Sandbox / Dated History Cleanup

Examples mentioning specific media in the on-page example section and off-page examples (replacing on-page examples where better written, valid, i.e. fitting the trope, not too general and with enough context, examples added through Theatre namespace (skipping Recap for now, also skipping Anastasia examples):

Yet Unsorted off-page examples

• Vinland Saga: Women in Viking Age society enjoyed more freedom and power in their communities than depicted in the story. That is a relatively recent discovery, and Yukimura probably couldn't have known that when he began the series back in 2005.
• The Divine Comedy: In what is for modern audiences one of the most controversial issues of the Inferno, Muhammad and his son-in-law Ali (who was responsible for the split between Sunni and Shiite Islam) are shown in the Eighth circle of Hell for promoting Schism. This was based on the assumption of Medieval European Christians that Islam was a heretical offshoot of Christianity founded in part by an Arian heretic named Bahira/Sergius the monk rather than as a distinct Abrahamic religion as it is understood today.
• Arsenic and Old Lace: Mortimer explains that his family's history of insanity goes way back because one of his ancestors used to scalp Indians. Although this comment was used at the time to indicate his family's unusual behavior, it is widely known now that colonists did scalp Native Americans on a regular basis, with colonies offering bounties to whites (and other Natives) who did so.
• In Search of...: Quite a few of the mysteries aren't so mysterious anymore.
  • For instance, they had an article about Carlos the Jackal as "The Most Wanted Man in the World." In 1994, the Sudanese government was convinced to give him up and he was arrested in 1994 and now is serving a life sentence in prison.
  • Likewise, they did a story on Josef Mengele. He died in 1979 and his grave was found in 1985. Now that Mengele's identity while living in South America is known, the dramatic tales of Mengele's narrow escapes from Nazi Hunters related in the episode have turned out to be bogus.
  • In the same episode, the death toll of Auschwitz is given as five million, which is even higher than the inflated Soviet number of four million. The "four million" figure was, contrary to the claims of Holocaust deniers, never accepted by credible Western historians, although it was used by the Auschwitz State Museum in then-communist Poland at the time the episode aired. Five million is about the number of Jews who were killed in The Holocaust, so it's possible the episode fallaciously conflated Auschwitz with the entire Holocaust.
  • The episode on Eva Braun features David Irving, who is presented as a respectable historian. At the time this episode was made, Irving was already a very controversial writer with a reputation as a Hitler apologist. Later, as a result of his libel lawsuit against Deborah Lipstadt (reenacted in Denial), he would be exposed as a full-blown Holocaust denier and historical falsifier.
  • Other subjects covered like astrology, dowsing, communicating with the dead, the predictions of Nostradamus, etc. have been thoroughly discredited as utter nonsense by modern scientific skeptics. Not that they had any scholarly support in the 70's, either.
  • A 1981 episode was about the search for the Titanic. The wreck was found just four years later. Of course, the episode repeats as truth the then-current theory that the Titanic sank in one piece, which was disproved when the wreck was found in two pieces. (Hence the reason pre-1985 Titanic films portray it sinking in one piece.)
  • An episode covers the real account of The Amityville Horror, which has now been debunked as a hoax.
  • Noah's Ark and the great flood is explored. Noah's flood being a myth has been the consensus of the geological community since the late Victorian era, so technically history had already marched on when the show was made. The episode acknowledges this and challenges the "nineteenth-century scientists" who disbelieved in the flood with the "twentieth-century scientists" who do. One of the "twentieth-century scientists" interviewed for this show is Henry Morris, founder of the modern creationist movement who revived literalist claims about the idea (and was also an engineer rather than a scientist).
  • There's an episode about Anastasia Romanova, including an interview with an ancient-but-still-living Anna Anderson. In 2007, DNA testing disproved the idea that Anastasia could have survived the Russian Revolution. Anderson's DNA was preserved in part of her intestine that was removed in an operation and tested against that of the Romanovs', proving definitely she wasn't a Romanov.
• Hollywood (1980): The series, unfortunately, took the contemporary Slutshaming of Virginia Rappe. The rumors about her character (that she had sexually-transmitted diseases, had an abortion, and was involved in badgering wealthy people) have since been disproven.
• Dogfights: Some of the events described in the show have been at least in part debunked by later analysis of records.
  • In "Dogfights of Desert Storm", a segment follows an unarmed EF-111A Raven electronic warfare plane that is credited with scoring a "maneuvering kill" by tricking an Iraqi Mirage F1 into flying into a mountainside. Analysis of Iraqi records in 2011 showed that only one Mirage F1 sortied that night, and it returned to base safely, claiming to have shot down an EF-111A Raven.
  • In "Long Odds", the B-17 "Old 666" claims to have shot down five Japanese fighters over the course of its famous mapping mission. However, Japanese records claim that they lost no planes during that time and that one plane had to return to base due to engine troubles and three other fighters were damaged.
• The Royal Diaries:
  • The epilogue of Anastasia: The Last Grand Duchess ends on an open-ended question of whether Anastasia could have survived, since at the time, there were still two members of the family unaccounted for, including one of the daughters^note due to the condition of the remains, it was impossible to conclusively determine which one — forensic experts analyzed the bodies to try and make identifications, but different types of examination suggested different answers. The matter was finally laid to rest when a second burial site was discovered in 2007.
  • Tryphaena is depicted as Cleopatra's eldest sister, based on a record from Porphyry that claimed Ptolemy XII had a daughter named Cleopatra Tryphaena who ruled with Berenice during their father's exile in Rome. This conflicts with other records that list Ptolemy with only three daughters (Berenice, Cleopatra, and Arsinoe); the consensus among modern historians is that Ptolemy's wife, Cleopatra V Tryphaena, is the Tryphaena who ruled with Berenice (in other words, Tryphaena was Cleopatra's stepmother or mother, not her sister).
  • The existence of Sondok's sister, Sonwha: At the time of the book's writing, there was only one record and a folk myth to attest to Sonwha's existence; archaeological evidence dug up years later proved that the son attributed to Sonwha was mothered by a different woman, meaning Sonwha was likely not a real person.
• Robinson Crusoe: It's since been established that reports of cannibalism among the Carib Amerindians were hugely exaggerated, if not outright fabricated. Most of the myth seems to have its roots in the tribe's practice of keeping the bones of their ancestors in their homes so that their spirits would watch over them. Furthermore, there has been no archaeological or anthropological evidence of cannibalism ever found in the Caribbean.
• Neon Genesis Evangelion: While it's never exactly made clear what the Dead Sea Scrolls referred to by SEELE are, it's possible that they are referring to the actual Dead Sea Scrolls. At the time the show was made, the full contents of the Scrolls had not been disclosed, which led to much speculation and conspiracies as to what they actually said. However the complete scrolls have since been made public, removing the mystery surrounding them that serves as the basis for this show.
• Space Battleship Yamato: The entire premise of the show relies on the then current belief that the sunken Yamato was mostly intact under the sea, and could be refitted into the Space Battleship. Years later, advances in technology disproved it pretty badly: the ship's ammunition exploded while sinking, splitting off the bow and forcing out its monster turrets, and the wreckage is more or less torn to pieces. (It really shouldn't have come as such a surprise: the U.S. Navy released photos taken by some of their aviators during the attack; the mushroom cloud from the magazine explosion rivals that of a tactical nuke.)
• The Cartoon History of the Universe:
  • Neanderthals being driven extinct due to conquest and extermination by the Cro-Magnons has been increasingly challenged by archaeological and genetic evidence. While not completely discredited, it's generally believed in the scientific community that it was, at most, one of multiple factors.
  • Speaking of Cro-Magnons, they're universally depicted as having light skin; it's now largely accepted that early European modern humans were almost all dark-skinned until around 30,000 years ago, and many Europeans still had dark skin until around 5,000 years ago.
  • Gonick puts far more stock the historicity of certain Biblical stories than more recent historians (and when it comes to early Christianity, his Author Avatar all but nervously admits that much of its material had to be taken straight from the New Testament due to the paucity of other accounts).
  • The race of the pre-Hellenic Egyptians changes based on what theories are popular at the time — they're depicted as black in the first five volumes, in contrast to the white Jews and Hyksos (it's presented as a subtle joke that Moses is also black), but then asides in the fifteenth show white ancient Egyptians discussing farming techniques with black West Africans and buying black slaves from black Nubians. It's now believed that they were (mostly) neither white nor black, but Afro-Asiatic like modern Egyptians.

