Legends, Lies & Cherished Myths of American History

Richard Shenkman

• Publisher: Harper
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780060972615
• eBook ISBN:
  9780062098870
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Teaching History
• Index: History

The truth and nothing but the truth—Richard Shenkman sheds light on America's most believed legends.

The story of Columbus discovering the world was round was invented by Washington Irving.

The pilgrims never lived in log cabins.

In Concord, Massachusetts, a third of all babies born in the twenty years before the Revolution were conceived out of wedlock.

Washington may have never told a lie, but he loved to drink and dance, and he fell in love with his best friend's wife.

Independence wasn't declared on July 4th.

There's no evidence that anyone died in a frontier shootout at high noon.

After World War II, the U.S. government concluded that Japan would have surrendered within months, even if we had not bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Notes

Discoverers and Inventors

1. WASHINGTON IRVING, The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828; rpt. Twayne Publishers, 1981), pp. 47–53; SAMUEL ELIOT MORISON, Admiral of the Ocean Sea (1942), vol. I, p. 117; SAMUEL ELIOT MORISON, The European Discovery of America: The Northern Voyages (1971), p. 6; HARVEY EINBINDER, The Myth of the Britannica (1964), pp. 169–72.

2. MORISON, Admiral of the Ocean Sea, vol. 1, pp. 137–38.

3. MORISON, European Discovery of America: The Northern Voyages, ch. 3; Emily Morison Beck, ed., Sailor Historian: The Best of Samuel Eliot Morison (1977), pp. 17–18.

4. MORISON, Admiral of the Ocean Sea, vol. II, p. 271. S. E. ACKERMAN, Popular Fallacies (1924), pp. 603–06.

5. HOWARD ZINN, A People’s History of the United States (1980), pp. 1–8.

6. FREDERICK J. POHL, Amerigo Vespucci (1944), p. 63 ff., says Vespucci did invent a new astronomy based on the moon; so does DANIEL BOORSTIN, The Discoverers (1983), ch. 33; SAMUEL ELIOT MORISON disagrees in The European Discovery of America: The Southern Voyages (1974), ch. 12.

7. LOUIS SIMON, “Famous American Myths,” You’re Wrong About That (October 1938), p. 48, tells about “Amteric”; THOMAS JAY, The Encyclopedia of Fads and Fallacies (1958), p. 12, tells about Ameryke.

8. CHARLES E. NOWELL, “The Discovery of the Pacific: A Suggested Change of Approach,” Pacific Historical Review (February 1947), pp. 1–10.

9. BERGEN EVANS, The Spoor of Spooks (1954), pp. 57–58.

10. JEROME E. BROOKS, The Mighty Leaf: Tobacco Through the Centuries (1952), pp. 11, 46, 62–63.

11. HOWARD S. ABRAMSON, National Geographic: Behind America’s Lens on the World (1987), pp. 71–108.

12. PETER BAIDA, “Eli Whitney’s Other Talent,” American Heritage (May-June 1987), pp. 22–23.

13. DANIEL H. THOMAS, “Pre-Whitney Cotton Gins in French Louisiana,” Journal of Southern History (May 1965), pp. 135–48; THOMAS A. BAILEY, “Presidential Address,” Journal of American History (June 1968), p. 5ff.

14. BERNARD WEISBERGER, communication with the author; Bureau of the Census, A Century of Population Growth, from the First Censw of the United States to the Twelfth, 1790–1900 (1909), pp. 133–40.

15. ALEX GRONER, The American Heritage History of American Business and Industry (1972), pp. 87–88; ASHLEY MONTAGU and EDWARD DARLING, The Prevalence of Nonsense (1967), pp. 209–12.

16. DIXON WECTER, The Hero in America (1941), pp. 417–18.

17. You’re Wrong About That (March 1939), p. 58.

18. ROBERT LACEY, Ford: The Men and the Machine (1986), pp. 110–17, 284; DAVID HALBERSTAM, The Reckoning (1986), passim; JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH, “Truly the Last Tycoons,” New York Review of Books (August 14, 1986), p. 17.

19. LEONARD MOSLEY, Lindbergh (1976), p. 73.

20. PETER WYDEN, Day One: Before Hiroshima and After (1984), pp. 20–27.

Founding Fathers

1. THOMAS A. BAILEY, The American Pageant (1971), p. 195.

2. JOHN BACH MCMASTER, “The Political Depravity of the Fathers,” Atlantic Monthly (May 1895), pp. 626–33; NATHAN MILLER, The Founding Finoglers (1976), pp. 116–34.

3. CHARLES A. BEARD, The Republic (1962), pp. 29–33.

4. JACK P. GREENE, in an interview quoted in JOHN A. GARRATY, Interpret ing American History (1970), vol. 1, p. 55.

5. HENRY STEELE COMMAGER, in an interview, ibid., vol. I, p. 103.

6. On Jefferson, see CHARLES B. HOSMER, Presence of the Past (1965), pp. 179–85; on Hamilton, Franklin, and Madison, see MICHAEL KAMMEN, A Season of Youtk (1978), pp. 42, 64, 69, 72; on Revere, see DIXON WECTER, The Hero in America (1941), p. 87; on Washington, see DANIEL BOORSTIN, The Americans: The National Experience (1965), pp. 337–39, and W. E. WOODWARD, George Washington (1928), pp. 11, 239, 311.

Jefferson may have become a member of the national pantheon before the 1920’s. At least Wecter thinks so. Wecter puts Jefferson’s apotheosis in 1858, when a three-volume biography listing his major accomplishments was published. In any case, Jefferson seems unquestionably to have become a full-fledged member of the elite club of demigods (to use Jefferson’s own term) by the 1930’s. By then Gutzon Borglum had put his fa...

Table of contents

• Dedication
• Contents
• Author’s Note
• Discoverers and Inventors
• Founding Fathers
• Presidents
• From Rags to Riches
• Sex
• The Family
• War
• Immigrants
• The Frontier
• From Slavery to Freedom
• Education
• Holidays
• Shrines
• Art
• The Good Old Days
• Folklore
• Famous Quotes
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Searchable Terms
• About the Author
• Copyright
• About the Publisher