Bad History?

[Dr Nigel]

Oh, yes, and going back to the original theme of this thread..

I've also not noticed any websites for Bad Biochemistry, and, boy, is there a lot of that around!

In Star Trek: TNG, what Beverly Crusher knows about DNA ... isn't worth knowing.

And that film Outbreak! Hah! I wish it were so easy to manufacture thousands of doses of a vaccine in 24 hours! (Never minding the lab researcher who had disabled the safety interlocks on his benchtop centrifuge so that he could put his hand in it while it was still spinning .... Aaargh!)

Breathe deep ... calm down ....

Better now.

[TriangleMan]

Anyway, I'm sure the ancient Greeks actually calculated the radius of the Earth, and were not far off. I can't remember the name of the chap who is most often associated with the measurement. I am, however, pretty sure that they knew the Earth was a sphere (approximately) back in 300 BC.

Eratosthenes, around 200BC.

[Lianachan]

I'm increasingly bothered that the Battle Of Dunnichen is so widely known as the Battle Of Nechtansmere.

The "ancients thought the the world was flat" thing also has me gnashing my teeth, rolling my eyes theatrically and rending my garments.

*edited to point out something about the links - Yes. I know. I did that on purpose*

[Eroica]

The "ancients thought the the world was flat" thing also has me gnashing my teeth, rolling my eyes theatrically and rending my garments.

Well, to be fair, some of them did. Democritus, I think? I've also read that in St Augustine's time (circa 400 AD), many of the Roman intelligentsia reverted to a flat-earth theory; but whether this is true I can't say.

[Disinfo Agent]

Looking at the link I posted on page 1 of this thread might clear that up.

[Lianachan]

Well, to be fair, some of them did. Democritus, I think? I've also read that in St Augustine's time (circa 400 AD), many of the Roman intelligentsia reverted to a flat-earth theory; but whether this is true I can't say.

Indeed yes, but it's normally deployed as a sweeping generalisation by people who would have no idea about any of that.

[Dr Nigel]

Thanks, Triangle Man.

Here's another one. At the Battle of Hastings in 1066, King Harold was killed by an arrow in the eye. Er, well, actually it may not have been him, it could have been one of about half a dozen people who were with him at the time. But he did die (or receive a fatal wound) in the battle.

[LurchGS]

regarding the claim that it was teh steamboat that made the westward "flood" of humanity possible...I think I'll differ with you on that. Steamboats had little, if anything, to do with the surge westward. The invention that really pushed it was the railroad - even though rail across the Mississippi River didn't come until after 1865.

Rail made it very easy for the disgruntled, the poor, the wanderer, and the 'I hate my neighbors" to get a significant portion of the way to new - and essentially free - land, at very little cost.

Once they got to the Mississippi, they crossed - and built the wagons on the WEST side of the river (you ever tried putting any kind of wagon on a steamboat? Ever wonder why St Louis is in Missouri and not Illinois?)

[LurchGS]

As far as accuracy,the buffalo hunters routinely made 1000 yard shots on their targets in the 1870s & '80s,so a 50 yard shot on a man-sized target by an experienced shootist with either a cap & ball or the new cartridge revolver wasn't unusual.


I should like to point out that there's a hole in that logic.
1) 1000 yard shots were made with a rifle - of course, Rifles are DESIGNED for long range. Pistols, on the other hand, are designed for close quarters use. Given those requirements, a great deal more care was taken when boring and rifling a... rifle. On the other hand, every vintage pistol I've ever fired has been insanely innaccurate by today's standards.

2) related to 1): 50 yards is a long distance for a pistol in any era. Any little shake in the shooter's hand would result in a big change in aim point. I'd easily believe 50 *feet* (20 paces is approximately 50 feet, after all). While certainly possible, I rather doubt 50 yard shots would be all that common. That's definately approaching a distance where a rifle would be a much better choice.

[Dr Nigel]

1) 1000 yard shots were made with a rifle - of course, Rifles are DESIGNED for long range. Pistols, on the other hand, are designed for close quarters use. Given those requirements, a great deal more care was taken when boring and rifling a... rifle. On the other hand, every vintage pistol I've ever fired has been insanely innaccurate by today's standards.

I agree. You'd struggle to hit a building at 1000 yards with a pistol better than three times out of ten. I also don't think there's anything routine about hitting a buffalo at 1000 yards even using a rifle (except perhaps a modern sniper or hunting rifle with a telescopic sight). That's more than half a mile. I've only fired high-velocity rifles at targets 100 and 200 yards away, and that seemed quite a long way at the time.