Prehistory

• "The Day Is Done", by Lester del Rey, portrays the main character, a neanderthal, as hunched and with limited speaking ability. Later discoveries would show that their spines and hyoid bones would be the equivalent of a human.
• The Ugly Little Boy: One of the first complete neanderthal skeletons discovered is that of a male with a twisted, bent spine, a wasted lower jaw, and a pronounced hunchback. Archaeologists assumed this was a typical neanderthal skeleton, extrapolating them as hunchbacked, chinless knuckle-draggers. In this story, Timmie is described as a younger version of this overall shape, unable to quite master an American English accent because of a difference in his mouth structure. Later skeletons, however, showed that the original was atypical, being over sixty years old; suffering from severe arthritis and bone wastage. Current theory suggest that a neanderthal would likely look very similar to a modern human.
• Earth's Children:
  • The idea of the Clan using sign language was based on a theory that Neanderthal vocal cords were constructed in a way that limited the range of sounds they could verbalize. Specifically, there was no evidence that they had a hyoid bone. Recent excavations have debunked this, as a hyoid bone has been found in Neanderthal remains.
  • Neanderthals are portrayed as almost universally dark-haired while Cro-Magnons show all the phenotypes found in modern (mostly European) humans. Recent studies in neanderthal mDNA have shown that at least some of them were red-haired. Additionally, its likely that the Cro-Magnons would have been fairly dark skinned, since they'd have recently (from an evolutionary perspective) immigrated out of Africa.
  • Claims that Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans couldn't interbreed - or that if they did, their offspring would be short-lived and/or infertile, a source of angst in the novels, have been thoroughly disproven.
  • The technology and cultures of the Others are a mixture of several different distinct Late Pleistocene material cultures, now known to have been separated by multi-millennial gaps in time.
• Claims that Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans couldn't interbreed - or that if they did, their offspring would be short-lived and/or infertile, a source of angst in Earth's Children, The Neanderthal Parallax, and Dance Of The Tiger among others - have been thoroughly disproven with the discovery that all modern humans but Sub-Saharan Africans have a small amount of Neanderthal DNA in them (and in the case of Australoids, also Denisovan-like DNA). As of now, the saving grace of these works is that all deal with pairings of Neanderthal men and modern women. For one reason or another, all Neanderthal DNA in modern humans seems to have come from females.
• Fair-haired, light-eyed, and light-skinned H. sapiens meeting dark-haired, dark-eyed, sometimes dark-skinned H. neanderthalensis, and their obvious Unfortunate Implications. The most notable example may be The Clan of the Cave Bear, but it's not the only one. Even at the time of writing, this was questionable if not illogical, because Cro-Magnons were recent immigrants from Africa while Neanderthals had evolved for hundreds of thousands of years in Europe by that point (this is explicitly why it's the opposite in Dance of the Tiger, from around the same time). We now have evidence that red hair and green and blue eyes were not uncommon among Neanderthals.
• The 2005 Spanish prehistoric novel Tras las huellas del hombre rojo ("On the red man's track") is inspired by the "Ebro Frontier" theory of The '90s, which claims that the Ebro River delayed the entry of H. sapiens in the rest of the Iberian Peninsula for about 5,000 years (c. 42,000-37,000 years ago), allowing Neanderthals to continue living there in isolation while disappearing from most of Europe. As of 2020, two archaeological sites from that period have been attributed to H. sapiens, one in Portugal and another in Spain (though both being on the western coast, it is still possible that H. sapiens reached them by following the northern coast without crossing the river).
• The Light of Other Days: One of the vignettes about how Wormcam is used talks about a researcher finally solving the case of Ötzi, a natural mummy found in the Italian Alps. The novel states that he was a hunter who went too far into the mountains in pursuit of his prey and died of hypothermia. The year after the novel was published, scans of the body proved that he'd been shot with arrows and had his head smashed in. It's now widely accepted that he died a violent death and may have been deliberately buried in the mountains.

Ancient (and Early Imperial) China

• King's War: While Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian did indicate that Ziying was Fusu's son, modern historians have disputed this, arguing that if Ziying did discuss with his sons the plan to assassinate Zhao Gao, him being Fusu's son would have made him too young for this scenario. Similarly, there are no consensus on whether Zhao Gao was truly a eunuch.
• Speaking of Cao Cao, thanks to the cultural impact of Romance of the Three Kingdoms in China, Japan and Korea, it was generally just accepted that he was a Dirty Coward opportunistic Magnificent Bastard ^note The main reason Cao Cao became the villain was because many empires often hailed from the region that was once Liu Bei's state of Shu-Han, so portraying Cao as a villain and the also underdog Liu as a hero was useful for morale and political reasons since Chinese culture was big on precedent and history repeating. It wouldn't be until Mao Zedong (an admirer of Cao Cao) began ordering more positive depictions of Cao that there was a real attempt to study the historical Cao. However, even now there is often pushback to such attempts due to how ingrained the idea of "Cao Cao the villain" is in culture. The 2012 drama Cao Cao, the hero, for example, wasn't released in China until 2015 (and even then renamed to simply Cao Cao) due to people refusing to see Cao Cao as anything other than a villainous figure. This is very notable because the series was explicitly based on historical records, rather than the Romance like most works.

Ancient Egypt

• Historical wisdom had it that Hatshepsut was a wicked stepmother who stole the Egyptian throne from Thutmose III, the legitimate heir (and her nephew, son-in-law, and stepson), and had herself crowned King of Egypt. She supposedly allowed Thutmose to control the army but otherwise ruled the country with an iron fist until her death despite Thutmose being a competent adult for most of her reign. The proof? After Hatshepsut's death, Thutmose walled up all her inscriptions, tore down her statues, and obliterated her name from the histories - clearly, a sign of someone who had finally had enough of a meddling mother-in-law. Putting aside for the moment how unlikely it would be for a woman to stage a successful palace coup in 1514 BC when her opponent had complete control of the military, it was discovered in the 1990s that Thutmose didn't even begin to obliterate Hatshepsut from the historical record until twenty years after she died. Historians now think that Hatshepsut and Thutmose were allies who ruled as co-monarchs, and that the elderly Thutmose or his son walled up her inscriptions because even decades after her death the people saw her as a more legitimate ruler than Thutmose. This has also put a few thorns into the common belief that Thutmose was Egypt's most successful and best-loved ruler. The trope is the basis of Pauline Gedge's novel Child of the Morning.
• X-ray evidence showing splinters of bone inside Tutankhamun's skull once led historians to believe that the pharaoh was murdered by his vizier, Ay, as part of a palace coup. Scans of the mummy using modern diagnostic imaging devices proved that the skull was splintered from the inside after death, probably as part of the mummification process, and that Tutankhamun likely died from a massive infection arising from a fractured leg (this does not disprove that Ay killed him, of course, but it does make it less likely—broken bones were not necessarily fatal even at that point in time). This mistake is something of a plot point in The Egyptian and Mummies Alive! among others.
• Cleopatra VII has had a lot of discredited ideas surrounding her.
  • She was once seen as a scheming, amoral Femme Fatale whose sins led to her death and to the destruction of Egypt as an independent nation. Evidence from Alexandria and a reappraisal of historical records led many historians to believe that Cleopatra saw seducing Caesar and Antony as a legitimate way of convincing them to help restore order in a country quickly approaching lawlessness while at the same time preventing Rome from invading and enslaving the populace. The discredited trope informs everything from William Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra and Julius Caesar to the paintings of Alexandre Cabanel and Guido Cagnacci.
• Blake and Mortimer: The Mystery of the Great Pyramid mentions future pharaoh Horemheb as being sympathetic towards the cult of Aten. Modern historians believe that it was Horemheb who had Akhenaten's monuments destroyed and his name erased from the records.
• ''Papyrus: The title "Tutankhamun, the Assassinated Pharaoh" pretty much says it all since new evidence points to him having not been.
• The Ten Commandments (1956):
  • Most modern estimates put the Exodus in the reign of Thutmose III ^note  more specifically, he's the most supported. Scholars agree that if it happened, it must've been somewhere in-between Pharaohs Dudimose and Rameses II, with both extremes being actually the least supported theories. , not Rameses II. Though to be fair, there isn't clear consensus among scholars and reconciling Old Testament timelines with historical dates is tricky at best. Also, Rameses II did lose his first-born son (the tomb was found). It doesn't help however that historical records show that Rameses II was actually one of the most successful pharaohs of Egyptian history, which he couldn't have been had his workforce left overnight. That would've definitely plunged Egypt into chaos for generations.
  • There are also competing archaeological theories that the Hebrews never left Palestine in the time of Joseph in the first place.
  • As of 1994, we know that Ramses was a redhead and that he came from a family of redheads. There is not a single redhead amongst the royal family.
  • The movie ends with the Hebrews reaching Canaan and Moses being unable to set foot in it like in the Book of Exodus. Today we know that Canaan was conquered by Seti I and part of Rameses II's empire during his 66-year-long reign, which would've made the whole Exodus completely moot.
  • Additionally, in 2010, it was discovered that slaves in Egypt did NOT build any pyramids or monuments of Egypt. They were built by paid laborers or Egyptian farmers in the off season.
• The Prince of Egypt:
  • In 1994, Ramses was discovered to be a redhead and in 2016 he was discovered to be fair-skinned meaning the black-haired, brown-skinned depiction in this film has actually become dated. Given how genetics work, the appearance of Seti and Tuya also fall under this trope as do all the Egyptians as they were historically quite diverse due to Egypt having always been a melting pot and crossroads meaning there has always been Egyptians of every hair and skin color.
  • The film depicts slaves building Egyptian monuments. Now it is believed the workers were compensated.

