Dated History / Late Modern Age

Examples of Dated History that reference events from roughly 1800 A.D. to this day.

19th century

• Napoléon Bonaparte and The Napoleonic Wars:
  • Napoleon is now believed to have been of about average height for a man of his era. The commonly held Anglosphere idea that he was short is derived from the fact that the French foot was longer than the English foot, so the English unknowingly shaved a few inches off his height after seeing reports of how tall he was. Other possible factors were his Affectionate Nickname le petit caporal and the fact that he was often surrounded by members of the Old Guard (who were mostly of above average height, making him look shorter in comparison).
  • A once-popular myth about the Ulm campaign is that Austrian and Russian armies failed to join forces in time because the Austrians used the Gregorian calendar while the Russians were still using the older Julian calendar. Some historians have pointed out that this idea is contradicted by the fact that virtually all known Russian correspondence with Austria during the War of the Third Coalition made sure to include both the Gregorian and Julian dates of events as a matter of course. It's now believed things were more complicated than that: the Austrians believed Napoleon would choose to give battle in northern Italy, and their planning with the Russians reflected that fact, so both were caught off guard when Napoleon chose to focus his efforts in southern Germany instead.
• It was once generally accepted that African Americans largely had the same names as their white counterparts up until the 1960s at the earliest. This narrative was cited in Chapter 6 Freakonomics as part of an extended discussion of nominative determinism. However, analysis of census records and birth and death certificates has shown that "distinctively black" names have been around for much longer than that; they've been around since the Antebellum era. It's just that the names that were recognized as such were different across different eras; for example, the 1920 census shows that 99% of Americans named Booker who were alive at the time were black.
• The German Coast uprising of 1811 was long written off as a fight against bandits, if not omitted altogether. Now, though, it's understood as a major slave rebellion. The prevailing theory as to why the truth was suppressed was because an organized, politically sophisticated slave revolt that wasn't wantonly murderous didn't gel with the popular narrative among slaveowners and slavery defenders that holding on to slaves was good for everyone involved.
• 2021 saw the unearthing of a document detailing the purchase of land that would become Liberia's capital Monrovia, which proved several widely accepted facts about said purchase to be myths.
  • Once it was said that local chieftains rejected the contract because their societies prohibited the purchase and sale of land. The fact that this purchase agreement shows formal approval of the land sale proves this wrong.
  • While it was said that the locals couldn't comprehend the contents of the contract because they had no knowledge of English, there is now proof that at least two of the West African signatories knew at least enough of the language to conduct negotiations in it.
  • The notion that Robert Stockton forced the locals to sign the contract at gunpoint is now known to be based on a misunderstanding. While he did draw his guns during the meeting, it was to ward off two pro-slavery outsiders who tried to sabotage the negotiations. In any event, the signing only happened the day after he drew his guns, so even if he had threatened the rulers he was in talks with, they would've had ample time to mobilize their troops, many of whom had guns of their own.
• Ranavalona I, Queen of Madagascar, was not viewed in a kind light by foreign contemporaries. They strongly condemned her policies and made her out to be little more than a cruel and xenophobic tyrant, and possibly a madwoman to boot. However, more recent historical analyses have taken a less overtly negative stance on her, with many recharacterizing her as an astute political operator who worked to expand her realm's territory and influence and tried to preserve Malagasy political and cultural sovereignty from European encroachment.
• British machinations during the Great Game were motivated by fears that Russia would use its expansion into Central Asia as a springboard to threaten the British presence in South Asia. While this was considered a very real possibility even after the original Great Game ended, most contemporary historians believe that Russia had no serious plans for South Asia.
• Scholarly consensus on the Thuggee seems to be constantly in flux. Were they really motivated by warped devotion to Kali, or were they just after money? Had they existed since antiquity, or did they only arise much later? Were they as divided as they seemed, or were they decentralized cells of a larger organization? Did they even exist at all?
• Like George III's porphyria, Queen Victoria's status as a carrier of hemophilia was also originally blamed on Royal Inbreeding. As is the case with George's porphyria, hemophilia is caused by a single mutated gene and is therefore not more common in inbred populations. The mutation is believed to have first occurred spontaneously in the gametes (=eggs/sperm) of either of Victoria's parents, making her the first person in her family ever to have the mutation. It’s now believed the mutation probably came from her father since he was in his early fifties when she was born and these types of mutations tend to pop up in the children of older fathers. Thus, inbreeding would have absolutely nothing to do with it. If anything, it's interbreeding with Victoria's daughters that spread hemophilia to so many other nations' royals, whether they were previously related to her or not. American television shows love this trope, though.
• Edgar Allan Poe's reputation as a depraved, drunk, drug-addled madman is now known to stem from character assassination by his literary rival Rufus Wilmot Griswold, who wrote a slanderous biography of Poe full of distortions and outright lies after Poe's mysterious death in 1849. This biography was treated with undeserved credibility for a long time and became the standard for characterization of Poe.
• Franklin's lost expedition:
  • Inuit accounts that some members of the expedition resorted to cannibalism to survive were once largely considered unreliable, with the allegorical play The Frozen Deep (co-written by Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens) including a Take That! at the idea that such respected sailors and researchers would do such a disgusting thing. However, in 1992, Canadian researchers discovered the skeletal remains of some expedition members that showed evidence of having been cannibalized, most notably cut marks on bones consistent with de-fleshing. On the basis of this evidence, it's now accepted that the Inuit witnesses were right and at least some among the men turned to eating their own dead in desperation.
  • More recently, the idea that lead poisoning may have played a part in the expedition's fate, showcased in both The Terror and Im Eisland has been disproven. Although large quantities of lead were discovered in the bodies discovered from the expedition, studies indicate that they aren't enough to be harmful and are equal to others of the time.
• The Revolutions of 1848 were once considered largely failures. However, it's now believed that they had more success than previously thought. Governments were forced to change how they acted or at least presented themselves, and the revolutionaries did obtain some political successes, both immediately (such as the end of feudalism in Austria and Prussia) and in the longer term (greater self-determination for the Hungarians).
• Empress Dowager Cixi's reputation in her own lifetime and for some decades afterwards, both within China and abroad, was that of a cruel, self-serving, reactionary despot more concerned with prolonging the existence of the ailing Qing dynasty and using state resources for her own benefit than the wellbeing of her country and people, who played no small part in China's downward spiral during the 19th and early 20th centuries. This traditional appraisal, however, was called into serious question by revisionist historians starting in the 1970s. Through examination of primary sources, it has become clear that much of her bad reputation comes from backdoor gossip and misrepresentation. Within China, both Nationalist and Communist historians scapegoated her for deep-rooted problems that created a virtually unsalvageable situation; while in the Western world, Orientalist stereotypes were a contributing factor to her vilification. Many historians have painted a more nuanced portrait of her as a charming, shrewd, and conscientious administrator and political operator who had to balance multiple internal and external influences and whose leadership was probably the best option China had at the time. She was also not as anti-reform as she has often been painted; she was involved in the abolition of slavery and torture in China and led a program of sweeping political change whose main flaw was not being implemented until late in the Qing dynasty's decline.
• The American Civil War:
  • After the war, it became a common refrain (especially in Lost Cause mythology) that the Confederate states seceded partly or even entirely for reasons other than slavery, the most popular one being states' rights (with the nature of those "rights" usually left nebulous). However, examination of primary sources (including the declarations made by the seceding states) reveals that the Confederate politicians were motivated largely if not completely by wanting to preserve slavery in perpetuity, which is why they were so reluctant to accept proposals that they boost their dwindling manpower by giving slaves their freedom in exchange for service in the Confederate military. Their supposed commitment to states' rights is now considered particularly laughable since the federal government of the Confederacy actually passed laws prohibiting any of its constituent states from abolishing slavery, showing where their priorities truly lay. This myth appears as recently as the 1996 The Simpsons episode "Much Apu About Nothing". When Apu is taking the US citizenship test, his examiner asks him about what caused the Civil War; Apu responds with a long-winded explanation of the complexities, to which the examiner annoyedly responds with "just say 'slavery'". Ironically, this means the joke has the opposite effect of its original intent; while it was originally meant to show how intelligent and knowledgeable Apu was, it now makes it look as if he unknowingly bought into a debunked myth.
