Most undeserved Dark Legends in History

Used to, to be more accurate. I mean, "the Radical Republicans were corrupt and power-hungry tyrants"

Ah, I thought you were saying that the characterization of the Dunning School as racist was an undeserved Dark Legend. Completely misread what you were saying there.
 
It should also be noted that the Vatican held that belief in witchcraft was in itself heretical and that witchcraft trials were an evil to be opposed. This actually was severely criticized by figures in the reformation who are now oddly regarded as heroes. The supposed anti scientific bias of the Vatican and inquisition is also largely, but not completely untrue. The Inquisition demanded that science be backed by empirical evidence, how dreadful of them hey. We would never do that would we? it should also be remembered that the control of the church over the Spanish branch of the Inquisition was limited.
 
I’d argue there’s at least as much of the opposite as well. That is to say the religious painting science as antithetical because they don’t want to acknowledge reality. See evolution.
Not a stance endorsed by many main stream churches mostly a US evangelical thing that. The Vatican for eg sees Evolution as compatible with Christianity as it did Newton's work before that. It just likes empirical evidence strangely when talking about science. Heck the Vatican has even considered the consequences of multiple evolutions on other worlds and concluded that there may be multiple incarnations....
 

Gaius Julius Magnus

Gone Fishin'
The Emancipation Proclamation didn't free any slaves. Except it quite literally freed thousands upon its declaration with slaves who had been traveling with the Union Army such as in the Carolinas and continued to free slaves as the armies marched further into the Deep South. Weirdly the idea that it didn't free slaves is presented as correcting a misconception.

Too many other popular conceptions about the American Civil War that have been promulgated by the Lost Cause and outdated early historiography of the conflict. The other notable one off the top of my head is "Grant the butcher and Lee the saint".
 
Columbus' critics opposed his plan because they believed that the world was flat.

In fact, they not only knew it was round, but had a far more realistic estimate of its size (Columbus assumed it was about half its actual diameter), so realised that going to the Indies by sailing west would be an impossibly long voyage. But since Columbus fortuitously discovered something he wasn't looking for, they have lived in ignominy as a bunch of ignoramuses who believed in a flat earth.

Agreed, if the Americas weren't there he would have starved to death on voyage.
 
The Emancipation Proclamation didn't free any slaves. Except it quite literally freed thousands upon its declaration with slaves who had been traveling with the Union Army such as in the Carolinas and continued to free slaves as the armies marched further into the Deep South. Weirdly the idea that it didn't free slaves is presented as correcting a misconception.

Too many other popular conceptions about the American Civil War that have been promulgated by the Lost Cause and outdated early historiography of the conflict. The other notable one off the top of my head is "Grant the butcher and Lee the saint".

I never got that either. Now it is true it didn't free all slaves but like you said it freed the slaves traveling with the army and all slaves where the army marched in the future. The only slaves that had not been freed by the EP is where the US government already ruled on Jan 1st, 1863 which was mainly the border states. It took the 13th Amendment to change that and to make sure it was not overturned by the courts.
 
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Gaius Julius Magnus

Gone Fishin'
I never got that either. Now it is true it didn't free all slaves but like you said it freed the slaves traveling with the army and all slaves where the army marched in the future. The only slaves that had not been freed by the EP is where the US government already ruled on Jan 1st, 1863 which was mainly the border states. It took the 13th Amendment to change that and to make sure it was not overturned by the courts.
Yeah, it's weirdly one that gets repeated by both modern day Confederate sympathizers and those not sympathetic to the Confederacy
 
Columbus' critics opposed his plan because they believed that the world was flat.

In fact, they not only knew it was round, but had a far more realistic estimate of its size (Columbus assumed it was about half its actual diameter), so realised that going to the Indies by sailing west would be an impossibly long voyage. But since Columbus fortuitously discovered something he wasn't looking for, they have lived in ignominy as a bunch of ignoramuses who believed in a flat earth.

On the other hand, thinking of Columbus as some geological nincompoop who thought that the Earth was about the size of Rhode Island is its own bad history, too. Posidonius, who wrote about a century after Eratosthenes, had his own calculations of the Earth's circumference, whose lower bound was accepted by Ptolemy (the foremost authority on astronomy up until Copernicus) and which, for several reasons, was accepted by a lot of educated Europeans up until the New World became an obvious fact. The fact that Eratosthenes and Posidonius' upper bound proved to be right and the latter's lower bound wrong was never immediately apparent, although repeated observation could have probably narrowed it down more than it was. There was certainly disagreement going around Europe at Columbus' time, and we might speculate that Columbus was thinking somewhat wishfully, but it's not like he was going off no scholarly precedent at all.
 