Ancient Near East

• David and Goliath were rejected as myth, but scholars now see the armor Goliath wore as plausible for the Mycenaean civilization. His Greek name was probably Kalliades. His story might have a Greek origin, and certain hard-to-translate phrases from the Bible seem to be loan translations from Ancient Greek.
  • The Bible has a fleeting Canon Discontinuity once, where it mentions that Goliath's killer was Elhanan son of Jair, not David. The Targum Jonathan solved this by claiming that Elhanan was another name of David, and the King James Bible by saying that Elhanan killed Goliath's brother while David killed Goliath. Modern scholars presume that Elhanan was the killer in an older version of the story and that the deed was attributed to David when he became popular and the other was forgotten. So if Goliath was real, he probably didn't live in the time of David.
• At least some historians now doubt that Judah and Israel were ever a single united kingdom under the House of David (or Saul, or a confederation under the loose rule of the Judges). Considering that the source material was for many years considered too sacred to question...
  • Closer examination of said source material demonstrates that even the contemporary authors themselves were aware of infighting among the ancient Jews. Most of the blame can be laid at the feet of those who gloss over such things in the quest to find good allegories.
  • Similarly, differences between the northern and southern Jewish kingdoms are thought to explain the story of the Jewish Exodus. There's little to no credible evidence of the entire population of Hebrews being enslaved in Egypt^note Or acting as corvee labor, or indentured, or otherwise doing work they didn't want to do, since chattel slavery really wasn't a thing in ancient Egypt. Later attempts to integrate this fact with the book of Exodus involved smaller groups either as hostages or mercenaries, or groups of commoners escaping famine conditions. One current historical thesis is that the entire story is political grandstanding; the earliest written accounts of the Exodus were found in the northern kingdom of Israel. While the southern kingdom of Judah was an Egyptian client state, Israel instead allied itself with Egypt's Mesopotamian rivals.
• There is almost no non-religious based historical consensus on the Crucifixion besides the fact that it happened.
  • Though common, crucifixion was not standardized. The Latin word Crux and the Greek Staurós could be applied to any vertical wooden structure where someone was nailed to, like a stake, wall, frame, even a tree. In other words, our very notion of 'cross-shaped' is inspired by religious representations of the Crucifixion, rather than the other way around. Those were likely based on the text saying Jesus was nailed with his arms extended and the legend "Jesus of Nazareth King of the Jews" fixed above his head.
  • Even accepting the common definition of cross, some historians have questioned that Jesus would have been forced to carry the whole cross to Golgotha as impractical, proposing that the condemned were forced to carry the horizontal section only while the post remained in place to be reused. Others favor that the real cross was T-shaped rather than a conventional Latin cross, as that would have been easier to assemble.
  • Practical experiments (including by Nazis at Dachau concentration camp) showed that if a man was nailed through his palms as Jesus is usually represented, the hands would rip completely under his weight. Because of this, it's been proposed that the condemned's arms were also tied to the cross, or that the nails were inserted through the wrists, or even the forearms.
  • Even then, Jesus' own weight would have likely suffocated him long before he's said to have succumbed. Some have suggested that the cross' post had some kind of footrest to 'help' the condemned resist for longer and therefore make him suffer more.
  • The number of nails involved is unknown, with some churches claiming up to 14 nails. The commonly depicted three nails (one through each palm and another through both feet) were codified in The Renaissance; four nails (one per hand and foot) was the preferred version in the European Middle Ages. In The '70s, Israeli archaeologists found the tomb of Jehohanan, a 1st century crucified, and claimed that his injuries supported a crucifixion with three nails, one through each forearm and the third through the heels, with the feet placed laterally on the post. However, a review questioned most of their findings and only admitted evidence of one nail through one heel, adding that such nail wasn't long enough to perforate both heels.^note A later find of the remains of a crucified man, in England, has added weight to the idea that nails were indeed used - in this case some of the largest possible carpentry nails, those used by the Roman Army to hold fortifications together. It was pointed out these are large valuable items and would have been continually retrieved for reuse - the only reason why they were still in the body was because they were embedded so successfully in the bone that they could not be removed again.
  • The Last Temptation of Christ references nearly all of these points one way or another. He is shown carrying only the horizontal beam, where he is nailed (by his wrists) and also tied. His cross is brand new, but the thieves are nailed to dead trees, and Golgotha is full of other older, 'occupied' crosses. His cross would have looked like a T, but the INRI sign at the top is wooden and makes it look like a Latin cross. The third nail is not through the heels and crosses both feet, but still allows him to turn his legs to the side (and thus acts as Scenery Censor, since unlike in other depictions, Jesus is naked here).

Ancient Rome

• Frontier Wolf: The most notable artifact from "Castellum", a piece of sepulchral statuary called the Cramond Lioness, makes no appearance in the story, as it was not discovered until 1997.
• Roman persecution of Christians has been found in part to be due to the refusal of Christians to worship the emperor. Later Romans, after some dialogue with Christians to get them in line with their policies, asked for a requirement to pray for rulers, which is repeated many times in Christian scripture and is still maintained today. Likewise, for those seeing Christianity as revolutionary in origin, there has been no historical evidence of any anti-state revolt led by Christians. Historians note that peasant-led Christian revolts happened in The Middle Ages (against the Corrupt Church and Christian kings). But in the Roman era, the dangerous revolts like the Spartacus uprising, Boudica's uprising, Queen Zenobia's Palmyrene Empire, and the ulcer that was the Jewish Revolts were all non-Christian. It is definitely true that Christianity did attract followers among women and the lower orders who were neglected, disenfranchised, and subjugated by the state, but they certainly did not promote revolution or agitation against the state. Likewise, Christians also tolerated and condoned slavery in the Roman era, though they also advocated for better treatment of slaves and included them in gatherings. However, Epicureanism took the same position on slaves and slavery. So the opening narration of Spartacus, which claims that slaves were freed only with the rise of Christianity and the end of pagan tyranny, is a little too generous to the former and not entirely fair to the latter.
• The Eagle of the Ninth has two main inspirations: the lack of historical references on the Legio IX Hispana after AD 117, when it was stationed on the Caledonian border, and speculation that it had been wiped out during an invasion of what is now Scotland; and a Roman eagle that was found buried under a British house in the 19th century (and is attributed to the main characters at the end of the book). Later historians found evidence that the Legion had actually been moved to the German border, and later, to Asia. This caused speculation that it was destroyed in AD 161 during a battle in Armenia, though the latest thinking has veered back to some kind of disaster north of Hadrian's Wall; the IXth does disappear from the records and a new Legion was imported to Britain at about the same time. The Romans undoubtedly knew perfectly well what had happened to the IXth, the information just didn't survive to our time. As for the buried eagle, it turned to have been decoration from a Roman temple to Jupiter, and not a military standard as it was initially assumed.
• Codex Alera: Word of God is that the Lost Roman Legion that the Alerans are descended from is the Legio IX Hispana, which famously disappeared north of Scotland in 108 AD and was supposedly never heard from again. However, in the years since the series' release, archeological evidence has emerged showing that the IX survived its supposed "annihilation" in Scotland and was camped in Nijmegen in what is now the Netherlands until around the second century AD.
• Outcast: The only quasi-historical event in the novel, the supposed Roman founding of the Rhee Wall of Romney Marsh in south-east England, is no longer credited by historians.
• The Fall of the Roman Empire:
  • The film takes as its thesis that Marcus Aurelius was the last great emperor and that the Empire after his passing was a long decay. While this was a popular opinion for a long period of time, historians have since corrected and modified this, by noting that the Emperors like Aurelian showed great dynamism bringing Rome Back from the Brink of the "Crisis of the Third Century", and furthermore even crackpots like Caracalla actually did extend citizenship across the Empire as Aurelius had planned. Furthermore the great rulers like Diocletian, Constantine came after this period. The so-called "decline" of the Roman Empire is no longer seen as a result of decay or some inevitable slide but a result of serious political and institutional errors on the part of its final emperors.
  • The portrayal of Commodus as a Bastard Bastard comes from a rumour that Faustina Minor had taken a gladiator as a lover and the unreliable Augustan History even painted her as an adulteress that had relations with sailors, gladiators and men of rank but we now know her and Marcus Aurelius to have been mutually devoted.
• Marcus Didius Falco: While Davis's unsavory depiction of Domitian is internally consistent, its historical foundations have been superseded by more recent research. The main problem is that basically all the sources about Domitian's reign were written after the fact by people who had bones to pick with him—aristocrats of the senatorial class like Suetonius or Pliny the Elder, with whom Domitian had notoriously poor relations—while the positive contemporaneous accounts by poets like Statius and Martial were considered no more than acts of brown-nosing (which, to be fair, they were). The negative accounts were essentially believed without question for centuries. More recent archaeological and historical studies indicate that Domitian's reign marked a period of financial stability thanks to the man's tight grip on economic policy (it is noted that coinage of the era are of particularly good quality in comparison to what came before and after), which laid the groundwork for the later prosperity of the Nerva-Antonine dynasty, and that Domitian was pragmatic enough to not pursue aggressive war policies which might have unnecessarily burdened the state (though this made him rather unpopular with the traditionalists of the upper classes). The common people and the troops generally seemed to have liked him, thanks to his reintroduction/promotion of various public festivities, his visits to the front, and his gifts/donatives to the public and the military—in fact, a group of officers of the Praetorian Guard eventually forced Nerva to put his killers to death. The modern, revisionist view paints Domitian as an autocratic but benevolent despot, whose flaws included Control Freak tendencies, paranoia, an inability to appease the senatorial classes, and an unfortunate penchance to celebrate military victories too early.