    • It should be noted that the idea of the "lost cause" as we think of it was specifically created in the later part of the 19th century by those in the Confederacy who didn't want to be viewed like they supported slavery, especially as slavery became less and less popular after the passage of the 13th Amendment. The term "lost cause" specifically comes from an 1866 book by southern journalist Edward A. Pollard titled The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates, Pollard having previously endorsed slavery in his writings (which even got him arrested in 1865) and still being a supporter of both segregation and white supremacy until the end of his life. Still, by this point he understood that slavery was immoral and wanted to distance those who fought on the side he supported from such a cause.
  • A popular idea rose in the 1920s that the Confederacy's supposed commitment to states' rights prevented the Confederate states from properly coordinating with each other and the Confederate central government, which hamstrung their war effort. This is now considered a myth: while the Confederacy did have problems with internal divisions, the impact they had is believed to have been exaggerated, and the Union also had serious internal divisions.
  • The once-popular idea of the Confederates as "libertarians in gray" has been shown to be a sanitization of a more complicated reality. Throughout the Confederacy's short-lived existence, there were increasingly vocal and widespread calls for it to abandon liberal democracy and free-market capitalism in favor of adopting a more authoritarian political system (such as a military dictatorship or an absolute monarchy) and much stronger government intervention in economic matters (with some going so far as to call for something akin to a command economy).
  • Robert E. Lee's traditional reputation is now believed to have been overblown. Not many seriously doubt that he was a talented commander, but it's thought that he wasn't as talented as once thought. While it was once thought that his defeats on the battlefield were the result of incompetence and/or disobedience by his subordinates (with James Longstreet in particular taking flack due to some of his postwar statements and actions), the fact that Lee willingly accepted the blame for them during his own lifetime combined with scholarly analysis of his tactics and strategies have shown that he wasn't quite the infallible general he was often made out to be.
    
    Lee pursued aggressive, flashy attacks which — while they often intimidated more timid Union commanders like McClellan — ran up casualty lists for the South, something the Confederacy could not afford as they were up against a more industrialized opponent with almost four times as many men of fighting age, and often failed to win strategic advantages in the war. For example, Lee's greatest victory in the war — the Battle of Chancellorsville — cost him more than 20% of his troops killed or wounded (including one of his best commanders, Stonewall Jackson) in a series of audacious but bloody frontal charges, without gaining a single yard of ground for the Confederacy. Despite Grant's traditional reputation as a butcher, he suffered fewer casualties while commanding three armies in two different theaters than Lee did while commanding one army in one theater.
  • It was traditionally held that the Confederate leadership was qualitatively superior to their Union counterparts, an advantage the Union overcame through its quantitative edge, overwhelming the Confederacy with its greater manpower, bank deposits, and industrial capacity. While these advantages certainly played a key role in the eventual Union victory, the idea that the Confederate generals were straight-up superior is now considered an exaggeration, or at least a simplification. Many Union generals, like William Tecumseh Sherman and George Henry Thomas, are now considered to have been very good commanders in their own right, while quite a few prominent Confederate generals (such as Braxton Bragg and Gideon Pillow) are now believed to have been straight-up incompetent.
  • Contrary to the idea that Union generals won largely by sending wave after wave of troops into the meatgrinder, it's now known that Confederate casualty rates were actually significantly higher than Union ones. In fact, Robert E. Lee had the highest casualty rates of any general on either side of the war. Ulysses S. Grant in particular was unfairly labeled a "butcher" who won mainly through brute force; starting in the 1950s, the view among historians has increasingly shifted towards him being a calculating and skillful strategist and commander who had the talent to utilize the Union's potential advantages and understood how to wage war in an age of industry better than many of his contemporaries.
  • Nowadays, it's known that the use of "hooker" as slang for a prostitute doesn't come from Joseph Hooker hiring prostitutes to service his soldiers. This use of the word with its popular meaning occurred in print as early as 1845 and likely comes from the fact that the Corlear's Hook area of Manhattan was a notorious Red Light District in the early 19th century.
  • Gettysburg as the war's main turning point is now considered a flawed idea by many historians, as it ignores the impact Union victories in Tennessee and Mississippi had. Even those who believe it did mark a turning point in the overall war generally say a large part of its impact was due to it happening the day before Vicksburg's surrender, which meant the Confederacy had been put on the backfoot in the Eastern Theater at the worst possible time.
  • While the Union's conduct during the war was by no means spotless, the stories of marauding Union troops are now believed to be exaggerations. Evidence suggests that the worst offenses were generally perpetrated by opportunistic criminals and pro-Union partisans and paramilitaries, not by Union regulars. The only theater where the stereotypical raving, rapacious bluebellies could be considered the norm was the brutal fighting in Kansas and Missouri (due to a combination of preexisting strife from Bleeding Kansas and people using the conflict as an excuse/opportunity to settle old scores), and even then, pro-Confederate forces didn't exactly hold a moral edge.
• The Dunning School of Reconstruction, which held that granting blacks the vote and the right to hold office had been a mistake and Radical Republican efforts to reform the postwar South were just a means of attacking it after it had already lost the war, dominated scholarly and popular depictions of the era from the 1900s to the 1930s. Elements of this narrative appeared in The Birth of a Nation (1915), a movie that infamously painted the first incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan as a band of morally justified vigilantes retaliating against abuses the legal authorities couldn't or wouldn't punish. However, its fundamental precepts were re-examined as the African-American civil rights movement gained steam in the mid-20th century and found to be wanting. While it was true that corruption and oppression were problems, the bad parts of Reconstruction were blown out of proportion while the more positive elements were minimized or twisted. One recurring thread that got particular criticism was the characterization of freedmen as either ignorant dupes who were used and abused by unscrupulous whites (both Northern carpetbaggers and Southern scalawags) or unthinking savages whose depredations threatened civilized society. New attention was paid to the role African-Americans played in shaping the course of events as this racist attempt to diminish their capacity as independent actors capable of constructive activity fell out of favor.
• Thanks to the influence of a famous 1930s biography, it was once widely believed that Sitting Bull was made "Supreme Chief of the whole Sioux Nation" sometime during Red Cloud's War. Later historians and ethnologists have found that Lakota society was highly decentralized, with different bands being largely autonomous and their elders making most decisions, meaning that this concept of authority was probably foreign to them.
• Spurious precision exaggerated the Paraguayan casualties of the War of the Triple Alliance. The traditional view was that Paraguay lost 84% of its pre-war population. This estimate was based partly on anecdotal evidence and partly on an 1857 census that is now known to have accidentally or purposely inflated the country's population. While the number of casualties will probably never be known for certain (though just about everyone agrees that military-aged males suffered disproportionate losses) and even the lowest estimates are pretty terrible in their own right (a country losing 7% of its population is certainly nothing to sneeze at), figures of more than 69% are now considered unlikely at best.
• The Wild West:
  • It's now believed that the Old West probably wasn't as violent or "wild" as generally imagined. The overall homicide rate was actually rather low in most places, about 1.5 murders per year per average western town. Additionally, those murders weren't likely to be committed with guns, and gunfights/shootouts/duels in general were not as common as is thought due to many frontier towns putting restrictions on guns. However, death from diseases like cholera, dysentery, and tuberculosis, or in an accident like being kicked/dragged by your own horse, makes for far less compelling media. While there were large-scale violent events like range wars and family feuds, similar or even worse events could be found elsewhere in the country at different times (with the Coal Wars notably continuing well into the 1930s).
  • The west is accepted as having been much more racially diverse in modern times than in years past or in the media. There are estimates that anywhere from about 30-50% of cowboys were black, Hispanic, or Native American. The media is largely still quite far behind on this matter as well.
  • Famed gunslinger Doc Holliday was reputed in his own time and for decades afterward to have killed over a dozen men in various altercations. Modern historians have concluded that a more modest body count of between one and four men is far more likely.
• 19th-century German historians promoted what is now known as the Borussian myth, the idea that German unification was inevitable and it was Prussia's destiny to accomplish it. After World War II, this myth was deconstructed and analyzed, and is now considered merely an attempt to work backwards and rationalize why German history took the course it did.
