American History Lies You Might Have Believed

Betsy Ross did not make or design the first U.S. flag. http://www.usflag.org/history/aboutbetsyross.html

George Washington’s cherry tree incident did not happen except in a fictional biography by Mason L. Weems.
http://www.lindseywilliams.org/index.htm?LAL_Archives/Cherry_Tree_Myth.htm~mainFrame

Thomas Jefferson was not such a great inventor. His dumbwaiter never worked properly, his wheel cipher had been in use for centuries, and his great clock involved no new technology or application, but was rather simply packaged differently. He did, however invent a much improved moldboard for plows, just as the steel plow was rendering the need for a moldboard irrelevant.
http://www.monticello.org/jefferson/dayinlife/vegetable/dig.html

Helen Keller did not want to be remembered for having overcome blindness; she wished for her activism as a Socialist and Progressive to be her legacy. She rejected racism, chauvinism, and unbridled capitalism, running afoul of many in the government, to include President Woodrow Wilson. http://www.answers.com/topic/helen-keller

America did not win the Second World War; the Soviet Union was rolling up both the Germans and the Japanese on the ground by the end of 1944, long before D-Day and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In fact, it is believed by many historians that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were intended to close the war out quickly thereby preventing the planned Soviet invasion of Japanese-held China.

The Cold War did not develop as a result of Soviet aggression during the 1950’s. The roots of the Cold War and the associated Russo-American tension and competition go back to the establishment of the Soviet Union and American ideological imperialist interference with the Bolshevik Revolution. Under Woodrow Wilson, American expeditions were sent to invade Russia and assist the “whites” in their counter-revolution against the “reds”. Lenin, Stalin, and Khrushchev were all historically justified in fearing and preparing against suspected U.S. interference and aggression.

Woodrow Wilson’s imperialist policies also served to expand communism in the Americas. Seeing the carnage wrought by US interference in other lands, many countries in Latin and South America sought a different route and chose socialism and/or communism in lieu of the imperialist American-style “democracy”. All too often in recent American history, the spreading of “democracy” resulted in violence and dictated totalitarianism.

Native Americans were not primitive nomadic hunter/gatherers. The native peoples of America lived in villages and towns. They were mostly agriculturalists who hunted managed game areas to supplement farm produce. The image of the wandering band following game and season comes as a direct result of white encroachment of native lands, destruction of game, and razing of their homes, sending the American native into an involuntary and unnatural state of transience.

America did not become a definitively and officially “Christian” nation until the 20th Century. “In God We Trust” first appeared regularly on US currency and coins during the communist scares post World Wars. The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights of the United States make little mention of any “god”, instead relying on the term “creator”, to indicate a decidedly ambiguous reference to whatever power, supernatural or natural, by which we came to be. Only in the second half of the 20th Century has the religious (read Christian) right come into vogue claiming false origins for this country as they do for all existence. The primary sources for the philosophy of the Founding Fathers came from the Iroquois Confederation (Native American) and the Enlightenment Humanist schools.
The American motto “In God We Trust”, now appearing on all units of currency, was adopted during the Civil War for coins, first appearing on the two-cent coin in 1864. However, by 1883, the motto had been dropped and did not re-appear until 1907. It was not until 1938 that the motto was standardized for all coins. The motto’s inclusion on paper currency did not occur until 1957. As the official motto of the U.S., “In God We Trust” usurped “E Pluribus Unum” in 1956, as the latter had not been officially adopted by act of Congress and the U.S. was seeking to demonstrate its difference and superiority to the communists during the fervent period of “red scare” of the 1950’s.
The Pledge of Allegiance, with its alienating phrase “One nation, under God…,” likewise was a by-product of “red scare”, making its official, completed form debut in 1954. The Pledge had been around since Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, but the words “under God” were added much later. Many versions of the Pledge circulated post Civil War, but the religious reference, deliberately Christian, appeared first only in 1951, in a version adopted by the Knights of Columbus.

The American Civil War was not fought for “states’ rights” as many Southern revisionists have attempted to claim for the past century. In fact, South Carolina, the first state to declare secession, railed in its declaration against states’ rights and the Northern practice of ignoring the Fugitive Slave Act. South Carolina’s declaration also referenced the idea that the North had come to view slavery as sinful. The Civil War started, in large part, over the Northern states’ refusal to fund activities by law enforcement designed to apprehend and return escaped slaves. The South was attempting to force federal allowance of the expansion of slavery during the years immediately preceding the Civil War. As the Fugitive Slave Act was federal law and the South was attempting to impose federal control over Northern states’ rights in budgeting their own law enforcement, the long popular revisionist view is a provable lie. In his second Inaugural Address, Lincoln said that the Civil War had come about as a consequence of slavery.

The South was not alone in utilizing slavery. The North also kept slaves. The difference was that the North did not rely predominately upon slave farm labor. Most slaves in the North were kept as household or artisanal servants for running errands and handling chores. This resulted in a much lower incidence of slavery for the North. Also, by 1820, most of the Northern states had rejected slavery outright and had joined the remainder of the world in the progressive act of abolition. By 1850, the difference between the “free” North and the enslaved South was apparent to any observer.

That Americans widely believe other versions of history comes from the inaccurate depiction and treatment of the subject in public primary and secondary schools. Most American textbooks portray the US in a positive light and ignore or gloss over the uncomfortable aspects of American history. Then too, most history teachers in American public schools are educated as teachers first and historians a very distant second. However, this phenomenon is not unique to America. During the era of the Soviet Union, schoolchildren were taught that America started nuclear proliferation with the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Soviet instruction ignored the American Pacific War and taught the bombings as unprovoked experiments with the new weapon.