Other Ancient Examples

• In the 19th century, historians called megaliths "druidic stones" as they attributed their erection to Celtic people. The belief persisted until the end of The 20th Century, explaining why, in Asterix (created in 1959), Obélix is a menhir delivery man (and carver) by profession. But since the 21th century, it been established that European megaliths were older, and actually dated from the Neolithic.

Middle Ages

• The Name of the Rose: The final sentence of the book is a quote from 12th century monk Bernard of Cluny. However, while a few of his manuscripts do say "rosa", based on the relative quality of the various texts the modern consensus is that Bernard actually wrote "Roma", as in the city of Rome, which got lost in transcription.
• Robin of Sherwood is heavily influenced by two discredited theories of British history which, however, remained influential on historical fiction in the 1980s.
  • The first is the "Norman Yoke" theory, developed in the seventeenth century by proto-leftists and English nationalists, which held that the Norman Conquest replaced a harmonious and just Anglo-Saxon society with Norman hierarchy and tyranny, and that for many centuries English society was dominated by continuing conscious ethnic conflict between a "Norman" aristocracy and an oppressed "English" people. While feudal Middle Ages society obviously experienced class conflict, there is little evidence of any consciousness of ethnic difference continuing for very long.
  • The second is the "Witch cult" hypothesis, which argues that pre-Christian paganism survived on a large-scale as an underground non-Christian faith for many centuries after the official Christian conversion of Western Europe, only finally being destroyed by the early-modern witch-hunts, which saw the Church exterminating a genuine traditional religion. This was never accepted by specialist medieval historians, but was believed for a time by many other educated people, although even most neo-pagans now recognise it as false.
• Ivanhoe: The view popularised by Sir Walter, of plucky "English" commoners still resisting their "Norman" overlords a century or two after the Conquest was questioned even in Scott's own time, and almost wholly abandoned by serious historians within the same century.
• A large number of 19th Century writers wanted to counter what they considered romanticism about the time period stemming from the writings of people like Sir Walter Scott and his novels like Ivanhoe. This desire to curb medieval romnticism combined with the general arrogance of the common 19th Century belief that all of history was just a prequel to their own "enlightened" age, leading them to assume that all of medieval Europe was "obviously" a horrible place of nothing but ignorance, ugliness, stupidity, and dirtiness. These writers included Mark Twain, who wrote A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court just so he could counter Scott's stories by portraying the medieval period as a nasty, brutish time, even going so far as to portray such classic mythological figures like King Arthur and Merlin themselves as little but stupid, superstitious, immoral savages simply because they were "medieval people." These writers left such a huge stamp on pop culture's understanding of the medieval period that their ideas still dominate popular thinking today, with many, many people believing the falsehoods introduced in their books. Just a few of these include the idea that a knight's armor was so heavy that if they were pushed to the ground on their backs they'd be as helpless as turtles and couldn't get back up by themselves, and that they had to be lifted up onto their saddles with big cranes and winches because their armor was just too heavy for them to mount a horse normally (in reality, period fighting manuals said that a fully plate-armored knight in good physical condition should be able to kip straight up to his feet from his back, and vault into his saddle without even touching the stirrups.) And that medieval European swords were little more than barely-sharpened metal clubs that were so heavy "a modern man couldn't even lift them," and medieval European swordsmanship was little more than unsophisticated brawling with no skill or technique involved, as opposed to the studied, elegant systems of Japanese swordfighting (in reality, you could put a medieval European swordfighting manual and a medieval Japanese swordfighting manual side-by-side and see what are basically the exact same stances and positions, since swordfighting was studied with just as much rigor in Europe as in Japan, practiced with just as much skill, and because the best methods for a human body to swing a sharpened length of steel are the same regardless of what country you live in.) Though such thinking is slowly being corrected as people learn better and more accurate ideas slowly propagate through pop culture, these things can still be seen in movies today that are supposed to be "more realistic."
• El Cid:
  • Most things people may remember - that he killed his future father-in-law in a tourney, witnessed Sancho II's murder (and that Sancho II was murdered), forced Alfonso VI to swear he was not involved in his brother's death at St. Gadea's church, won a battle while dead - are just literary creation, and have always been known to be. Still, historians were willing to believe that the rivalry between the Castilian El Cid and the old Leonese nobility in the Cantar del mio Cid had a basis in El Cid being, or descending from, a Self-Made Man who had gained noblehood through military service. However, genealogical and documentary research in the 21st century showed that he descended from Leonese nobility on both sides of his family (his ancestors included the Flaínez, which were of Gothic origin and among the oldest lineages in the kingdom). He may have been born in Castile as per tradition, or not, and just accompanied Sancho there when he was given it by his father. The c. 1200 Cantar may have introduced or exaggerated a Castilian-Leonese conflict because it was written when Castile and Leon were separate kingdoms with border disputes and opposing views on their relations with the Almohads, while in El Cid's time (c. 1045-1099) there was almost no difference between the two.
  • The name "El Cid" itself. Nowadays, and for centuries used exclusively for Rodrigo Díaz. Pop history will always note that it derives from the Arabic word Sidi ("Lord"), have him receiving it as a title from either his Muslim soldiers or employers (as in Anthony Mann's El Cid), and highlight how strange it is for a Knight in Shining Armor of the Crusader era. However, contemporary documents show that "cid" was just a common word for war leader in 11th-century Spain, used by Christians and Muslims alike, and that it continued to be used as a courtesy until the 14th. The historical Rodrigo was known and signed as El Campeador ("Master of the Field"), which was an actual accomplishment. He went from El cid (one of many), to El Cid Campeador (the one and only), to El Cid (the one, after the common meaning of "cid" was forgotten).
• The view popularized by Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe of plucky "Saxon" commoners still resisting their "Norman" overlords a century or two after the conquest has been shown to be hogwash - but that doesn't stop it showing up in many subsequent Robin Hood adaptations, where the Sheriff's soldiers are referred to as Normans to make it OK for Robin to kill them. In the Robin Hood story, the Merry Men also long for "Good King Richard" to return and oust the evil Norman usurper, John. But Richard was John's brother, so, presumably, a Norman as well. Also it's often forgotten in the stories that although John did take control of England when Richard was held prisoner in Austria, he also succeeded him as king after his death (not without a rebellion, though it was put down).
• Joan of Arc was lionized in 19th century Republican France as a symbol of the nation and the French people. Consequently, they turned her into a rival and victim of those opposed to the Republic - the monarchy, aristocracy, clergy - and diminished their role in the fight against the English. In reality, Joan was not a poor peasant, but the daughter of the Dean of Domremy, and could ride a horse before she met the Dauphin; she never decided strategies or fought in the battles, but served as a standard-bearer and rallying point while the aristocrats led the army (in fact, part of her defense at the trial was that she never killed a person, in battle or otherwise); and Charles VII really tried to take Paris (several times in fact) instead of withholding resources to engineer Joan's defeat out of jealousy. As for Joan's trial, it was the work of the Bishop of Beauvais who was an English ally, so it is not surprising that his verdict was undone by the French King and the Pope as soon as they could. She was also not burned as a witch. Her crime was relapsed heresy, having to do not with her voices but with her cross-dressing. She promised she would never again do so, then her captors stole her skirt and replaced it with pants; it was either that or go naked. Anyway, her real crime was opposing the English, and she was reviled as a witch and a whore in England for decades afterward because of that (e.g. Shakespeare's Henry VI).
• While there's still some debate over Richard III's overall character and culpability for certain actions (specifically the deaths of his nephews), this trope is in play for Richard's appearance. As part of the Historical Villain Upgrade he received from Tudor historians and playwrights, Richard was depicted as a deformed hunchback. Later historians concluded that this was anti-Richard propaganda. However, when his body was discovered in late 2012/early 2013, it was found that he actually did suffer from scoliosis and roundworms. His portrayal in Shakespeare complete with hunchback, withered arm and limp was more than just an exaggeration of his appearance - had he been as Shakespeare wrote, he wouldn't have been capable of mounting the horse he offered to trade his kingdom for - but the kernel of reality within the myth was there.
• The "Christopher Columbus fudged the distance" theory is used in Orson Scott Card's novel Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus and Alejo Carpentier's novel El Arpa y la Sombra. The former describes Columbus desperately looking at ancient records to try to find "proof" that his size of Earth was the correct one. He is pretty obviously shown to be disregarding any piece of evidence to the contrary. Interestingly, the novel shows that by the time he brought his case before the Spanish royal court, his case was solid enough to rival the established proof, leaving the tie-breaker up to the Queen, whom he convinced by his sheer piety. Also, according to the novel, Columbus thought he was looking for China, not India, because a hologram sent from the future pretending to be God told him to. The latter proposes that Columbus knew of the Vikings' travels, so he knew he'd find new lands, and he used the wrong size on purpose to get financing for the expedition and return a hero for the discovery.
• Horrible Histories: "Sweet King Richard III" was recorded before King Richard's body was found and exhumed, so the song dismisses Richard's scoliosis as an invention of his enemies.