• Assessments of George Armstrong Custer have shifted over the years. While he initially received criticism after his death at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, it wasn't long before the public saw him as a tragic military hero, due in no small part to a number of hagiographic books written about him by his widow Elizabeth. The disaster was frequently blamed on Marcus Reno's alleged cowardice and Frederick Benteen's alleged tardiness. This portrait of Custer translated into countless works of fiction, perhaps most famously They Died with Their Boots On. However, later historians cast a more critical eye on Custer's conduct, pointing to his refusal of reinforcements and leaving behind a battery of gatling guns despite knowing he was facing superior numbers, as well as his decision to divide his command. Though Custer still has a number of defenders, the "tragic hero" Custer is no longer the consensus. The more critical view has bled into the mainstream, with many works of fiction and popular history characterizing him as a reckless, arrogant Glory Hound who needlessly got himself and hundreds of his men killed.
• For a long time, it was believed that one of the key reasons for the British defeat at Isandlwana was that the soldiers ran out of ammunition because Quartermaster Bloomfield dispensed reserve bullets to soldiers in an absurdly slow, "orderly" fashion. However, it appears this story is exaggerated, if not a myth; while Durnford's Native troops did run out of ammunition, it was mostly because they had been deployed too far from the camp to ensure a steady supply of ammo, not Bloomfield's poor handling of supply. Most British units closer to the main camp were able to keep up a steady stream of fire until they were overrun, as attested by both British and Zulu accounts of the battle. A related myth is that Bloomfield and his aides weren't able to open the ammo boxes because the commissary had misplaced their screwdrivers; even if this had been the case, the boxes could've easily been broken open with rifle butts or other tools. Both of these myths appear in the Zulu prequel Zulu Dawn.
• The Chicago cholera epidemic of 1885, which is claimed to have killed up to 90,000 Chicagoans after a thunderstorm washed polluted water into Lake Michigan. Historian Libby Hill debunked this in her 2000 book The Chicago River: A Natural and Unnatural History, showing that there were no contemporary records of such an epidemic; no more than 1,000 Chicagoans died from cholera, typhoid, or other diseases in 1885. Hill's book hasn't stopped newspapers, novelists, and even historians from propagating the claim, including Erik Larson's popular nonfiction book The Devil in the White City.
• While the First and Second Boer Wars were commonly thought of as "white men's wars" (even when they took place), in more recent times increasing scholarly efforts have been undertaken to document the role black Africans in the region played in the conflicts, both as military personnel and non-combatants. Black people living in the Boer Republics were also forced into concentration camps, though they were separated from interned Afrikaners; Africans were also the victims of massacres (at the hands of Boer forces) and forced labor during the war.
• 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 bedmate 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.
• Vincent van Gogh's last painting was once believed to be Wheatfield with Crows. However, new studies conducted in 2020 have cast this into doubt, and a competing theory that Tree Roots was his final painting has gained significant credence.
• Some beliefs about the beatified Chilean girl Laura Vicuña are now known to be inaccurate:
  • For many years that included the time of her beatification, no photograph of her was known to exist. This meant that representations of her were derived from a portrait painted by Italian artist Caffaro Rore, which was based on an account of Laura's appearance by her younger sister Julia decades after the fact. This portrait made her appear very European-looking, and other depictions followed suit. However, a rediscovered school picture of Laura has made it clear that she was actually Mestizo and looked it, and church depictions have been changed to match.
  • Popular accounts of Laura's life and death have been debunked by biographers Bernhard Maier and Ciro Brugna, who have pointed out multiple inaccuracies, especially in regards to Laura's father José Domingo. Unlike in the earlier accounts, he never legally married her mother Mercedes Pino and didn't die before the family moved to Argentina; in actuality, he outlived Laura, as shown in rediscovered notes saying that Laura actually offered her life for both her parents.
• While the notion that Bram Stoker based Dracula on Vlad the Impaler has been seriously discussed since at least 1958, it was the 1972 publication of In Search of Dracula that popularized it. However, the rediscovery of Stoker's notes has cast this idea into doubt:
  • The notes give no indication that Stoker even knew Vlad the Impaler existed. According to them, he got the name from the book An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, which contained references to multiple voivodes known as "Dracula" and a footnote claiming that "Dracula" meant "Devil" and was a name given by Wallachians to people who were particularly courageous, cruel or cunning. This strongly indicates that he chose the name because of its devilish associations, not because of the history and legends attached to its owner.
  • For that matter, the idea that there was a singular model for Dracula has itself come under attack. More likely, he was a composite containing aspects of multiple people, both historical figures and people Stoker knew personally.
  • We now know a great deal of where Stoker's knowledge of vampire lore came from. He consulted numerous books on superstitions and added a few inventions of his own to make his vampires stand out from others. We also know more about how the novel changed over time. Originally, the count wasn't from Transylvania at all; he was from Styria in Austria. And before he came across the name Dracula, it appears Stoker was calling his vampire Count Wampyr. There are actually multiple places in his intermediate manuscripts where the name "Wampyr" is crossed out and replaced with "Dracula". If Stoker had based Dracula on Vlad, it seems likely that he would've been named that from the beginning. The evidence points to Dracula being an amalgam like many other fictional characters, a mix of information Stoker found interesting and ideas he developed on the way. Dracula isn't even representative of one European state: he's a pinch of Transylvanian folklore with a Wallachian name, a Hungarian ethnic background, and a feudal estate straight out of English Gothic Horror.

20th Century

• While it was once believed that Ty Cobb was one of the most violent and racist individuals to ever play baseball, it's now generally accepted among historians that his bad reputation was based on sensationalized and even outright fictionalized biographies. Cobb really did get into a number of fights, but his reputation for violence was exaggerated and what he did wasn't as extreme by the standards of the time as it would be today; though it's true that he assaulted a heckler, that was hardly uncommon in those days. Not only was he not as violent as claimed, he was also an advocate for racial equality, in contrast to the once-accepted image of him as a virulent racist, and his advocacy was recognized and praised in black newspapers of the era. He noted his approval when Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier and called Roy Campanella one of the greatest catchers in baseball history, hardly statements one would expect from a man who hated black people. Before the traditional image of him was proven wrong, this characterization of Cobb was the norm in both fiction and non-fiction for decades; The Cinema Snob even jokingly alluded to it (and implied it was true) in his review of The Babe Ruth Story.
• For over 70 years, it was taken for granted that ill-fated Antarctic explorer Robert Falcon 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 that 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 ensure 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 has 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.
• For decades, western historians attributed the fall of the Qing Dynasty solely to the Qing's own corruption and misrule of the Chinese people, who had since become enlightened by western ideals of democracy and political revolution. With the rise of Red China as a serious world power, however, this consensus has been largely discredited, with the collapse of the Qing Dynasty now being attributed to the expansion of European colonial empires and the Qing's own failure to industrialize, resulting in their defeat and subjugation by their much more powerful neighbors. The 1911 revolution that ultimately brought down the Qing was caused largely by the fact that the Qing were seen as too weak to ward off foreign control, and thus the Chinese people in their revolution aimed to establish a new Chinese state which could defend itself against European intrusions.
  • It was also once believed in the west that one of the main reasons the Qing were overthrown was due to their being perceived by most Han Chinese as foreigners due to their Manchu roots. This theory has also been largely disproven, as the distinction between Han Chinese and non-Han peoples was not prevalent in China at the time, and didn't become so until later in the twentieth century.
• The RMS Titanic sank on a dark, moonless night. Most survivors in lifeboats thought they saw the ship sink in one piece, while the few survivors struggling in the water thought it broke in two. The inquiry into the sinking accepted that the lifeboats had a better vantage point, and it was accepted that the Titanic sank whole. In 1985, however, the ship was found on the ocean floor in two pieces, surrounded by a debris field that could only have been created by the two pieces separating at or near the surface. All movies about the sinking filmed before 1985 show the ship sinking whole, while the ones made afterwards show it splitting before sinking.
  • Clive Cussler's bestseller Raise the Titanic! (published 1976 and set in 1987) imagines the ship in one piece. Furthermore, the book argues that thanks to the icy cold temperatures, the ship would be nearly perfectly preserved and capable of salvaging. Cussler himself wrote in later editions how he was working off the assumptions of the time and how happy he was the novel was finished before the discovery invalidated the entire plot.
