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History?

What actually happened, minus the myths your teacher repeated. 24 questions and counting.

Who really discovered America?Indigenous peoples arrived at least 15,000 years ago, so they discovered it. Among Europeans, Norse sailor Leif Erikson …
How long was the Hundred Years War?116 years, from 1337 to 1453, so the name undersells it. It was not one continuous war but a series of conflicts between…
Did medieval people really think the Earth was flat?No. Educated people knew the Earth was round for over 2,000 years; the ancient Greeks even calculated its size. The flat…
How did the dinosaurs go extinct?An asteroid about six miles wide struck near Mexico 66 million years ago, triggering a global winter that killed roughly…
Who was really the first president of the United States?George Washington, inaugurated in 1789 under the Constitution. The trivia trap points to John Hanson, who led Congress u…
Why did the Roman Empire fall?No single cause, and half of it did not fall for another thousand years. The Western Empire collapsed in 476 AD from a m…
Was Napoleon actually short?No, he was average height for his era, around five foot six or seven. The short Napoleon myth came from confusion betwee…
How did World War I actually start?An assassination lit a fuse already laid. The killing of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914 triggered a chain of alliance …
What was the Black Death?A plague pandemic that killed roughly a third to half of Europe, tens of millions of people, in just a few years around …
Who actually built the pyramids?Paid Egyptian workers, not slaves and definitely not aliens. Archaeology found their organized villages, tombs, and reco…
Why do we have leap years?Because a year is not exactly 365 days but about 365.24, so we add a day every four years to catch up. The extra rule, s…
What caused the Great Depression?The 1929 stock crash was the trigger, not the whole cause. Bank failures, a collapsing money supply, plummeting demand, …
Were people burned at the stake in Salem?No, that is the most persistent Salem myth. Nineteen convicted witches were hanged, not burned, and one man was pressed …
Did Edison really invent the lightbulb?Not exactly. Others built electric lights before him; Edison and his lab created the first practical, long-lasting, comm…
Why is the Statue of Liberty green?It is made of copper, and copper turns green as it oxidizes. The statue was shiny brown like a penny when it arrived in …
How old are the Egyptian pyramids?The Great Pyramid is about 4,500 years old, built around 2560 BC. To put that in perspective, Cleopatra lived closer to …
Did Lincoln free the slaves?Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation freed slaves only in the rebelling Confederate states, and only as Union armies adva…
What happened to the Library of Alexandria?It was not destroyed in one dramatic fire. The great library declined gradually over centuries through multiple damaging…
When did humans first appear?Anatomically modern humans emerged in Africa around 300,000 years ago. Our genus Homo goes back over 2 million years, an…
Who actually invented the internet?No single person. ARPANET began in 1969 with Defense Department funding; Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn designed TCP/IP in the 1…
What was the Silk Road?Not a road, and not primarily about silk. It was a shifting network of overland and maritime routes linking China to the…
Why did the Titanic actually sink?An iceberg opened a series of gaps along the hull, flooding more watertight compartments than the design could survive. …
What was Prohibition, and did it work?The 1920 to 1933 constitutional ban on producing and selling alcohol in the US. Consumption did fall substantially at fi…
Was Cleopatra Egyptian?She ruled Egypt but descended from Ptolemy, a Macedonian Greek general of Alexander the Great. Her family ruled for near…