16th century

• The Borgias:
  • Contemporaries viewed Lucrezia Borgia as a scheming, amoral poisoner who abetted her father and brother (Rodrigo and Cesare Borgia, respectively) in their plans to dominate Europe. This belief became even more prevalent in Victorian times, when the words "borgia" and "lucrezia" became shorthands for "female serial killer". More recent scholarship casts doubt on this belief, as there is no historical proof that Lucrezia harmed a flea herself, let alone committed multiple murders. If anything, Lucrezia's life might have been easier if she had been a poisoner. It's thought now that Lucrezia was blamed by her contemporaries because she was a safe target compared to her relatives. Old Harry's Game references this in one episode where Edith tells a man that there's no evidence Lucrezia Borgia ever murdered anybody. However, since the person she's talking to is Satan, he knows from personal experience that the rumours are true.
• There is a myth that Jane Seymour died after delivering the future Edward VI via Caesarian section. This sprung up very shortly after Edward's birth; there's even a Child Ballad about it. But there is no evidence either in the historical record; if Edward had been born via Caesarian, Jane wouldn't have survived the birth, let alone been seen by dozens the next day sitting up in bed healthy and hale. There would also be a surgeon's bill in the records, which there is not.
• Yume no Shizuku, Kin no Torikago: The manga, set in the Ottoman empire, has Grand Vizier Ibrahim Pasha marrying Princess Hatice, who was Sultan Suleiman I's sister. This was believed to be the case for a long time, but during The Noughties scholar Ebru Turan found references that the actual Ibrahim married a woman called Muhsine Hatun, who had no such relation. In fact, she was the granddaughter of the man that had enslaved Ibrahim decades prior.
• Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego? (1997): The manual states Mona the model in the Leonardo da Vinci mission was a fictional character and the inspiration for the painting, let alone whether or not Leonardo actually used a model for the creation of The Mona Lisa, was (at the time) unknown. In 2005, it was discovered that the Mona Lisa depicts Lisa del Giocondo, meaning the game was actually right to depict her as a real person (note that the "Mona" is a title, not part of her name — "Mona Lisa" is the Italian equivalent of "Madam Lisa"). Of course, the depiction of her as a surly model posing for Leonardo is still completely fanciful, especially considering he spent years working on it.

17th century

• Where In Time Is Carmen Sandiego: In one episode, Medeva steals the first newspapers from 1609. It was once believed that the world's first two newspapers, Relation aller Fürnemmen und gedenckwürdigen Historien and Avisa Relation oder Zeitung, both debuted in that year. In 2005, it was established that Relation aller Fürnemmen und gedenckwürdigen Historien actually debuted a few years earlier in 1605.
• ''Cromwell: One of Cromwell's sons, also named Oliver, is depicted as having been killed in battle. This was thought to be the case at the time the movie was made, but later on, rediscovered letters revealed that he had actually died of smallpox.

18th century

• The American Revolution:
  • When 1776 was written, not a lot of information about James Wilson was available. The playwrights tossed in a bit of Artistic License and created a climax where his desire to remain a nobody is the crucial factor in him breaking with Dickinson and voting for independence. They note in the DVD Commentary that this was never singled out by historians as a major misstep, but later findings show that James Wilson was a staunch proponent of independence, and that the delay in the vote which the play attributes to stalling techniques by Adams was in reality partially due to Wilson wanting to go home and check that his constituents were all right with his vote.

19th century

• Similarly to the above, the Mound Builders and other advanced civilizations in the Americas were later denied by Europeans as being Native American, a view which thrived in the 19th century. They ignored even the accounts from Spanish and French explorers who'd met the people there, or those who knew them, in previous centuries, instead positing that they were actually Europeans, Chinese, Phoenicians, Indians (from India), or Jews (the ten lost tribes of Israel-this theory was used in The Book of Mormon for instance). Tropes like Precursors and Ancient Astronauts are often recycled versions of these, just replacing Old Worlders with aliens.
• The Terror:
  • The ultimate fate of HMS Terror: When Dan Simmons wrote the book, popular belief held that the vessel had most likely been crushed and sunk by the pack ice. At the end of the book, Crozier sets Terror ablaze after returning to the ship to find it abandoned by its skeleton crew and finding... something inside his cabin. In Real Life, not only was the sunken wreck of Terror found in Terror Bay in 2016 (a full decade after the book was published) but it was in such pristine condition that it can be hypothetically raised and made seaworthy again after restoration. (Though in a fun bit of creepiness, the divers found that silt had blocked all access to Crozier's cabin, so who knows what might be waiting in there...)
  • James Fitzjames is a Flat Character owing to the fact that little was known about his background at the time the book was written, hence no Character Development beyond his true-to-life perchant for heroics. However, a few years after the book was published, a biography of Fitzjames was released which detailed Fitzjames's origin as an illegitimate bastard who bluffed his way into the Royal Navy with help from his foster family. This new dimension to Fitzjames was later incorporated into his character's portrayal in the 2018 television adaptation.
  • Curiously enough recent studies published after the book indicated that lead poisoning was likely not a major factor in the expedition's failure.
  • While it is unlikely we'll ever know, it is possible that the "Aglooka" sightings refer to different people and that Crozier didn't survive as long as he's been traditionally assumed, on account of them.
• Im Eisland:
  • As the wreck had yet to be discovered when the comic was made, Terror is depicted as being crushed in the ice while trapped in Erebus bay, while the real ship was found in good condition a few miles further south in Terror Bay.
  • Lead Poisoning is also brought up as one of the causes for the expedition's downfall, when this theory was later disproven, as the amount of lead found in the bodies is equivalent to others of the time.
• Painters and musicians of the 18th and 19th century were captivated by Orientalism, and especially by the concept of the Turkish harem. They were enraptured by the idea of hundreds of beautiful young concubines or "odalisques" loitering around in various states of undress, fawned on by cringing slaves and guarded by eunuchs, all existing solely for the pleasure of the Sultan. The best-known works influenced by this are probably Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Abduction from the Seraglio and Ingres's Grande Odalisque.
  • We now know, of course, that the Real Life Turkish harem was very different from the imaginations of these artists; most inhabitants were older female relatives of the sultan or of previous sultans, and the concubines that did live in the harem were often left to wither on the branch, most sultans being either too old, too drunk, or too uninterested to make use of them. In fact, non-castrated men were generally forbidden to enter the harem, which included the sultan himself. The task of choosing his bed mate generally fell to his mother.
  • The majority of women in the Seraglio weren't on the concubine track at all, but engaged in various professions necessary to the running of the Sultan's household. A woman could make a nice little fortune for herself and look forward to eventual retirement and marriage.
• The Statue of Liberty: The story of Bartholdi and Laboulaye conceiving of the statue as a monument to the emancipation of America's slaves, presented in this film as fact, seems to be myth, as later research has indicated.
• Flashman: Some of the novels suffer from this on account of recent historical research by scholars accessing new primary sources in Afghanistan and India from the original languages. Fraser at the time he wrote the books relied on the then available British sources and his own, very good, intuition, and as such his account of the Afghan Wars and the Indian Mutiny while entertaining as always is not exactly insightful as education. In general, Fraser takes as given that "the Great Game" was an active thing and that Imperial Russia's designs on India were real, when modern historians like Peter Hopkirk and William Dalrymple have seen the Great Game as an exaggerated diplomatic issue on the part of the British, and used more as an Excuse Plot to ensure there was something to do for bored officers than of any practical diplomatic concerns.
• How Few Remain: The Richard Nixon, the Used Car Salesman portrayal of Ulysses S. Grant as a largely forgotten drunk is largely founded on hostile rumours with virtually no solid evidence and now considered a myth by most serious historians. At most, Grant may have occasionally drank too much, which would've been easy for a man who Can't Hold His Liquor in a profession where drinking was common for coping with boredom and stress. This is even more interesting since three of Turtledove's protagonists—Teddy Roosevelt, Frederick Douglass, and Mark Twain—all idolized Grant in Real Life for his character even more than his generalship.
• The Killer Angels about the Battle of Gettysburg:
  • Lee ordered Stuart to attack the Federal right flank and be prepared to disrupt the defense against Pickett. Thus the famous charge was not so reckless as assumed. A pincers attack from front and rear would have disrupted the defense of the ridge and destroyed Meade's army, but the Federal cavalry defeated Stuart and disrupted this part of the plan.
  • Fremantle was more of a tourist rather than an official representative of the government and did not wear his uniform, although he did write that book about how the Confederacy was sure to win.
  • In a later chapter, Chamberlain's told by another character that General Meade wanted to retreat after the second day but was talked out of it by his corps commanders. Although this was accepted as true by historians for a long time, it's now believed to be a fabrication by Daniel Sickles, who feuded with Meade for years after the war over Sickles' decision to move troops to the Peach Orchard.
  • In the years since, some military historians have questioned if losing Little Round Top would have been as disastrous for the Union as stated here because the hill would have made a poor seat for artillery (reducing its ability to disrupt the rest of the Union line), the number of Confederate troops available to hold it would probably not have been adequate, and Lee wrote of it as an obstacle rather than an objective. However, this is analysis in hindsight from the Union's perspective; the men defending it on that day certainly believed it was critical to hold at all costs.

