What happens when one of the certainties in the classroom turns out to be costume design, bad mathematics or a judicial system that is constructed to listen to ghosts?
The most enduring “facts” in history are mostly the ones that are easy to visualize. Horns on a Viking helmet. A little Napoleon frowning at Europe. A queen barking, Slap the cake to them. These pictures are far more transportable, in cases where the evidence they represent is not. Contemporary scholarship has a tendency to unravell them in an unheroic fashion that is by using measurements, materials analysis, court documents, slow disciplines of juxtaposing sources written nearer to the events they document.
Consider the Viking helmet. There are no horned battle headgear of the Viking Age in archaeology and the functional issue is clear: protrusions provide something to hold on to on the opponent. The fashionable figure was solidified in the 19th century, as opera and illustration required immediate visual abbreviation. A theatrical decision became a reality and the reality was there to last as long as it was appropriate in posters, cartoons and then television.
The supposed shortness of Napoleon is of the same kind of convenience. Documents show him at five foot six–not very remarkable of his day but propaganda is fond of caricature, and systems of measurement do not move across boundaries in a smooth manner. The arithmetic that made the myth was outlived by its usefulness.
Mechanical errors are some of the most smoldering mistakes. The story of the wooden teeth of George Washington breaks down once one inspects the list of the materials that dentures were constructed out of: ivory, metals, and at times even human teeth. Another report explains that the dentures that Washington wore were made of such materials as human teeth, as well as bone and ivory which leaves the folklore behind and introduces a disconcerting, more human image of the dentistry of the 18 th century. This wooden appearance is seen to have been made through staining and cracking of the hairlines to make ivory look like grain.
Then there are myths which confuse the boundaries of perception with the boundaries of the past. The Great Wall of China is not a reliable object that can be viewed at the naked eye at the low Earth orbit due to being only narrow with irregular shape with low contrast to the rest of the terrain. An optical explanation reveals the reasons why: the average human eye has a visual resolution of approximately one arcminute, and the apparent width of the Wall in orbit is lower than that in favorable conditions. Instead, what people recall is the romance of the claim, which is a single monumental structure visible at space.
Another form of misconception is manifested in Salem. One of the strongest images that people have was based on fire, witches at the stakes, but the executions in Massachusetts were hangings and the machine that created the possibility of the trials was the law not the stage. The fact that a world view that attributed physical misfortune to a spiritual one accepted spectral evidence (even dreams and visions) was the most consequential one of all since a worldview that believed in a spiritual cause of physical misfortune could treat an apparition as evidence. This was later brought to bear by the culture itself, Increase Mather being quoted saying: it were better that ten suspected witches should escape than that one innocent person should suffer.
Even literature based myths can become concrete in engineering schematics. The Trojan horse is sometimes imagined as a one-literary work on wheels, but classicists and archeologists have understood the horse as a narrative element that can represent a strategy or a mechanism. A single academic speculation is that siege-engines were covered with wet horse-hides, a workaround solution to fire that might have sown the metaphor.
In these narratives the lesson is the same: history is not merely the past, but that which succeeding generations found most readily repeated. Evidence cannot always produce a better picture, It gives a firmer picture.
