Misconceptions about History - mental_floss on YouTube (Ep. 23)

Hey there, I'm Elliot and this is Mental Floss on YouTube

Today, I'm going to talk about some misconceptions about history. Misconception number one, the Spanish Inquisition was a huge and cruel historical event

Actually, experts now believe that the Inquisition was more humane than originally thought

According to historian Thomas Madden, most people accused of heresy by the Inquisition

were either acquitted or their sentences suspended. In fact, there are cases of people deliberately blaspheming

so that they'd get into Inquisition prisons and out of the state prisons. Madden also notes, before 1530

the Spanish Inquisition was widely hailed as the best-run, most humane court in Europe

Later, English Protestants exaggerated stories about the Inquisition. Misconception number two, the Maya civilization suddenly disappeared

This might not be the big mystery that people like to think it is. According to a book from Stanford University

the Maya were the last kingdom in the New World to fall to the Spanish in 1697

Misconception number three, the story of Lady Godiva's naked ride. I'm sure that you've heard this one, so I'll just give you a quick refresher

11th century noblewoman Lady Godiva was fed up with her husband, who had placed huge taxes on the people of Coventry He told her that if she rode through the streets on a horse naked then he would lower the taxes So she did after issuing a proclamation that everyone in the town must stay in their houses with their windows shut One man named Tom didn listen to the

order, and that's how we get the expression, peeping Tom. False. It's a fun story, but probably

not true. We can't find evidence of the tale existing any earlier than 100 years after Godiva's

death. Plus, the first known source for it was an English monk named Roger of Wendover, who had a

reputation for embellishing stories. And the Tom part of the story is even newer, emerging in the

16th century. Misconception at number four, slaves built the Egyptian pyramids. This one cannot be

confirmed until we build a time machine, but there's actually evidence that the people who

built the pyramids were paid workers. In 2010, archaeologists from Egypt uncovered tombs from

4,000 years ago of the people who built the pyramids. Evidence shows that they were poor

workers from the northern and southern regions of Egypt, but they were respected for their work

so they were buried within the tombs. Slaves wouldn't have been buried there, according to experts

Misconception number five. The Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves. The proclamation was only directed towards the states that were rebelling

Abraham Lincoln wanted to hurt those states, so it didn't affect the slave states that were still loyal to the Union

Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri. It also didn't affect the parts of the Confederacy

that had already been taken back over by the Union. Basically the Emancipation Proclamation didn free any slaves because it was only directed at places that weren listening to the federal government anyway Misconception number six Benjamin Franklin discovered electricity

Actually, the English astronomer William Gilbert studied electricity in the 1600s, well before Franklin was even born

As for the story about Franklin and his kite, he only described it briefly four months after it supposedly happened

The full tale wasn't written until 15 years later, when it was published by one of his friends, Joseph Priestley

We don't know for sure whether he experimented with a kite at all. Misconception number seven, early humans died really young

We usually hear that the life expectancy from the Stone Age through the early 1900s was much lower than ours is now

so people tend to assume that people used to die around age 40. The problem here is how we calculate life expectancy by including infant mortality rates

and that's why we should differentiate between life expectancy and maximum human lifespan

which has remained stable over the course of thousands of years. Misconception number eight, Nero played the fiddle while Rome burned down

As you may remember from history class, the Great Fire of Rome occurred in the year 64 CE

At the time, Rome had 14 districts, but the fire destroyed 10 of those. And the story goes that the Emperor Nero played the fiddle while watching it burn

But we're pretty sure he didn't for a couple of reasons. First, the violin family of instruments wasn't invented until the 11th century

And second Nero was around 35 miles away when the fire started It wouldn have even hurt him It was a little imaginary violin Speaking of fire misconception number nine The Great Chicago Fire happened thanks to a cow After the fire in 1871 the Chicago Tribune published that the whole thing occurred

thanks to a cow who knocked over a lit lantern while it was being milked. Forty years later

Michael Ahern, the reporter who wrote the story, confessed that he made it up. Misconception

number ten. A lot about gladiators. Quite a few things that we think we know about them

are not true. Like thanks to the movie Gladiator, many believe that when an emperor puts his thumb

down, the losing gladiator would be killed. We do know that there was a hand gesture that

indicated this, but scholars aren't sure whether it was thumbs up, thumbs down, or a different

gesture altogether. People also tend to believe that only men were gladiators, but that is not

true. A female gladiator was known as a gladiatrix. How cool is that? Finally, not as many died as you

might think. According to historian George Veal, at the start of a fight in the first century CE

a gladiator had a 90% chance of surviving, but this number lowered as time went on

By the 3rd century CE, they probably had a 3 to 1 chance of living