20th century

• The Great White Silence: This film reflects the view of Robert Falcon Scott and his expedition to the South Pole that held up for nearly 70 years, namely, that Scott was a brave and noble hero undone by bad weather and bad luck. That changed dramatically with the publication of a 1979 book called Scott and Amundsen (later re-titled The Last Place on Earth) which characterized Robert Scott as a bungler out of his depth. According to this view Scott made a series of blunders which led to the deaths of him and his party, including: using ponies that were ill-suited for polar conditions (and getting weak, poor-quality ponies at that) when he had been advised to use dogs, deciding to rely on man-hauling sledges to the Pole instead of using dogs, failing to insure that the motorized sledges would actually work, failing to lay enough fuel and supplies, choosing to take a fifth man to the Pole when they had rationed for four, and not issuing clear instructions for a dogsled party to come to his rescue. Full publication of Scott's diaries have also revealed some pretty unflattering passages, including what can only be described as irritation towards Edward Evans for dying. There has been pushback against this view since, with Scott defenders pointing out that he actually did leave orders for a relief party to come get him (although it was phrased to not be a priority), and Scott falling victim to what was, even for the Antarctic, a terrible blizzard. But even as the issue has continued to be debated, it's basically consensus that Scott's party met with failure and disaster, while Amundsen got to the Pole first and got back alive, because Amundsen's expedition was planned better and led better than Scott's.
• The Killing Star: At one point, during the Titanic simulation, the narrator mentions that robot probes in the early 21st century confirmed the belief that officers aboard the ship had locked the way to Third Class, with the brass gates still in place a century later, and Jonathan even sees the officers locking the way while the lifeboats are still launching. This is an old myth that has since been debunked, as the gates were locked mostly out of confusion and ineptitude, not elitism, and that this happened after most of the lifeboats were already gone, after the passengers themselves still found their way up to the decks.
• Titanic (1996): Alice Cleaver being portrayed as a child murderer. In defense of the miniseries, it was widely believed in the early 90s, during the resurgence of interest in Titanic, that Alice was indeed a convicted murderer. At least two books even accepted this as fact, including Don Lynch and Ken Marschall's otherwise exhaustive volume Titanic: An Illustrated History. Only in recent years it was confirmed that the woman who murdered her baby in 1909 was Alice Mary Cleaver, completely unrelated to Alice Catherine Cleaver, the Allison family nurse.
• Raise the Titanic!:
  • The Titanic wreck is shown in one piece, when it is now known that the ship broke apart before it sank. In defense of the film makers, they were working before the wreck's discovery in 1985. Up until then, the received wisdom was that the ship went down intact and every previous film adaptation reflected this.
  • Likewise the myth of the iceberg opening up a 300 feet gash along the Titanic's side is repeated. It is now known, thanks to the discovery of the wreck, that the damage caused by the collision amounted to buckled plates, popped rivets and a series of much smaller punctures.
  • Just look at the poster, really. The bridge, decks, masts, and most chimneys are intact. In reality, all of them were either torn out by the water as it sank or were thrown by the energy of the impact with the sea floor. When James Cameron visited the wreck, the steering motor was exposed and anything above was missing.
• A Night to Remember:
  • Titanic is shown sinking in one piece, which was the received wisdom at the time the film was made. The discovery of the wreck in 1985 proved that it actually broke apart as it sank. To be fair no one is known to have observed this for certain (the break probably occured when the section was already under water) so its not surprising none of the film's characters witness this happening.
  • Thomas Andrews says that the ship has suffered a 300ft gash. In the 1990s, a series of sonar scans determined that Titanic actually suffered a series of small holes. Obviously as with the above event we don't know how much information the real Andrews had at that point (any witnesses who saw the internal damage don't seem to have survived and obviously the outer hull below the water line could not be observed) so its not too shocking he's incorrect. He's also urgently trying to make the point Titanic is doomed at that moment and could be playing to the crowd.
• Titanic (1943) and Titanic (1953): In addition to all the deliberate errors made for propaganda, this film shows the Titanic going down in one piece. This was the commonly accepted version of events until the discovery of the wreck in The '80s proved that the Titanic broke in half.
• Titanic (1997):
  • The sinking was made to be as accurate as possible as it was understood in the mid-90s. After the movie was released, James Cameron continued to make expeditions to the wreck to gain a better understanding of the sinking. It has now been determined that the ship broke apart between the second and third funnels, and at a much lower angle than depicted in the film. Cameron has since joked that he now needs to reshoot the entire sinking.
  • As in every depiction of the ship, the central propeller is shown to have four blades. However, in the 2000s, a design notebook that belonged to Thomas Andrews was found at Harland & Wolff's offices, and in it was a note which suggests the central propeller actually had three blades.^note No known photographs of Titanic's propellers exist; any such photo purported to be of Titanic are actually of Olympic. In addition, shortly after the sinking, Olympic was refitted with a three-bladed central propeller. This suggests that Titanic was fitted with one in order to test the efficiency of a three-bladed vs four-bladed propeller, a test that was obviously never completed due to the sinking. At the wreck, the central propeller is buried in mud, making it impossible to confirm how many blades it had.
• Millennium (1983): It's said that the wreck of the Titanic was never found because the ship and the remaining people on board were brought to the future. The book was released two years before the wreck was discovered.
• Case Closed: In the 3rd Non-Serial Movie The Last Wizard of the Century (released in 1999), it was revealed that Grand Duchess Maria Nikolaevna of Russia survived the Russian Revolution and escaped to and settled in Japan with the help of a Japanese craftsman. This revelation, while plausible (though far-fetched) in 1999, is no longer historically possible today as her missing remains were found in Russia in 2007 and confirmed in 2009.
• World War I:
  • Studies of German documents after the fall of the Berlin Wall suggest that there might have never been a "Schlieffen Plan", at least as most commonly presented in post-1918 literature. This is, however, hotly contested among historians.
  • In Britain and the US at least, even historians who saw the war as worthwhile depicted Western Front generals like Douglas Haig and Sir John French as blundering incompetents wantonly sacrificing their men for little appreciable gain. This view was propagated by popular histories like Basil Liddell Hart's The History of the First World War and Alan Clark's The Donkeys, not to mention fiction like Paths of Glory and Blackadder. More recent historians (Hew Strachan, Brian Bond) tend to emphasize the tactical and logistical difficulties brought by the war's unprecedented scale and new technologies (planes, tanks, gas) making it extraordinarily difficult for generals on either side to adapt. More extreme claims, like Haig's supposed obsession with cavalry, have been sharply revised. This is by no means a consensus view (see John Mosier and Denis Winter for opposing views), but analysis of WWI became less one-sided in just 20 years.
• The Sinking Of The Lusitania: The film has the Germans torpedoing the Lusitania twice. This was a widely believed version of the story, due to a second, massive explosion after the first torpedo hit that sent the ship to the bottom. It was also the version advanced by the British government, which sought to maximize propaganda value. However, all primary evidence—testimony from the submarine crew, intercepted communications from the submarine, testimony from Lusitania survivors—indicates that the ship was only torpedoed once. The second explosion has never been fully explained but is now believed to have been a massive steam explosion due to damage from the torpedo.
• Lawrence of Arabia: The depiction of Lawrence as a sadist who enjoys killing can be traced to several critical Lawrence biographies (by Richard Aldington and Anthony Nutting) written shortly before the movie's release, something which most modern historians discount. Not coincidentally, Nutting served as an advisor to the filmmakers. On the other hand, showing him as a masochist who liked receiving pain has become widely accepted.
• About Nazi Germany, the conversations Hermann Rauschning claimed to have had with Adolf Hitler, which he wrote down in his book Conversations with Hitler (Hitler Speaks in the UK). Modern historians specializing in Nazism have since questioned the authenticity of said conversations, and the most serious among them such as Ian Kershaw tend to simply disregard them. Some documentaries such as De Nuremberg à Nuremberg made ample use of them before more research was done.
• World War II:
  • For a while, it was assumed that Nazi Germany was efficiently-run because of its fast ascension from economic devastation to conqueror of Europe. For example, in the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "Patterns of Force", this view led a misguided historian to believe he could make it work without the ethical problems. Philip K. Dick also wrote The Man in the High Castle on the assumption that the Nazis were capable of overrunning half the planet. Since then, a lot of evidence has drawn historians to the conclusion that the regime was full of internal corruption and egotistical rivalries, which hurt its efficiency in many ways. Some of this was by design: Hitler wanted his subordinates feuding with each other, both out of Social Darwinist ideology and because bitter rivals would be much less likely to join forces and seize power from him. Ultimately, the modern historical view is that Germany did as well as it did in the first half of WWII in spite of the Nazi regime, and a lot of it had more to do with Allied General Failures and unwillingness to take decisive action until the winter of 1939-40.
  • Enemy at the Gates is often mocked for its portrayal of Stalingrad (most notably for showing unarmed Russians charging German machine guns and getting killed by their own officers for retreating). However, the film is actually (loosely) based on a 1973 non-fiction book of the same name, which draws its content from archives and actual anecdotes from soldiers. Unfortunately, governments classified most of their WWII archives at the time and only granted the author access to a select few, and many of the soldiers interviewed turned out to be Unreliable Narrators. The sniper duel is largely based on an interview with the real-life Vasily Zaitsev during the battle, but scholars have failed to find the dueling sniper in German archives (called Major Walter König in contemporary Soviet news, and Heinz Thorvald in Zaitsev's biography). It's now generally accepted to be Soviet propaganda.
  • Albert Speer's conduct during the war has also had some reappraisal over the years. This started at the Nuremberg Trials, where Speer presented himself to the court and the wider public as the token 'Good Nazi', a Consummate Professional devoid of ideology who was Hitler's only true friend, did not know anything about the Holocaust beyond rumors, and whose conscience drove him to refuse Hitler's final "scorched earth" orders and even attempted to assassinate him. While the assassination claim was dismissed as a fabrication even by his former colleagues, his sudden atonement saved Speer from the hangman's noose and he was sentenced to twenty years at Spandau Prison instead. This 'Speer Myth' became the dominant narrative, later codified through his own memoirs. Several historians who did more digging into his record came to question this, including proof that he was present at the 1943 Posen Speeches where Heinrich Himmler clearly outlined what was happening in the SS camps, and Speer's rather eager use of slave labor as Minister of Armaments, resulting in tens of thousands of deaths of primarily 'Eastern workers'. He also directly ordered the dispossession of Jewish tenants in Berlin when he was still simply Hitler's chief architect before the war. While several works of fiction until the mid-2000s (such as Downfall) still give him a fairly sympathetic portrayal, some more recent works (such as Über) have accurately reflected the fact that he was one of the key Nazis leading Germany's war effort, not a blameless bureaucrat.
• Education for Death: Goebbels's portrait at school portrays him as if he were trying to hide and learning in the classroom at the same time. This was because, at the time, there was a (now discredited) theory that Goebbels was the real ruler and Hitler just a puppet/poster boy for the regime.
• The Desert Fox: This film (and the book it's based on) is one of many that promotes the 'Clean Wehrmacht' and Rommel myths. While this was understandable at the time because of the very limited declassified information available in the 1950s and relying mostly on the biased testimonies of former Wehrmacht officers, it does make the film very dated.
• Battle of Britain:
  • The film was made a few years before it was revealed that British intelligence had broken the Enigma code; hence there was no mention of the crucial role that Ultra decrypts played in turning back the German air offensive.
  • Also the film erroneously indicates that the RAF pulled out of the Battle of France while it was still going on, when in fact it was still heavily engaged through the end of the Dunkirk evacuation. Churchill acknowledged the RAF's role in his speech about the evacuation (the speech is briefly mentioned in the film), but popular history tends to forget this because most of the RAF's roughly 3500 air sorties took place out of sight of the evacuation beaches and so are absent from eyewitness accounts.
• Sink the Bismarck!:
  • The film makes no reference to the signals intelligence that played a vital role in the Royal Navy's hunt for the Bismarck for the very good reason that said intelligence's very existence was still an official secret.
  • The film was made decades before the wrecks of the Bismarck and Hood were located; the condition of the Bismarck wreck confirmed the conventional narrative, the condition of the Hood wreck contradicted several theories about her loss.
  • The Catalina that rediscovers the Bismarck was actually flown by U.S. Navy Reserve Ensign Leonard Smith. Again, this was something the filmmakers couldn't reveal in 1960. America was still officially neutral in May 1941 and Smith's involvement in combat operations was still an official secret.
• Flags of Our Fathers: Recent research has revealed that Doc isn't actually in the famous photograph of the second flag raising, though he was assigned to the same platoon and was present at the first flag raising (the same squad raised both flags.) The man in the photograph previously misidentified as Doc Bradley was actually Pfc. Harold Schultz.
• Lightning: The book was published ten years before it was revealed to the public that Churchill did have a plan to attack the Soviet Union, rightly called Operation Unthinkable.
• Under Ten Flags: Instead of doppelganger spies doing Mission Impossible-type infiltrations of German headquarters to steal German military codes during World War II, the codes were actually obtained by the codebreakers of Bletchley Park, a fact still classified at the time the movie was made. In fairness, Ultra decrypts were routinely passed off as intelligence obtained from spies or reconnaissance aircraft.
• Prelude to War:
  • The Tanaka Memorial was widely believed to be real in the 30s and 40s, and the films portray it as such, but it is now commonly believed to be a forgery. On the other hand, Japan did basically follow its scheme.
  • Admiral Yamamoto's claim that Japan would dictate peace to the US in the White House was seen as a jingoistic boast in the US (and the admiral is misquoted to that effect), but we now know Yamamoto was actually warning against starting a war with the United States, because the US would never be willing to make peace unless terms were dictated to them in the White House (i.e. unless they were totally conquered, which everyone in Japan knew was completely beyond Japanese capabilities).
• Night and Fog: Being made in the 1950s, the movie contains inacurracies due to the imperfect knowledge of the Holocaust at the time, notably to differenciate concentration and extermination camps. Prior to the 1970s, resistants and political prisoners were thought as the main targets of nazi deportation, and the specific genocide of Jews wasn't as well known.
• History of U.S. Naval Operations in World War II: The author's personal loyalty to the US Navy and close proximity to the actual events meant he either did not have access to or give sufficient credit to Axis primary sources, some of which did not resurface until years after the war. As a result he was sometimes forced to treat US Navy suppositions about enemy actions and intentions as fact and some of those assumptions have not withstood the test of time. This is especially apparent in his account of the Battle Off Samar which is obviously colored by his evident contempt for Admiral Kurita and cannot be reconciled with the action reports of the Japanese ships involved. By and large though he managed to get things right if he had good sources.
• Rambo: The Force of Freedom: The crux of General Warhawk's plan for naval superiority in the pilot miniseries is to raise the World War II era battleship Yamato and retrofit it for battle. This was before modern sea mapping technology confirmed the Yamato was severely damaged when it sank and split in two pieces.
• Slaughterhouse-Five: It's stated several times that 135,000 people were killed in the bombing of Dresden. Vonnegut took this figure from David Irving's book, The Destruction of Dresden, which even appears in the novel. Back in the '60s, Irving was considered a respectable historian, and his figures were widely accepted. Since then, he came out as a Holocaust denier and fell into disgrace. It also turned out that he inflated the figures, and the actual casualties were no higher than 25,000.
• Anne Frank: The Whole Story: The miniseries depicts Lena Hartog, the cleaning lady, betraying the Franks to the police. This claim was made in Melissa Mueller's biography, but the identity of the betrayer has never been verified. The SS officer who took the call has been recorded as saying that the informant had "the voice of a young woman". A 2015 biography raised the possibility that it could have been Bep's younger sister Nelly, a Nazi collaborator who disapproved of her family helping the Jews. She was witnessed by her other sister talking on the phone to the Gestapo that morning, but nothing was ever proven.