[Sam5]

regarding the claim that it was teh steamboat that made the westward "flood" of humanity possible...I think I'll differ with you on that. Steamboats had little, if anything, to do with the surge westward. The invention that really pushed it was the railroad - even though rail across the Mississippi River didn't come until after 1865.

Rail made it very easy for the disgruntled, the poor, the wanderer, and the 'I hate my neighbors" to get a significant portion of the way to new - and essentially free - land, at very little cost.

Once they got to the Mississippi, they crossed - and built the wagons on the WEST side of the river (you ever tried putting any kind of wagon on a steamboat? Ever wonder why St Louis is in Missouri and not Illinois?)

Hi,

The Conestoga wagon was built in Pennsylvania. They crossed the Mississippi River by steam-powered ferry boats designed to haul wagons. This allowed for crossings by long wagon trains headed West before the Intercontinental railroad was completed in 1869.

Lodisa Frizzell, 1852: “Teams crossing the river all the while, but there is not half ferry boats enough here, great delay is the consequence, besides the pushing & crowding, to see who shall get across first.”

http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:...river%22&hl=en

“On reaching the Mississippi River, it may be necessary to stop a day or two. If there is a large backlog of wagons for the ferries, a family may have to wait their turn. At times the ferries do not operate more than once a day. Some ferry captains will not run on Sunday.”

http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:...pi+river&hl=en

“Thousands of immigrants who came before the seventies entered the promised land of Iowa by means of ferries. The steamboat companies and ferrymen were bitterly opposed to the construction of bridges across the Father of Waters”

http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:...pi+river&hl=en

“We crossed the Mississippi River between Rock Island, Illinois & Davenport, Iowa in a ferry boat.”

http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:...pi+river&hl=en

Population of St. Louis in 1830 = 4,977
(before the steamboat became popular on the river)

Population of St. Louis in 1860 = 160,773
(after the steamboat became popular on the river)

http://physics.bu.edu/~redner/projec...s/stlouis.html

[Frantic Freddie]

As far as accuracy,the buffalo hunters routinely made 1000 yard shots on their targets in the 1870s & '80s,so a 50 yard shot on a man-sized target by an experienced shootist with either a cap & ball or the new cartridge revolver wasn't unusual.


I should like to point out that there's a hole in that logic.
1) 1000 yard shots were made with a rifle - of course, Rifles are DESIGNED for long range. Pistols, on the other hand, are designed for close quarters use. Given those requirements, a great deal more care was taken when boring and rifling a... rifle. On the other hand, every vintage pistol I've ever fired has been insanely innaccurate by today's standards.

Where are you getting that assumption from? Both Colt & Smith & Wesson hand-fitted their handguns & they had a reputation for accuracy.It's possible that the rifling could be shot out in an old gun,destrotying accuracy.
The guns of the era were no less accurate than they are today.

2) related to 1): 50 yards is a long distance for a pistol in any era. Any little shake in the shooter's hand would result in a big change in aim point. I'd easily believe 50 *feet* (20 paces is approximately 50 feet, after all). While certainly possible, I rather doubt 50 yard shots would be all that common. That's definately approaching a distance where a rifle would be a much better choice.

I routinely shoot handguns at 50 yard targets & it's really easy to make hits on a man-sized target at 100 yards.Elmer Keith (the father of the 44 S&W Magnum) made a documented hit on a wounded ram at 600 yards using his pet .44 Special load.

[Frantic Freddie]

I agree. You'd struggle to hit a building at 1000 yards with a pistol better than three times out of ten. I also don't think there's anything routine about hitting a buffalo at 1000 yards even using a rifle (except perhaps a modern sniper or hunting rifle with a telescopic sight). That's more than half a mile. I've only fired high-velocity rifles at targets 100 and 200 yards away, and that seemed quite a long way at the time.

http://www.nrahq.org/compete/blackpowder.asp

NRA Black Powder Target Rifle competition allows any safe original, modern production or custom variety black powder rifle to be fired in matches at distances of 100 to 1,000 yards

[Dr Nigel]

Frantic Freddie - OK, I accept that shooting matches use targets out to 1000 yards. But I will assume that the people firing at those targets are mostly pretty damn good shots.

I would also contest the accuracy of mid-19th century weapons compared with modern ones. Any weapon with a rifled barrel that fires a bullet as opposed to a ball will be of comparable accuracy. My (albeit limited) understanding of the mid-19th century firearms is that most (even rifled weapons) fired a ball rather than a bullet. If this is the case, modern weapons will be more accurate.

[TheBlackCat]

The reason no one wanted to fund Colombus was that they were convinced his calculations about the size of the Earth were wrong. His calculations indicated the Earth was much smaller than everyone else had calculated. Everyone else thought that the distance to the orient was too far and no one could make the journey with the current level of technology. It turns out everyone else was right, if it wasn't for the complete accident of there being another, basically unknown continent in the way Columbus would have turned back or been lost at sea.

