everybody thinks. It is one of several important rights to be found in the document. The catch is, only free people were allowed to exercise the new rights listed in Magna Carta, and in 1215 only a small number of Englishmen were free. Five-sixths were serfs.
So who really benefited from Magna Carta? England's barons. All the fuss about Magna Carta is about the new rights they won from the king for their own protection. But Magna Carta didn't give the average Englishman one more right than he'd had before.
So why, if all this is true, do we celebrate Magna Carta today? It is because several hundred years ago a bright Englishman by the name of Sir Edward Coke decided to put one over on us all. He announced one day that something called Magna Carta, which he said he'd found sitting on an old dusty library shelf, gave Englishmen rights the monarch couldn't take away. From that day forward the English felt all their rights and liberties could be traced to that one document, a document nobody had ever even heard of before.
King John, by the way, didn't really sign the Magna Carta. He had his royal seal pressed in wax on the document. All the Hollywood movies which show him signing it are wrong. A king did not deign to sign anything. (Many didn't know how.)
ANOTHER KNIGHTMARE FOR HISTORIANS
To get to the bad news first: King Arthur had rotten teeth. This is the reason you never see pictures of him smiling. Come to think of it, you never see pictures of anybody from the old days smiling. This is because they all had rotten teeth. They also smelled bad and bit their nails. They never tell you these kinds of things in normal history books because historians are trained to overlook the unpleasant fact that history is about human beings.
Actually, I don't really know if King Arthur had bad teeth or not. In fact, I don't know a thing about him. And neither does anybody else. The reason for this is that Arthur never lived.
Who started the Arthurian madness? It would appear to be the work of an eighth-century Welshman named Nennius. Nennius wasn't a liar. He just enjoyed telling good stories. One of his favorites was about the day King Arthur singlehandedly slew 960 enemy Saxon soldiers.
It wasn't Nennius, though, who turned Arthur into a popular hero. It was Geoffrey of Monmouth. The reason we think of Arthur as a shining knight surrounded by sweet damsels in distress is because Geoffrey himself lived in the 12th century. And in the 12th century you couldn't go to the corner store to buy a bottle of milk without running into a knight who'd just rescued some sweet damsel.
Why is the date important? Because Arthur is supposed to have lived in the fifth century. And in the fifth century there were no knights. Knights didn't appear in Europe until the eighth century, and they didn't appear in England for several centuries after that.
Nor, for that matter, did people live in castles back in the fifth century. Stone castles did not appear in England until after the Norman Conquest 600 years later.
Anyway, the Arthur we are familiar with is not the Arthur known in medieval England. Between then and now Arthur's story got sanitized. In the medieval versions, for instance, he commits incest with his half-sister, by whom he had a bastard son.
NAPOLEON: A TALLER TALE
The main belief about Napoleon, that he suffered from a Napoleonic complex and wanted to rule the world, is almost always attributed to his short height. But he wasn't short. By contemporary standards, he was of average height. The confusion about his height was due to the fact that it was widely reported, after his autopsy, that he measured just 5-foot-2. But the 5-foot-2 figure was based on the old French system of measurement, known as pieds de roi. Using the modern standard of measurement, he was actually a little over 5-foot-6.
Napoleon's characteristic pose, his hand stuck smartly in his vest, has fascinated people for generations, giving rise to all sorts of interesting psychological diagnoses. All are in error, however. His behavior was actuated by a physical cause. His whole adult life he suffered from sharp stomach pains. Keeping his hand on his stomach helped relieve his affliction.
Only the French recall the emperor's glory days. The rest of us seem to savor his demise, remembering him for his defeats: the Moscow retreat and Waterloo, both of which are suffused in error.
The cruelty of Russian winters is so well known that the story of Napoleon's defeat in the winter of 1812 is taken almost as a given. Actually, the winter of 1812 in Russia was remarkably mild. The reason the famous crossing of the Beresina on Nov. 26 was so deadly was that the stream had melted, trapping French troops on one side until Napoleon could build a makeshift bridge for their escape.
We blame Napoleon's defeat on the Russian winter because Napoleon himself did, to lessen his own responsibility for the failure. But the army was broken long before the winter cold arrived.
The oddest finding of historians is that his army probably suffered as much from the heat as the cold. The Russian summer of 1812 was so hot that tens of thousands of his soldiers died from heat exhaustion and sunstroke.
HOLLYWOOD DOES HISTORY
If the movies often get history wrong, it's thought that the newsreels - many of which were also produced by Hollywood - got history-in-the-making right. But the pictures often were bogus. Unbeknownst to movie audiences - or to film historians for many years, for that matter - the pictures were often staged or faked outright.
Phony war scenes were especially common. During the Spanish-American War audiences were shown an exciting moment purportedly of the Battle of Santiago, which was actually shot in a bathtub containing toy ships.
Newsreel footage supposedly of the Boer War was also faked. Film historians have now established that much of it was shot in New Jersey. Footage of World War I was often staged, sometimes with the cooperation of enemy German soldiers.
The reason for faking the pictures of the war was that the fake pictures always looked more authentic than the real ones. Captain F.E. Kleinschmidt, who traveled with the Austrian army, explained: "In real life a man who has been hit by a bullet does not throw up his hands and rifle and then fall in a theatrical fashion and roll a few times over. When he lies in the trenches and is hit he barely lurches a few inches forward or quietly turns on his side. The real picture is not as dramatic as the fake picture."
Even the much-respected "March of Time" newsreels contained fake footage. A 1937 newsreel, for instance, featuring the Japanese attack on China was shot in the United States. Yes, in New Jersey.