• Band of Brothers: In episode 3,Private Albert Blithe died of his wounds sustained during World War II in 1948 and this was commonly believed among Easy Company men. However after the episode aired his family informed everyone that he had lived for another twenty years. They had all just assumed he had died as he never went to any reunions. Some editions of the book and the series have corrected this error.
• Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory: There's a fraudulent fifth ticket claimed by a gambler in Paraguay named Alberto Minoleta — who is implied to actually be fugitive Nazi Martin Bormann using a false name. It wasn't until 1973 that that the real Bormann's remains were found in Berlin, and it wasn't until 1998 that DNA testing confirmed his identity, proving that he died during the Fall of Berlin.
• Dr. Charles R. Drew dying after being denied admittance to a whites-only hospital because of his skin colour when he was injured in a car crash, and thus (ironically) not receiving a blood transfusion. This gets a mention in an episode of M*A*S*H. He was actually admitted to the Alamance Greater Hospital in Burlington, North Carolina, and was pronounced dead half an hour after receiving medical attention. One of the passengers in Dr. Drew's car, John Ford, stated that his injuries were so severe — mostly in his leg due to his foot being caught under the brake pedal when the car rolled three times — that there was virtually nothing that could have saved him and a blood transfusion might have killed him sooner due to shock.
• Watchmen: Rorschach's account of the murder of Kitty Genovese is based on a New York Times article that came out shortly after Genovese's death, which said that 38 people watched her being killed in plain view, and did nothing. This was, for years, the only narrative about what happened, and was the one Moore drew on. However, later researchers found that the Times story lacked evidence: nobody saw the attack in its entirety and those that did see it only saw parts of it. Some people heard her cries for help, but assumed it was a lover's quarrel or just people leaving a bar. The killer attacked Genovese twice, disguising himself after the first attack, so people didn't realise it was the same guy. After the second attack, one of Genovese's neighbours called the police and another, a 70-year-old woman, cradled her while she was dying. So while Genovese's murder was undoubtedly horrible, it was no more awful than most murders: the story that people watched it happen and didn't lift a finger is entirely without foundation, and seems to have been made up by the original reporter, as the Times itself acknowledged in a 2016 article. While it is is fitting for Rorschach to believe such a bias-reinforcing story, even Dr. Long on hearing this story, does not demolish this claim, since this was indeed the widely accepted narrative for a long time.
• Casino:
  • Nicky and Dominick's real-life counterparts Tony and Michael Spilotro were not beaten to death in an Indiana cornfield and buried alive. That was thought to be what happened at the time the film was made, but it's now known that they were actually killed in a Cook County basement. The bodies were then buried in a cornfield, which is why the authorities initially believed they had been killed there.
  • Ace's real-life equivalent, Frank "Lefty" Rosenthal, was an FBI informant... but since this didn't become public knowledge until 2008, after Rosenthal had passed away, it's never even hinted at in the movie. His wife, Geri, Ginger's real-life equivalent, was also an informant, even sharing the same FBI handler; neither ever found out what the other was doing.
• The identity of Deep Throat, the principal informant of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein who helped unravel the Watergate scandal, was a mystery for thirty years. In All the President's Men (1976), he's portrayed as an anonymous figure in a trenchcoat, with some speculating that he was actually a combination of different people from Nixon's inner circle; in Dick (1999), "he" is actually two teenage girls. In 2005, Deep Throat was revealed as former FBI Associate Director Mark Felt, whose motives were likely revenge against Nixon for not promoting him to replace Hoover. In retrospect, it was never that much of a mystery; Nixon's tapes show that the administration figured it out almost immediately and it killed his career.
• Carlos the Jackal is the Big Bad of The Bourne Series, written while he was at large, which presents him as a Diabolical Mastermind and attributes a number of assassinations to him, including that of JFK. The actual Carlos was captured in 1994, and is now viewed as more of a bumbling Smug Snake whose past reputation was highly exaggerated. This also accounts for most of the differences between the books and the movies (he had been caught by that time).
• Manson (1973): All the Tate-LaBianca murderers are introduced with captions saying "Death Row". The death sentences of the Manson gang were commuted to life imprisonment, along with those of everyone else on Death Row at the time, due to a Supreme Court decision made not long after this movie was filmed. (California later re-imposed the death penalty.)
• Zodiac (2007): Some things in the film have been proven incorrect, as new evidence has came to light in the years since the film's release. For example, in the film, the Zodiac Killer is shown sitting in the backseat of the cab before killing Paul Stine, while in real life, there was evidence that he actually sat in the passenger seat next to Stine. Also, Arthur Leigh Allen hasn't been suspected of being the Zodiac for many years.
• The Boys from Brazil: The movie puts Mengele in Paraguay (though the mothers of the kids are Brazilian), his speculated real life location. He actually did live there for some time, but in the 1970s he was really in Brazil (where he died in 1979, meaning that besides the deteriorated health he could have seen the movie).
• The Hunt for Red October: The fall of the Iron Curtain led to the revelation that a number of Clancy's guesses about the Soviet stuff were completely wrong:
  • The Storozhevoy, the Real Life basis for the story, is mentioned in the novel as attempting to defect to the West. The political officer who led the mutiny (and was later shot) was actually attempting to mimic the actions of the Avrora in 1917: sail into Leningrad, denounce the cronyism of the Brezhnev regime, and demand reform among Leninist lines.
  • Many technical details about the Red October and the Typhoon class in general, such as the unique internal arrangement of these vessels (practically two big submarines and three minisubs connected inside an outer shell), the number of reactors and the lack of a missile room, which would have invalidated several plot points. There are similar problems with his depiction of the Alfa class.
  • Zampoliti didn't have authority over combat matters, were strictly subordinate to the commanding officer, and functioned similarly to a chaplain in a Western military.
  • Most Soviet vessels weren't named; then again, The Hunt for K-139 doesn't really sing or dance.
  • The reactor accident that sinks the first Alfa would be impossible; they used a liquid metal cooled nuclear reactor that wasn't pressurized, and any leaking coolant would simply have frozen, sealing the leak. Ironically, the use of a liquid metal plant rather than an American-style pressurized water reactor is mentioned as a faulty guess by U.S. military intelligence.
  • The "Crazy Ivan" was a real maneuver. Its existence was highly classified when the book was written; Clancy had figured it out himself. However, it had by and large been rendered obsolete by the use of towed-array sonar equipment, which was also classified at the time.
• Golgo 13: Martin Bormann appears as the leader of a Nazi revial group in the 1980s. At the time, there was still speculation that he'd managed to survive the fall of Berlin, but his skeleton was found in 1972 near a Berlin bridge and confirmed to be him in 1998.
• Dirt (Album) by Alice in Chains: "Rooster" repeats the assertion that Vietnam vets were spat on after returning from the war. Studies published since the release of the album have concluded that very little evidence supports that Vietnam veterans were spat upon by anti-war protestors, though it's certainly possible that isolated incidents really did happen.
• Evita:
  • Eva's entire relationship with Magaldi, which has been called into question by more recent research. (See the Other Wiki (second paragraph of linked section) for details.)
  • The whole musical falls prey to this. When it was written in the 1970s, there was only one English-language book about Eva Péron published, written by a political opponent of the Pérons. (Imagine writing a musical about Barack Obama based solely upon his Conservapedia page.) More recent biographers have portrayed Eva much more evenhandedly; she may not have been a saint, but she wasn't a villain, either.

21st century

• United 93 was produced before the cockpit voice recorder tape or accurate transcripts were released to the public. As a result, the words and actions of Jarrah and Ghamdi while in the cockpit are now known to have been slightly different in reality, and it is possible that the pilots Dahl and Homer were wounded but alive up to the crash instead of killed immediately. There is also no evidence whatsoever that German passenger Christian Adams panicked or promoted collaboration with the terrorists. That was a complete invention for the film.
• Ex Machina: A member of the Department of Defense states that if Mitchell's staff had read the classified intelligence that he has, they would know how closely Saddam Hussein and Al Quaeda are linked. At the time of the story's publishing in 2005, this was still an issue in dispute. However, later investigations and intelligence declassification would reveal that Saddam Hussein and Al Quaeda had no functional relationship, and Hussein had no involvement in the 9/11 terrorist attacks.