Paul Revere was among the people who rode to warn the minutemen that the British were en route. However, the British captured him before he could carry out his assignment. "The Midnight Run of Paul Revere" was actually carried out by another man.

Thomas Edison did not invent the light bulb. The light bulb had been invented years before. What Edison did was invent a light bulb that lasted long enough without burning out to be a commercially viable product.

Einstein got the Nobel Prize for his work in the photoelectric effect. He never recieved a Nobel prize for relativity.

The Constituion of the United States did not form the first government of the United States. Technically the Second Continental Congress was the first US government, which used the Decleration of Indpendence as a makeshift constitution. After that, there was a constitution known as the Articles of Confederation. This government was in place about 7 years before the current constitution was formed. Additionally, the Framers who wrote the Constitution were not supposed to be making a new government, they were simply supposed to be repairing the Articles. The Constitutional Convention had to be carried out in strict secrecy because what they were doing was technically treason. I have heard some debate over whether the Articles were actually doing that poor a job by the time of the Constitutional Convention, but I do not know how valid the debate is. Also, Thomas Jefferson was not involved in writing the constitution, he was the US embassador to France at the time and thus was not in the country.

[Frantic Freddie]

Frantic Freddie - OK, I accept that shooting matches use targets out to 1000 yards. But I will assume that the people firing at those targets are mostly pretty damn good shots.

I would also contest the accuracy of mid-19th century weapons compared with modern ones. Any weapon with a rifled barrel that fires a bullet as opposed to a ball will be of comparable accuracy. My (albeit limited) understanding of the mid-19th century firearms is that most (even rifled weapons) fired a ball rather than a bullet. If this is the case, modern weapons will be more accurate.

By the 1850s the Minie ball (a misnomer,it's a conical projectile) was invented & used to devastating effect in the American Civil War,shots up to 600 yards were not uncommon.

I'll find some more links to that & the buffalo hunters.


Here's a good story,about General Sedgewick,whose last words were "They couldn't hit an elephant at that dis..."
http://www.sedgwick.org/na/families/...aminm1841.html

About 10 o'clock in the morning of the 9th of May, 1864, three days after the battle of the Wilderness, and three days before the battle of the Bloody Angle, Major-General John Sedgwick, commanding the sixth corps of Grant's Army, was killed, near Spottsylvania, by a single shot from a Confederate sharpshooter, over a half mile distant.

[Dr Nigel]

I stand corrected.

[Gillianren]

They crossed the Mississippi River by steam-powered ferry boats designed to haul wagons.

not everyone. the Ingallses, for example, drove across the river while it was frozen. (okay, I can't actually remember if that was the Mississippi or not, and I'm too lazy to look it up. but I think it safe to say that an awful lot of people did not, in fact, use steamships.)

[Sam5]

not everyone. the Ingallses, for example, drove across the river while it was frozen.

That's pretty clever. Man, that must have been a rough way to travel in the old days.

I crossed the river on an Amtrak one time, someplace up North, and it was all frozen over.

[Eroica]

I think the story of "racism" in Latin America is not accurate in modern history books. The Spanish freely inter-married with the Indians and formed the totally new "race" that today we call "Hispanics" or "Latinos", and there are a few hundred million of them in Latin America and the US today. Only a few of the Spanish families refused to mix with the Indians.

I'm in the middle of James Michener's Texas at the moment. I don't know how accurate it really is, or how good a researcher he was (he frequently refers to nineteenth century Scots-Irish as coming from Northern Ireland, which didn't exist until 1920!), but he mentions that a couple of Spanish officials (Jesuits?) once drew up a list of 84 racial categories found in Mexico in the seventeenth or eighteenth century, beginning with Peninsulares (Spaniards born in Iberia) and ending with, I think, Negro-Native Americans! If true, it shows: 1) that such intermixing did indeed take place, as you point out; and 2) that some people took such racial/racist distinctions seriously. However, Michener makes a point of stating that very few of their contemporaries took such lists seriously.

[Sam5]

I'm in the middle of James Michener's Texas at the moment. I don't know how accurate it really is, or how good a researcher he was (he frequently refers to nineteenth century Scots-Irish as coming from Northern Ireland, which didn't exist until 1920!), but he mentions that a couple of Spanish officials (Jesuits?) once drew up a list of 84 racial categories found in Mexico in the seventeenth or eighteenth century, beginning with Peninsulares (Spaniards born in Iberia) and ending with, I think, Negro-Native Americans! If true, it shows: 1) that such intermixing did indeed take place, as you point out; and 2) that some people took such racial/racist distinctions seriously. However, Michener makes a point of stating that very few of their contemporaries took such lists seriously.