  • The Film of the Book was outdated even faster, being released in 1980. Here, the ship has the bridge and three of four funnels intact, and there is even a barely decomposed human body aboard!
  • Raise the Titanic! also mentions the ship having a massive gash across the bow from the iceberg. In reality, the iceberg just pushed in the hull's plating to allow water to seep in (had there been such a huge gash, the ship would have sunk in half the time).
  • Some works written before the wreck was found, like Millennium (1983) by John Varley, have the wreck never being found at all. In this case, the ship and the "casualties" were taken forward in time.
• The fatalities that occurred as a result of the Colorado Coalfield War are now believed to be significantly higher than official records suggest. Modern estimates vary significantly, but even the minimum suggested death toll of 69 is more than twice as high as the contemporary figures.
• Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa signed a contract with Mutual Film Company, one where the studio paid him for the exclusive right to film his troops in battle. This much is true. However, the supposed clauses demanding Villa conduct his battles in certain ways (such as saying he could only fight in the daytime) while being recorded were proven to be apocryphal when Villa's biographer Friedrich Katz found a copy of the contract in a Mexico City archive and discovered that they were nowhere to be found.
• On a more light-hearted note, the bra was considered a very modern invention, and post-WWI women's fashion was considered revolutionary, with the earlier eras of costume popularly perceived as very restricting to women (although this latter view is often more Hollywood History than actual fact). With the 2008 discovery of some well-preserved textile remnants in the Austrian castle of Lengberg, it suddenly turns out that bra-like garments with separate breast cups were worn in the 15th century, and the tailoring techniques of that time bear some surprising similarities to 1930s fashions... In other words, 20th-century women's fashion only reinvented the wheel.
• 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.
  • T. E. Lawrence's reputation seems to shift with each passing decade. From the '20s through 1955, he was viewed as a Chaste Hero and military genius serving both the British and his Arab allies. After Richard Aldington's Biographical Enquiry of 1955, he was viewed as some combination of Consummate Liar, Small Name, Big Ego, and Depraved Homosexual. In the '60s, it was common to depict him as an imperialist agent knowingly selling out the Arab rebels, based on a selective reading of declassified War Office files. From the '70s onward, biographies like John Mack's Prince Of Our Disorder focused on his psychosexual hangups and literary output. More recent volumes typically explore Lawrence's military and diplomatic achievements, framing them in light of more recent events in the Middle East.
  • Unlike what was claimed in some contemporary accounts, Mata Hari almost certainly never blew a kiss at the firing squad that executed her.
  • The Treaty of Versailles was seen in its time, mostly thanks to J. M. Keynes' book The Economic Consequences of the Peace, as a "Carthaginian peace" or a victor's justice forced unfairly on Imperial Germany. This was an explanation shared within Germany, by liberals, by conservatives, by centrists, by socialists, by fascists, and by communists, who agreed with Keynes because of his later fame as an economist. Decades later, the French economist Etienne Mantoux debunked Keynes' analysis, and historians A.J.P. Taylor, Fritz Fischer, and Hans Mommsen argued that Imperial Germany was truly culpable for the First World War, and deserved to pay reparations. They also claimed that the real problem with the reparations was that they were too lenient, as Germany was in a position to pay, meaning that Versailles was a Golden Mean Fallacy that humiliated Germany politically but left it in a militarily and economically secure position to act on its desire for vengeance, while at the same time leaving the League of Nations with no force and authority to enforce the conditions of the Treaty.
• Remember Rasputin? The mad monk who was poisoned, beaten, and shot in the head four times before being thrown in the icy Neva River, and when they fished him out they discovered that he'd drowned? Turns out, the entire story was probably not true. The autopsy report (discovered after the fall of the Iron Curtain) states that Rasputin was shot in the head by a .455 Webley revolver, a gun normally issued at the time to British Secret Intelligence Service, and died instantly. There was no evidence of poison, no evidence of pre-mortem beating, and no evidence of drowning. Whether he was killed by the SIS or by Prince Felix Yusupov, who had close ties to the British government, using a British gun, will probably never be known, but the story of poisoned cakes and wine and the indestructible mad monk seems to be an invention. It's even unwise to read too much into the murder weapon being a Webley because, while it was issued to the SIS, the revolver and its ammunition could be bought all over the world and was a popular sporting and self-defence weapon.
• It was speculated for decades that Russian Grand Duchess Anastasia survived the execution of her family by the Bolsheviks. This inspired two movies and numerous pretenders who claimed to be Anastasia or one of her sisters.^note In Russia, the sister believed to have survived was either Maria or Tatiana; in the West, it was Anastasia. Later, the Romanovs' mass grave was found and five of the seven family members were identified; Alexei (the only son) and either Anastasia or Maria remained missing. In 2007, charred remains of a boy and girl were found near the mass grave, and in 2009 they were proven through DNA testing to be Alexei and one of his sisters, proving definitively that the whole Romanov family was killed.
• Mussolini did not make the trains run on time. Even in his own time, some observers (namely American journalist George Seldes) called Mussolini on this, but the myth persisted (and nobody stopped him from lying about it).
• Thanks to the influence of Leon Trotsky and his writings, it was once a common belief among the anti-Stalinist left that Josef Stalin was just being used as a front-man by a nebulous conspiracy of "Bolshevik Rightists". It's now understood that this viewpoint was due to Trotsky fatally underestimating Stalin, a fact he himself acknowledged later on.
• The Zinoviev letter, a supposed directive from the Comintern to the Communist Party of Great Britain, was widely thought to be genuine for decades. Since the 1960s, however, the consensus has been that it was a forgery designed to energize the Conservative Party's base and undermine support for Ramsay Mac Donald's government.
• In 1928, a young woman named Nan Britton wrote a book claiming that her daughter Elizabeth Ann had been fathered by US President Warren G. Harding, dead with no known children in 1923. She was generally dismissed as delusional: the book was terribly written, it had outright ridiculous parts like Britton claiming to have had sex with Harding in a closet in the executive office of the White House, and Harding's family said that he was infertile. Yet in 2015, a DNA test proved that Harding really was the father of Britton's daughter. Funnily enough, in a rare inversion of this trope, Boardwalk Empire presented Nan's claims as true several years before they were proven right.
• Today, it's generally accepted that Imperial Japan didn't really have a coherent state ideology. Different nationalist and military leaders had different interpretations of how to achieve an ideal nationalist state, with different degrees of militarism and authoritarianism, and they frequently disagreed with each other. Some were into ultratraditionalist Buddhist esotericism, others were arch-modernizers and wanted a totalitarian state to industrialize more and more, and still others were even genuine pan-Asianists that wanted Japan to become leaders of an anti-colonial East Asia (members of this last group generally had little authority outside the production and distribution of propaganda).
• While Eliot Ness certainly disrupted Al Capone's operations, the animosity between them is now considered to have been exaggerated. Capone was significantly more concerned with rival gangsters than he was with federal agents, and there's no hard evidence that the two ever met until 1932 — at the very end of Capone's criminal career when Ness was helping escort Capone to prison.
• There were a lot of misconceptions widely held about Alfred Hitchcock, the way he worked, and even his own personality that were taken as fact until quite recently:
  • It was commonly believed that Hitchcock pre-planned all his films, that he story-boarded all the scenes in his films to the last detail and never improvised or changed his mind during production. As Bill Krohn's Hitchcock at Work reveals, while Hitchcock did in fact do a great deal of pre-planning, not all of his films were such models of efficiency as he led everyone to believe. To begin with, Hitchcock shot all his films in sequence rather than out of narrative order. This was rare and exceptional in the Golden Age, and it meant that a surprising number of his films went over-budget and over-schedule, which never became a problem for him because they were all hugely successful at the box office and because Hitchcock managed to convince film journalists that there was nothing to see there.