In the thread of Columbus, I suggest you guys go and watch this. Afterwards, though I recommend going to the comments to clear any issues with the video may have for you (the biggest one being his translations of Columbus' diaries and the terminology used but that's still being debated on). Most importantly it deals with the Columbus Earth size issue and his plans.
 

In the thread of Columbus, I suggest you guys go and watch this. Afterwards, though I recommend going to the comments to clear any issues with the video may have for you (the biggest one being his translations of Columbus' diaries and the terminology used but that's still being debated on). Most importantly it deals with the Columbus Earth size issue and his plans.
pretty much. i saw this video myself a while ago and this is what really brought me to the opinion that Columbus gets an unnecessarily bad rap. don't misread that: he undoubtedly did terrible things, but for all the evil people assign to him you'd think he was an immortal supervillain who was personally responsible for every single act of the entire Indian Genocide, and if you go around blaming Columbus as an individual for the Indian Genocide then you may as well blame the Mitochondrial Eve for every crime ever committed by every human ever in the history of ever because none of us would exist if it weren't for that one single individual from whom all living humans descend and therefore all those crimes, no matter how small, would never have happened.
 
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In the thread of Columbus, I suggest you guys go and watch this. Afterwards, though I recommend going to the comments to clear any issues with the video may have for you (the biggest one being his translations of Columbus' diaries and the terminology used but that's still being debated on). Most importantly it deals with the Columbus Earth size issue and his plans.

This video is one of the best videos detailing the true legacy of Columbus and is one of his best videos, up there with Our of Context|How to Make Bad History Worse|World War 2
 
The Emancipation Proclamation didn't free any slaves. Except it quite literally freed thousands upon its declaration with slaves who had been traveling with the Union Army such as in the Carolinas and continued to free slaves as the armies marched further into the Deep South. Weirdly the idea that it didn't free slaves is presented as correcting a misconception.

Too many other popular conceptions about the American Civil War that have been promulgated by the Lost Cause and outdated early historiography of the conflict. The other notable one off the top of my head is "Grant the butcher and Lee the saint".
Lucy Wolsey is doing a series on BBC on the greatest fibs in US history later this year.
 
Oliver Cromwell, especially regarding his actions in Ireland. Although the war was undoubtedly a very bad one, resulting in hundreds of thousands of death, this was more due to the fact that seventeenth-century war tended to be very brutal on the civilian population as armies generally supported themselves by living off the land. Cromwell himself was only in Ireland for a year or so and his army was by no means the worst when it came to treating civilians (he cracked down on plundering, for example, with plunderers being court-martialled and hanged), but he tends to get blamed for everything that happened during the entire twelve years of war. As for Drogheda and Wexford, sacking enemy cities which refused to surrender was accepted practice down until the nineteenth century, so Cromwell's actions here didn't break the contemporary laws of warfare. Nor, contrary to popular belief, is there much evidence for him being a rabid anti-Catholic zealot -- in fact, there's no evidence that he was any worse in this regard than the average seventeenth-century Englishman, and Catholics weren't noticeably worse off under the Protectorate than they had been under Charles I or James I.
 
Columbus' critics opposed his plan because they believed that the world was flat.

In fact, they not only knew it was round, but had a far more realistic estimate of its size (Columbus assumed it was about half its actual diameter), so realised that going to the Indies by sailing west would be an impossibly long voyage. But since Columbus fortuitously discovered something he wasn't looking for, they have lived in ignominy as a bunch of ignoramuses who believed in a flat earth.
AFAIK people did not really know how far East China and Japan went either, that could have helped with bad calculations
 
I think they're the only civilization in history that significantly decreased global population by killing as many people as they did. If anything, I think they've been whitewashed way too much of late. Killing millions is a-okay so long as you don't discriminate by religion, apparently.
is it really whitewashing or just that it happened so long ago? There were a lot of brutal massacres throughout history, many of them are scarcely remembered today...
 
is it really whitewashing or just that it happened so long ago? There were a lot of brutal massacres throughout history, many of them are scarcely remembered today...

Well, where are all the rabid Assyria fanboys? That the Mongols get glorified as infallible military geniuses and fair and tolerant rulers pushes them over the line for me.
 
Basically all the misconceptions surrounding Order no. 227 and the use of human wave tactics with blocking detachment massacring retreating personell during the Great Patriotic War
 
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