Thanks for the information. I’ve been interested in genetics and race mixing for many decades. I think it’s because I’ve traveled around the US a lot and down into different parts of Mexico and Central America. And one thing I’ve notice is that quite a lot of people tend to look alike if they were born and raised in just one town or village, yet, if I drive a 100 or so miles away, to another town or village, I can see other people who tend to look very much alike within the village, but they don’t look like the people from the other village.

I figure this might be some kind of family-group genetics that make them look alike, especially if they marry within their own village. So in effect, I think we might be able to classify various villages as containing separate and distinct “village races” of people. Or maybe I should call that “family groups” or something rather than “races.” Any ideas about this?

[ausduck1]

Thanks, Triangle Man.

Here's another one. At the Battle of Hastings in 1066, King Harold was killed by an arrow in the eye. Er, well, actually it may not have been him, it could have been one of about half a dozen people who were with him at the time. But he did die (or receive a fatal wound) in the battle.

Just watched a documentary that analysed just this Battle - seems that William and Harold were pretty evenly matched as leaders and the Battle of Hastings could have gone either way... but the death of the army's leader was, at the time, basically the end of the battle. But I digress.

In the panel of the Bayoux tapestry that shows the infamous arrow in the eye it also shows a fallen figure with the legs hacked off, and other figures as well. The $64K question is... which one is Harold?? It was proposed (in the documentary) that Harold was the fallen figure, as apparently there are acounts of him receiving wounds to the legs which dismounted him, then the coup-de-gras was administered. But it just goes to show the interesting ways tht history is 'preserved' and then interpreted years later

[Gillianren]

oh, and let's not forget Henry VIII and his wives, only two of which he (directly) killed. (there's no evidence from her lifetime that Anne Boleyn had a large mole on her neck and eleven fingers, either.)

[Frantic Freddie]

Oh yeah,and Billy the Kid didn't kill 21 men,one for every year of his age when he died,he can be connected to only 4 men & one of those only peripherally.

[Halcyon Dayz]

Lore has it that the English king Richard III murdered his nephews.
There is, however, not a single shred of evidence.

[Disinfo Agent]

I'm in the middle of James Michener's Texas at the moment. I don't know how accurate it really is, or how good a researcher he was (he frequently refers to nineteenth century Scots-Irish as coming from Northern Ireland, which didn't exist until 1920!) [...]

Not as a separate entity from the rest of Ireland, since the whole of Ireland was a part of the U.K. at the time. But he could be using modern political borders as a geographical reference. Many historians do that.

[...] but he mentions that a couple of Spanish officials (Jesuits?) once drew up a list of 84 racial categories found in Mexico in the seventeenth or eighteenth century, beginning with Peninsulares (Spaniards born in Iberia) and ending with, I think, Negro-Native Americans! If true, it shows: 1) that such intermixing did indeed take place, as you point out; and 2) that some people took such racial/racist distinctions seriously. However, Michener makes a point of stating that very few of their contemporaries took such lists seriously.

I have trouble believing that ordinary humans could be that intricately minute, even in their prejudice. Quite probably, many of those 84 terms were either synonyms, or overlapped with one another to some extent. However, it's true that Latin American colonial societies usually produced more racial categories than just 'white', 'black', and 'indian'.
This essay has a brief overview of race concepts in colonial and postcolonial Latin America, in case you're interested (warning: it uses some non-PC terms).

[Disinfo Agent]

Sam5, what you wrote in your latest post reminded me of this.
Couldn't plain environmental factors have some role in what you observed?

[Eroica]

Not as a separate entity from the rest of Ireland, since the whole of Ireland was a part of the U.K. at the time. But he could be using modern political borders as a geographical reference. Many historians do that.

That occurred to me, but it still jars on my ears (especially when it would have been so much easier and more accurate to say Ulster). It's like dividing the German settlers of Texas into East Germans and West Germans.

[Disinfo Agent]

That occurred to me, but it still jars on my ears (especially when it would have been so much easier and more accurate to say Ulster). It's like dividing the German settlers of Texas into East Germans and West Germans.

Could it be that his "Northern Ireland" doesn't coincide entirely with modern Ulster?

[ausduck1]

We even have re-interpretations of our own colonial history in Australia - seems that Ned Kelly (1854-1880) was not a criminal thief and a murderer but a contemporary socialist intent on improving the conditions of poor Irish settlers by..... being a thief and a murderer.
*ducking all the Aussie commentary I KNOW I'm going to get!*