  • A number of his movies actually went into production without a complete script. These included the remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much and Strangers on a Train and also Notorious, which was more or less made up as it went along. Likewise, while Hitchcock did storyboard a large portion of his scenes, he also winged it on many occasions. The famous crop-duster sequence in North By Northwest wasn't storyboarded at all, but after the film was finished, Hitchcock commissioned artists to create new storyboards based on the scene he shot for promotional purposes, to make it look like he planned the whole thing all along. And likewise, many of the scenes in his films differed from how they were storyboarded.
  • Hitchcock also had a tendency to deflect or invent excuses to explain the reasons certain films didn't work. In the case of Suspicion, he said that the film's ending was rejected because audiences didn't want Cary Grant to be a villain and a Karma Houdini, implying that the studio originally approved a script with such an ending to begin with^note An impossibility given the nature of The Hays Code which pre-approved and vetoed all properties and scripts in the pre-production stage. It's now known that in actual fact, the original ending of Suspicion ended much the way the film currently does, differing only in that preview audiences didn't find it as laughably funny as the one Hitchcock shot^note Hitchcock's real ending had Joan Fontaine drinking the glass of milk she thought was poison only to survive and then hearing a commotion and barely stopping Cary Grant's character from committing suicide. Audiences found this ending a little too bizarre and out of nowhere.
• Ma Barker was once thought to be the leader of the Barker–Karpis Gang, gaining a reputation as a ruthless criminal matriarch who organized and controlled her sons' activities. J. Edgar Hoover's characterization of her as "the most vicious, dangerous, and resourceful criminal brain of the last decade" was cemented in popular culture for a long time with her depictions in movies like Ma Barker's Killer Brood and Bloody Mama. Nowadays, however, most historians believe this popular image of her is an exaggeration. While she did know of her sons' criminal activities and provided a certain degree of support (which made her an accomplice to their crimes), there's no evidence that she was personally involved in planning or executing them, surviving members of the gang insisted she was only tangentially involved, and the gang's actual leader was more likely a Canadian gangster named Alvin Karpis. It's widely suspected that Hoover tarnished her reputation to avoid criticism for her death in a shootout between the FBI and her son Fred; according to this theory, he figured it would be easier to stomach the death of an old woman with no warrant for her arrest if she was made out to be a criminal mastermind who shot at FBI Agents.
• When The Hindenburg suffered its infamous explosion, suspicions that it was destroyed in an act of deliberate sabotage led to decades of speculation. This even became a major part of the plot of The Hindenburg (1975), where a Luftwaffe colonel investigates a plot to bomb the zeppelin on what would turn out to be its fateful final voyage. However, examination of declassified FBI documents has led most historians to conclude that the disaster really was an accident, and any "evidence" pointing to one or more people trying to destroy the zeppelin was most likely mere coincidence.
• On account of being controversial and a major celebrity, there were huge numbers of myths spread about Orson Welles that are now known to be false:
  • The initial radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds (1938) allegedly causing mass hysteria and chaos because people thought that Earth really was being attacked by Martians: there is no evidence of any "mass hysteria," riots, looting, or chaos taking place that night or in the days that followed. Also, according to a kind of ratings data, the entire United States was not tuned in to that particular broadcast; only a relatively small number of people actually listened to it, certainly not enough for there to be "mass hysteria." Even among those, very few could be described as panicking. Most just called up the newspapers and police to learn if something was really going on.
  • Due to the high-profile Executive Meddling on some of his films, Welles was often held as the emblematic "irresponsible director" by critics and the emblematic martyr of creative expression by supporters. Now, of course, Welles does bear some amount of blame for the way his career turned out, and his feuds with his former colleagues were by no means one-sided and by all accounts he did have a self-righteous and myth-making tendency, but this wasn't in any sense exceptional in kind or degree, or atypical of show business types. For one thing, Welles never quite made films on very expensive budgets (unlike, say, Michael Cimino); indeed, Welles was critical of New Hollywood for young directors being given such large amounts of money for personal films, feeling it would lead to irresponsible behavior, concerns that were dismissed at the time. Even Citizen Kane was relatively cheap compared to other films of its kind, and that film had a smooth, competent production; the controversy around the film began during the editing and around the time of its release. The majority of Welles' films were made on low budgets and they were delayed because of the usual low-budget difficulties, but even given all that, Welles had a gift for working very fast, quickly and improvising and maximizing from very limited resources, as well as having enough people skills to command loyalty from production crew and actors to stick with him in very trying circumstances.
  • Many once widely believed misconceptions about Citizen Kane and its production originated in Pauline Kael's essay "Raising Kane", written to accompany the published screenplay. Besides propagating the Common Knowledge that Welles carelessly forgot to explain how anyone knew Charles Foster Kane's last words when there was nobody around to hear them,^note In actuality, Kane's butler Raymond says he was there when his boss died; we just don't see him because the entire scene is shot in extreme close-ups (in fact, the scene may have been shot from Raymond's POV) she argued at length that Herman Mankiewicz was the sole author of the screenplay, with Welles merely stealing credit after the fact — an argument that's still popular today. In reality, the two wrote separate drafts of the script and Welles combined together before shooting began, so the co-author credit is accurate.
  • As for Welles' films being taken away from him, and him being a martyr for artistic expression, the majority of Welles' completed films (Citizen Kane, Macbeth, The Tragedy of Othello, Chimes at Midnight, The Trial, The Immortal Story, F For Fake) are now known to exist as per his intentions with full Auteur License. This actually makes him exceptional to most directors of The Golden Age of Hollywood (who would be lucky to even be allowed in the editing room and many of whom at the end of their careers would only claim three or four films as works they were entirely satisfied with). The likes of George Cukor and King Vidor who enjoyed far more prolific Hollywood careers faced Executive Meddling far more often; for just one example, A Star Is Born (1954) was butchered worse than any of Welles' films (in fact, the movie's Re-Cut version has to be filled in with production stills). It also differentiates him from Erich von Stroheim (who with the exception of Blind Husbands faced Executive Meddling on each and every one of his films). The butchering of some of Welles' films (Touch of Evil, The Magnificent Ambersons, Mr. Arkadin) is more well known, and in each case, Welles finished shooting, and he's relatively fortunate for the fact that, Ambersons excepted, his films are generally capable of being reconstructed.
• 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 Alternate History novel 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.
  • While the image of Polish cavalry charging at German tanks with lances and sabers is undoubtedly iconic and has been interpreted in many different lights, it's now known to be based on a misunderstanding. War correspondents saw the corpses of Polish cavalrymen and horses near German tanks in the aftermath of the Battle of Krojanty and incorrectly assumed the Poles had tried to charge them, a misinterpretation Nazi and later Soviet propaganda ran with. What really happened was that a group of Polish cavalry made a surprise charge that dispersed a resting German infantry unit, only to be themselves surprised by a German armor column that drove up a nearby road. Note also that the cavalry unit was not a traditional 19th century cavalry that attacked with swords from horseback, they were a modern (for the time) partially mechanized unit armed with anti-tank rifles and TKS tankettes that dismounted to fight.
  • Italo Balbo's death in a 1940 friendly fire incident was long suspected to be an assassination ordered by Benito Mussolini. These rumors have been conclusively debunked, and it's now generally accepted that Balbo's aircraft was simply mistaken for a British plane.
  • The Pearl Harbor attack has become enshrined in history as brilliantly planned and executed primarily as a CYA and face-saving gesture for both sides. In reality, Fuchida's execution was effective but not brilliant and Genda's attack plan contained fundamental errors that become apparent in hindsight. The US Military played up the brilliance of the attack to make their own mistakes seem less important. And the mythical "third wave" attack on the oil storage facilities was not considered by Genda or Fuchida until after the war when they realized it was what their US interrogators wanted to hear and went Sure, Let's Go with That. A lot of this is thanks to the Pearl Harbor raid only being a small part of a simultaneous attack at targets right across the Pacific that was otherwise a complete success.
