Fun History Facts

History is a myth that men agree to believe.
-Napoleon


I hesitated to write this post, I felt that most of my "fun facts" were things that a lot of people already knew; until I did an informal poll that suggested these facts were not as widely known as I had thought. Please excuse me if I've wasted your time.
Most of these falsehoods were represented as facts from either high school or college teachers.
I ave to credit Robert Wohl and his "Assume the Position" shows on HBO for driving home the point made in the quote used at the beginning, I learned the 4th fact (and half of #3) from it. In the newest "Assume The Position" he used my Hedy Lamarr fun fact, so I guess we're even.

1. Napoleon has been used as history's ultimate example of the overachieving short dude but, considering the standard of the time, Napoleon Bonaparte was of normal height.

2. The Pennsylvania Dutch are actually German. They were the Pennsylvania "Deutsch" but it got twisted in to "Dutch"in our unique method of cultural assimilation.

3. One of the concerns I was taught about the historical journey of Christopher Columbus was the popular notion that the world was flat. Actually the world was generally though of as round hundreds of years before, but when Washington Irving wrote a biography of the fateful trip, he added the concern for sailing over the edge of the world to spice up history a bit.

4.During the Revolutionary War, he traveled hundreds of miles on horseback to warn of a British Invasion from the Boston area all the way to Philadelphia. His Name? Israel Bissell. Who? Exactly.

5.My roommates college history professor told him that while it was getting prepared of sexual congress with the queen, a horse was accidentally dropped on Catherine the Great and killed her. This was the result of a rumor about the queen during her life taking on a life of it's own as "true" history told with a "wink,wink". It's like the rumor about Richard Gere's gerbil, if history said he had died of his fictitious gerbil wounds. There was also the rumor that she had died when she broke the toilet she was sitting on and died from the injuries.