Katie Adams - Bullsh*t: 500 Mind-Blowing Lies We Still Believe

Theres a bit more to those stories about the Founding Fathers, the Pilgrims, and the American way of life that youve heard a million times. For example: the truth.

Those found guilty in the Salem Witch Trials were burned at the stake.

In the Salem Witch Trials of the 1690s, 20 people (mostly women) were found guilty and executed, and they were hanged, all except for Giles Corey, who was crushed to death under the weight of stones.

Charles Lindbergh became an American hero and celebrity after he piloted the Spirit of St. Louis over the Atlantic Ocean, the first person to do so.

Lindbergh was the 61st person to fly over the Atlanticbut the first person to do it solo.

American schools summer vacation originated with farm families pulling their kids out of school to help with chores.

In the 19th century, before the days of air conditioning, schoolhouses got so hot in the summer months that wealthy parents took their kids out of school in June, July, and August and would retreat to their country houses. Then the middle classes started doing it, and before long, so few kids were showing up for summer school that administrators canceled classes.

President Zachary Taylor died in 1850 after eating a ton of cherries and washing them down with milk, a toxic combination when mixed.

While Taylor did dine on fruit and cow juice on the Fourth of July, five days before his death, it was cholera that killed him.

During times of attack by Native Americans, Old West pioneers would circle their wagons.

That just looked dramatic in old cowboy movies. When settlers really did circle their wagons on the frontier, it was to fence in livestock.

The Old West was the Wild West, full of shootouts, murder, and pioneer justice.

During what historians consider the golden age of the Old West, 1870 to 1885, the major settlements of Dodge City, Ellsworth, Abilene, Caldwell, and Wichita experienced 45 murders, combined. The murder rate in the 21st-century U.S. is about five times that.

President George Bush wouldve won re-election in 1992 if not for the candidacy of H. Ross Perot.

The 1992 presidential election was the first in decades to feature three major candidates: Democrat Bill Clinton, Republican Bush, and Perot, a billionaire from Texas running as an independent. Perot held himself up as a populist, a financial conservative and political outsider, and he won 19 percent of the popular vote. As he leaned to the right of the political spectrum, conventional wisdom held that without Perot in the race, Bush wouldve gotten that 19 percent, enough to triumph over Clinton. Post-election exit polls indicated that Perot siphoned off votes equally from Clinton and Bush.

Slavery officially ended when President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1862.

Most northern states had long outlawed slavery; therefore, the Emancipation Proclamation was an expression of U.S. government authority over the rogue Southern states that had seceded, so they didnt much pay attention to Lincolns order. Five states remained loyal to the Union during the Civil War but still used slaveryKentucky, Missouri, West Virginia, Maryland, and Delawareand the Emancipation Proclamation allowed that practice to continue there. Slavery was eliminated nationwide with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865.

Al Gore claimed to have invented the Internet.

In a presidential campaign interview with CNN in 1999, Gore said, During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our countrys economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system.

When millions of people immigrated to the United States through Ellis Island, officials changed their names to make them easier to pronounce or to sound more American.

Records of immigrants were generated from ship manifests, so there was no chance or reason to rename anyone. If immigrants names changed, the immigrants made the change themselves, informing processors of their new name when they were getting checked off the manifest.

The only group the U.S. government placed in internment camps during World War II were Japanese people.

About 11,500 people of German descent were interned during World War II.