  • The Battle Off Samar:
    • It became Shrouded in Myth fairly quickly: Modern scholarship comparing photographs and cinematography with the various ship's logs and action reports revealed that the traditional narrative of the battle promulgated in Samuel Eliot Morrison's History of U.S. Naval Operations in World War II simply cannot be reconciled with the courses and positions of the Japanese ships involved. Even if Morrison had access to Japanese primary sources the heroic nature of the engagement and triumphalist tenor of the times could have prevented him from cross-checking "his" heroic sailors' accounts against their defeated enemies'. Among other things, the battleships Yamato and Nagato played a much bigger role in the battle than previously believed (the shell that crippled USS White Plains was almost certainly fired by Yamato from an estimated range of 31.6 km, eclipsing by a wide margin the record-setting 24 km hits by Scharnhorst against HMS Glorious and by HMS Warspite against Guilio Cesare, as was the shell that sunk the Gambier Bay), and the torpedo salvo that forced Yamato to steam north out of battle was probably fired by USS Hoel, and not USS Johnston as commonly reported.
    • Japanese cruiser Chokai was proposed to have been fatally damaged by hits from USS White Plains sole 5-inch gun but it sank leaving only one survivor, and the sole surviving Japanese source (Haguro's action report) to mention Chokai's damage states that it came from an air attack. Chokai's wreck was found in 2019 with all of her torpedo launchers and reloads intact, debunking its sinking by White Plains. Instead, evidence was found for a disabling hit on one turret, which was also mentioned in her action log.
  • It was once generally held that the battleship Yamato was sunk mostly intact. But it's now known that this was not the case: 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.
  • During the war, much was made of a document known as the "Tanaka Memorial", supposedly written by Japanese Prime Minister Giichi Tanaka in the 20s and detailing the steps that Japan would take to conquer Asia and then the world.^note Essentially: Step 1 — conquer Manchuria and Mongolia; Step 2 — Use that as a springboard to conquer China; Step 3 — Use the conquest of China to dominate and eventually conquer the rest of Asia; Step 4 -- ???; Step 5 — Japan Takes Over the World The document was widely believed to be genuine (as shown in Why We Fight), though well-informed observers doubted it already, and it was decisively exposed as a forgery following the Tokyo Trials. It's still not sure who committed the forgery (some sources say it was the Kuomintang regime or the Chinese Communist Party trying to garner more foreign support for their wars against Japan,^note This theory has credence as the "memorial" was first published in 1929 in a KMT newspaper others say it was the Soviet NKVD hoping to pull a Let's You and Him Fight between the West and Japan). The document seemed credible because Japan was indeed engaged in an (undeclared) war with China at the time.
  • 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.
  • For decades, it was believed that the Wehrmacht was (aside from the top brass and a handful of "bad apples") a mostly apolitical fighting force that was by and large not involved with the Holocaust or other Nazi war crimes. This was largely because the Wehrmacht's history immediately after the war was written in part by the very same generals who ran it and who sought to 'rehabilitate' its image, as well as their own actions. While there were some ^note like William L. Shirer, Hans-Adolf Jacobsen, Manfred Messerschmidt, Klaus-Jürgen Muller, Volker R. Berghahn, Christian Streit, Omer Bartov, Alfred Streim, Helmut Krausnick and Hans-Heinrich Wilhelm who dissented from this consensus, they were a distinct minority, especially in Germany. The idea started to crumble in the 1980s as new avenues of research opened up, and the fall of communism allowed historians access to documentation and material evidence that had previously been shut up in archives behind the Iron Curtain. By the mid-1990s, evidence that the Wehrmacht had been complicit and even actively involved in Nazi war crimes (including the Holocaust) became overwhelming. Now the consensus is that, while there were many within the Wehrmacht who were not involved in these crimes and some who even actively tried to protect people, the Wehrmacht as an institution was intimately linked with the atrocities of the Nazi regime.
  • 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.
  • Isoroku Yamamoto's talk of dictating peace talks in the White House was far from the jingoistic boast it was thought to be at the time. The actual context of the quote was him trying to impress upon his superiors the true enormity of the task they had set themselves in attacking Pearl Harbor — Yamamoto wasn't promising to dictate peace terms in the White House, he was saying that the only way for Japan to definitively win against the United States was to invade, fight across the breadth of the American continent and do just that. In short, he was telling his superiors "you're asking the impossible. They're not going to roll over and die with one bloody nose."
  • The idea that Hitler could have won the war had he just listened to his generals is now mostly considered a myth promoted by surviving German generals. While Hitler certainly made some serious mistakes during the course of the war, it's believed that there were multiple times when he made the right calls, with many historians pointing to cases where he went against his generals' recommendations and succeeded and instances when he went along with his generals (sometimes despite his own misgivings) and things went poorly. Even his long-derided decision to prioritize the Caucasus offensive over taking Moscow is now thought to be a case where Hitler was right and his generals were wrong: taking Moscow wouldn't have made the Soviets capitulate, and Germany and its allies really needed the oil that the Caucasus oil fields could provide.
  • The Kokoda Track campaign was long mythologized in Australia as part of the "Anzac spirit", which has led to some myths about the campaign gaining credence for a long time. One well-known example is the Battle of Isurava: for a long time, it was mythologized as "Australia's Thermopylae", where an Australian force that was defeated by the Japanese nevertheless fought a successful delaying action against an overwhelmingly more numerous enemy and managed to inflict more casualties than it sustained. However, it's now known that the Australians outnumbered the Japanese in the battle, and their successful withdrawal had more to do with Japanese tactical errors than any special Australian moves.
  • Outside of Poland, the Bloody Wednesday of Olkusz was long misrepresented as a specifically anti-Semitic event. Now it's generally understood that the atrocity indiscriminately harmed both Jewish and non-Jewish Poles; in fact, the majority of the victims were actually Gentiles.
  • There was no Japanese propaganda radio broadcaster who went by Tokyo Rose. It was a nickname given by American newspapers to describe these broadcasters, who were later conflated into one person by propaganda. While the idea of a singular "Tokyo Rose" started out as merely symbolic for Japanese propaganda as a whole, it was later taken at face value.
    • Further, the woman who was finally identified as "Tokyo Rose", Iva Toguri d'Aquino, wasn't the mythical propagandist either. She broadcasted under the name "Little Orphan Annie" among others. Also, she was not a dyed-in-the-wool Japanese supporter by any means. She was actually a Nisei (American born of Japanese descent) and UCLA student who had encountered the great misfortune of being in Japan visiting a dying relative at the time of Pearl Harbor. Due to her fluency in English, she was forced into making propaganda broadcasts aimed at the Allied forces, with the unwilling help of American and British POWs. She and they colluded to try to defang any propaganda value that the broadcasts would have, according to testimony from those same prisoners during Toguri's 1946 treason trial.
  • Few historians now seriously consider the idea that Operation Sea Lion had a realistic chance of defeating Britain. Even if the Luftwaffe had managed to defeat the Royal Air Force, the invasion would've been a logistical nightmare, German intelligence efforts against Britain had already been subverted, and the Royal Navy would've wrought merry havoc on German shipping. The Germans also had a crucial lack of vessels that could be used as landing craft, with their best substitute being river barges that would have had a rough time coping with the strong seas of the Channel, meaning that it's questionable whether an invasion would have even been feasible. Indeed, at least one reason Hitler shifted his gaze East was that he knew Germany didn't possess the navy needed to invade Britain. A 1974 wargame conducted by Royal Military Academy Sandhurst concluded that the invasion, if attempted, would have been a resounding failure.
  • Some once generally uncontested claims about the sinking of the USS Indianapolis have become more controversial or have been outright proven false.
    • The ship's captain, Charles B. McVay III, was long held responsible for the sinking, especially after he was convicted on charges of incompetence and negligence. While he always had defenders who claimed he was convicted unfairly so he could be used as a scapegoat for the loss of life, they were a distinct minority. That was, until research conducted by Hunter Scott in 1998 brought renewed attention to extenuating circumstances that undermined the case against McVay, notably the fact that he was not warned about Japanese submarines in the area and also that his request for a destroyer escort was rejected by naval command, who assumed the area he was sailing in was safe. Now, he's generally considered to have been a fall guy to draw the blame away from the higher-ups who were responsible for putting the ship in danger, and he was exonerated in 2000.
    • While it's long been claimed that huge numbers of the ship's crew were killed by sharks, perhaps most famously in Quint's iconic monologue from Jaws, these claims have become hotly contested in the 21st century. Many have gone on record stating that it's likely that sun exposure, thirst, hunger, bleeding, internal injuries, and even suicide killed far more people than the sharks did; with sharks getting a disproportionate share of the blame due to a combination of post-traumatic stress and people mistaking scavenging for predation. To back up these claims, historians and marine biologists have pointed out that Oceanic Whitetips, the species the lion's share of shark deaths in the incident have been attributed to, are now believed to be primarily scavengers. A 2017 investigation hosted by Shark Week determined that the number of fatalities caused by sharks was most likely in the low dozens.
  • Similarly to the claims that sharks killed most of the Indianapolis survivors, the Battle of Ramree Island has long been said to have seen the worst animal attack in recorded history, where a Japanese battalion trapped in the island's mangrove swamps by British and Indian forces was nearly wiped out by saltwater crocodiles; of the 1,000 Japanese soldiers in the wetlands, only 20 survived, with the vast majority of the deaths being attributed to crocodile attacks. It even won a Guinness World Record for the single worst animal attack on humans in recorded history. This is no longer considered credible by most serious historians: while it's certainly not implausible that at least a few of the Japanese were killed by crocs, it's unlikely that the number needed to kill so many people would have willingly gathered in such a small area. What's more likely is that the majority of the Japanese troops died from drowning and/or being shot, with many if not most of the deaths attributed to crocodiles actually being the crocs scavenging on Japanese who were already dead.
  • The Bombing of Dresden's death toll was a subject of debate for a long time, but the idea that up to 500,000 people were killed was considered at the very least credible... until it was discovered that the document these higher estimates were based on, the supposed Tagesbefehl 47, was actually a forgery promulgated by Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels.
    • An inflated figure of over 100,000 appears in Slaughterhouse-Five along with references to David Irving’s then-recent account of the bombing. Irving has since been widely discredited for his pro-Nazi sympathies and Holocaust denial, and Irving himself appears to have retracted the claim and admitted it was based on fabricated evidence.
  • Werwolf was traditionally thought to be intended as a guerrilla force that would harass Allied occupiers after the defeat of Germany. This was in fact a misconception created by the Nazi propaganda station Radio Werwolf, which broadcasted claims that the Germans would continue the fight even if all of Germany was captured; despite its name, it had no actual connection with the Werwolf unit. Rather than a clandestine organization of irregulars and partisans who would carry out an insurgency, Werwolf was made up of uniformed commandos who would clandestinely operate behind Allied lines in parallel with the troops fighting in front of the lines. Some within Werwolf may have continued to operate for a few months after the end of the war, but whether actions frequently credited to them can actually be attributed to any member of the group is questionable and most serious historians agree that Werwolf ceased to be a threat by Autumn 1945.
  • Since Nazi Party Chancellery chief Martin Bormann seemingly dropped off the face of the Earth in the last days of the war in Europe, it was long speculated that he might've escaped. He was even tried in absentia at the Nuremberg Trials and sentenced to death for his complicity in German war crimes. That changed in 1973 when a skeleton discovered by construction workers in Berlin the previous year was determined to be Bormann's. Any reasonable doubt was dispelled in 1998 when genetic testing was done on fragments of the skull conclusively proved that Bormann did indeed die in 1945, either committing suicide or being killed in a firefight shortly after leaving the Fuhrerbunker. Before this, however, many works of fiction would imply or outright state that he was still alive somewhere out there; for example, Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (released in 1971) had a "Paraguayan gambler" with a suspicious resemblance to Bormann fraudulently claim to have won a Golden Ticket.
  • Once, it was believed that Francoist Spain saved vast numbers of Jews from the clutches of the Nazis, but it's now understood that previous claims were exaggerated and Spain's actual efforts were more half-hearted and inconsistent. While it's true that the Spanish government allowed 25,000-30,000 Jews to leave Continental Europe through Spain, it failed to repatriate or otherwise protect the vast majority of Sephardi Jews living under Axis occupation, and it severely limited visas granted to Jews from 1943 onwards. Some actions previously credited to the Spanish government were later found to have been carried out by individual Spaniards acting on their own initiative. Not only that but documents uncovered in 2010 show that in 1941, Franco's government collected a list of all Jews living in Spain at the time; the fact that Franco was negotiating a potential alliance with the Axis at the time strongly indicates that he was willing to sacrifice them if he thought it would benefit him to do so.
  • Pope Pius XII was long criticized for his supposed inactivity in allowing the Jews and others to be slaughtered by the Nazis and their allies, with a number of possible reasons being suggested for his allegedly doing so. It is now known, however, that behind the public façade of stubborn neutrality, Pius was busily working to save countless souls from the Nazis and established links with the German Resistance. He allowed officials within the Catholic Church to do whatever they could to protect those targeted for death in the Holocaust and may have actively encouraged and masterminded such activity. Contrary to his nickname of "Hitler's Pope", it is now known that Hitler (who was at least somewhat aware of what Pius was doing but couldn't openly act against him as long as he kept up his public face of neutrality) referred to Pius as "Nazism's greatest enemy".
    • This is not to say that the Catholic Church did not occasionally brush with Nazism. Many German Catholics (Catholicism being the branch of Christianity Hitler aligned himself with publicly) engaged in aid to the Nazis, rather it be through celebrating Hitler's birthday, breaking the seal of confessionals, or turning over birth records to the Nazis. In the same regard, one of the most famous Nazi sympathizers in the United States was Charles Coughlin, a Catholic Priest. Mussolini and Franco (the second of which the Church was friendly with, although that could more be seen more as the the result of fighting against radical anti-Catholics during the Spanish Civil War) were also publicly Catholic. However, it is important to remember that no religious belief can be judged by its worse members. Furthermore, although it is not unfair to say the Church has gone along with fascist leaders and thinkers in the past, to say they were somehow fine with The Holocaust just has no historical basis.
  • Many otherwise-well-done books about the war suffer badly from the fact that they were written when all mention of the Allies' extensive code-breaking operations were still highly classified. For example, the British codebreaking operation codenamed ULTRA was pivotal in winning the Battle of the Atlantic, but no book published prior to 1974 will even mention it.
  • The American understanding of the Battle of Midway had to be heavily revised when American historians discovered that the book that American authors had previously used as a primary reference for the Japanese side of the battle (MIDWAY: The Battle That Doomed Japan by Nagumo's senior pilot Fuchida Mitsuo) contained some major lies about the battle — not just mistakes, but outright and intentional lies. Somewhat ironically, this had long been known in Japan, and Senshi Sōsho, the Japanese military's official history of the war published in the 1970s, gave a more accurate version of events on the Japanese side. But Senshi Sōsho had never been translated into English, so the American version remained wrong until the publication of Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway in 2004.
  • The notion of Adolf Eichmann as nothing more than an average desk worker who had no interest in doing any of the terrible actions he engaged in, one that was popularized by the 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, has been more or less dismissed by modern historians. Bettina Stangneth's 2011 work Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer is considered to have debunked the idea, proving that Eichmann was motivated by antisemitism and allegiance to Nazi ideology and not, as was once thought, a man who was simply doing what he thought his job was.
• The Sonderweg theory of German historiography claims that Germany followed a course from aristocratic to democratic government unlike any other in Europe, one that made the rise of something like Nazism almost inevitable. Once accepted nearly universally, it has been the subject of serious criticism since the 1980s, with some historians pointing to the experiences of Britain and France in the 19th century as the exception rather than the norm, and others claiming that the liberal German middle class held more influence than previously thought. While the idea of the Sonderweg isn't exactly discredited and still has its adherents, it's no longer considered the gospel truth it once was.
• In the aftermath of World War II, it was alleged that an underground, clandestine organization known as ODESSA (from the German: Organisation der ehemaligen SS-Angehörigen, meaning: Organization of Former SS Members) was set up by SS officers in either the war's last days or its immediate aftermath to help Nazis escape to South America or the Middle East. Today, however, it is generally believed no organization by that name actually existed.
• Dr. Charles R. Drew^note An African American physician who pioneered new techniques of storing blood for transfusions, which is credited with saving the lives of countless soldiers during World War II 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.
• Ed Wood is often called "the worst director of all time"; however, some film historians now dispute that. His movies were bad, there's still no doubt about it, but they were closer to averagely bad for B-Movie standards of his time. Wood's reputation as one of the worst directors originally came from some critics of later eras who by chance saw some of his movies (most notably Plan 9 from Outer Space) and judged them based on the standards of their own time rather than those of when they were made, granting him the title. In reality, Wood's movies would be considered bad but by far not the worst of the time, specially compare with such stinkers as Robot Monster or Monster a-Go Go. To put it in perspective, his movies would be for the time kind of The Asylum or Syfy Channel Original Movie levels of "bad", not Vídeo Brinquedo levels of bad.
  • Due to this, his reputation has largely shifted from being the "worst director" to the "best worst director" in that his films were often able to at least entertain his audience—albeit through bizarre choices made by Wood (his work was fairly creative, especially given science fiction movies were a dime a dozen at the time) as opposed to because they were actually good films.
• For Western historians, the interpretation of the "Stalin Note" went through this twice before ending about where it began. The first view was that Joseph Stalin was not serious about wanting a united neutral Germany, and sent the note to sour relations between Germans and the West. But in the early '80s declassified documents indicated that the western powers had not always acted in good faith about the offer, leading to a shift towards viewing Stalin as more serious about it... which lasted until the end of the Cold War, when declassified Soviet documents indicated that the Soviet goal had been to sour German-Western Allied relations.
• The debate over whether Julius and Ethel Rosenberg really were guilty of providing top secret information (most famously nuclear weapon designs) to the Soviet Union raged for decades, and they had many defenders who believed their conviction was a Miscarriage of Justice. Some even accused the case against them of being based in antisemitism, comparing it to the infamous Dreyfus affair. However, when many documents decoded by the Venona project were declassified, it became clear that Julius definitely spied for the USSR, and it seems likely that Ethel was at the very least complicit in her husband's crimes.
• For many years it was taken as obvious that Israel was heavily outnumbered and outgunned in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. However, after a generation of "New Historians" working in the 1980s and 90s examined newly declassified documents, it became widely acknowledged that Israel enjoyed considerable military advantages over its Arab enemies, with more than twice the manpower and a steady stream of state-of-the-art weapons from abroad.
• When the Soviet space dog Laika died aboard Sputnik 2, it was initially reported that she was euthanized by poisoned food shortly before she ran out of oxygen. Then in 2002, Dimitri Malashenkov revealed that she actually died from overheating on the fourth circuit of the satellite's orbit.
• Quebec's Quiet Revolution was once characterized as a great upheaval in Quebecois society. However, re-examination of prior economic and political developments in Quebec has shown that the events of the revolution appear to have been foreshadowed by things like the expansion of Quebec's manufacturing sector that had already begun decades earlier and the previous popularity of Quebec Liberalism (particularly the 1940s reforms of Adélard Godbout). Because of this, the Quiet Revolution is now seen not as a sudden u-turn in Quebec's Francophone society, but as a natural continuation of pre-existing trends.
• The claim regarding the murder of Kitty Genovese, based on a New York Times article that came out shortly after Genovese's death, saying that 38 people watched her being killed in plain view and did nothing. This was, for years, the only narrative about what happened, even being referenced in Alan Moore's Watchmen by Rorschach. 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. One man did open his window and yell "Leave that girl alone!", whereupon the killer left. He returned again to attack her a second time, but disguised himself, so people who might have seen him didn't realize it was the same guy. The second attack took place out of view of any witnesses. Two 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 "stood and watched" it happen right in front of them 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.
• Dimitri Tsafendas, the assassin of South African Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd, was once seen as an apolitical schizophrenic who was motivated by an irrational belief that Verwoerd was to blame for his tapeworm infestation. This was disproven by a 2018 investigation which revealed that Tsafendas was mentally healthy and motivated by anger at Apartheid. The prosecution at his trial set the false narrative in an attempt to prevent others from following in his footsteps, bribing a psychiatrist to falsely diagnose him as insane and deliberately withholding any evidence that would contradict the story they made up.
• Some widely-held ideas about the 1960s counterculture are now considered myths:
  • The stereotypical protesters against the Vietnam War are generally hippies and other countercultural strains. However, the anti-war movement and the counterculture weren't as intertwined as often thought; indeed, new distinctions have been made between cultural movements and activist movements (though of course, there was overlap, and some movements were both). While some groups combined anti-war politics with the hippie lifestyle, hippies generally prioritized spiritual enlightenment and community building over conventional political organizing. In fact, many hippies were indifferent towards or even opposed to political activism and instead hoped to change America by effectively abandoning established institutions and mainstream society to build what they thought would be better alternatives.
  • No, American hippies didn't just live in rural communes and large coastal cities. They could be found all over the United States, even in small Southern and Midwestern cities.
• Anton LaVey once claimed to have ritualistically shaved his head "in the tradition of ancient executioners". It's now known that he shaved his head because he lost a bet with his wife and made up the "ancient executioners" story to add to his mystique.
• There are now known to be no confirmed reports of second-wave feminists burning bras. The myth probably stems from a protest organized by New York Radical Women at the Miss America 1969 contest, where protestors threw feminine products into a "Freedom Trash Can" on the Atlantic City boardwalk. While they did initially plan to burn them, the police advised them not to (since doing so on a boardwalk posed a fire hazard), and evidence suggests that they probably acquiesced. Some local news stories claimed these items were burned at least briefly, but these claims are heavily disputed. Nevertheless, the idea caught on among both supporters and opponents of second-wave feminism, probably due to parallels with men burning their draft cards to protest The Vietnam War.
• While it was once widely believed that the Crips were an offshoot of the Black Panther Party, it's now generally accepted that the group got its start from a merger of pre-existing street gangs. Nor did it start out with any political or community agenda; co-founder Stanley "Tookie" Williams went on record refuting this idea, writing in his memoir that it was just a fighting alliance.
• Even though the Lin Biao incident remains shrouded in mystery to this day and the Chinese government's official account is viewed with considerable skepticism abroad (in large part due to the lack of corroborating evidence aside from testimony that may have been coerced), some once-popular foreign theories about what happened have since been discredited by examination of evidence. For example, it was once widely suspected that Lin wasn't actually aboard the plane that crashed and that he was actually secretly murdered in Beijing. However, unknown to most people at the time, a Soviet medical team had secretly dug up and examined the bodies found at the crash site, confirming in a classified report to Leonid Brezhnev and Yuri Andropov that one of the corpses was Lin's. The report was only made public in the early 1990s. Similarly, theories that the plane had actually been shot down were contradicted by accounts from eyewitnesses in Mongolia, which made no mention of any shoot-down.
• Chilean President Salvador Allende died of gunshot wounds during a 1973 Military Coup against him. It was suspected for decades that he had been assassinated, but a 2011 autopsy conclusively proved that Allende killed himself, putting those theories to bed.
• 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 J. Edgar 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.
• The sectarian aspects of the Lebanese Civil War are now believed by most historians to have not been as prominent as once thought. While many of the people and factions involved used religious rhetoric, it's currently understood that the secular reasons underlying the conflict were more important than previously believed and many of the participants weren't particularly motivated by religion. Indeed, there were conflicts between factions that were largely the same religion, such as Sunni Muslims (the Palestine Liberation Organization vs. the Syrian Army), Shia Muslims (Amal vs. Hezbollah), and Maronite Christians (Forces Libanaises vs. the Marada Movement).
• It was once generally assumed that the Soviet Union had a hand in the Saur Revolution, a 1978 coup which saw the overthrow and murder of Afghanistan's president Mohammed Daoud Khan and the establishment of a communist dictatorship. However, examination of archives following the fall of the Soviet Union revealed that the Soviets were just as surprised by the Saur Revolution as everyone else.
• Jimmy Hoffa was long thought to be buried under the west end zone of Giants Stadium. This was seemingly put to rest when the stadium was demolished in 2010 and no human remains were found.
• 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).

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.
• When Palestinian militant Abu Nidal died of a gunshot wound in his Baghdad apartment in 2002, many (especially Palestinians) rejected the official verdict of suicide and insisted he was murdered on the orders of Saddam Hussein out of fear that he might collaborate with invaders. However, in 2008, journalist Robert Fisk obtained a report by Iraq's Special Intelligence Unit M4 indicating that Abu Nidal likely really did shoot himself.