Textbooks Rewritten by Governments, and Other Fake and Hidden History

19. The Truth About Plymouth Rock

The Pilgrims crossed the Atlantic in the Mayflower, and finally reached Massachusetts (their initial destination had been the Virginia Colony, but that is another story) in December, 1620. They landed at Plymouth Rock, and ever since, it has been revered for its association with America’s earliest history. In 1835, French traveler and author Alexis de Tocqueville wrote: “This Rock is become an object of veneration in the United States. I have seen bits of it carefully preserved in several towns of the Union. Does not this sufficiently show that all human power and greatness is in the soul of man? Here is a stone which the feet of a few outcasts pressed for an instant, and this stone becomes famous; it is treasured by a great nation, its very dust is shared as a relic“.

After centuries in which souvenir hunters broke off pieces of that granite stone, what is left today is only about a third of what had originally weighed around 20,000 pounds. But did the Pilgrims even make landfall there? We know of two firsthand accounts of the Pilgrims’ arrival and the foundation of their colony. Neither account mentions what we know today as Plymouth Rock. Indeed, for over a century, the rock was not mentioned in any known records. It was only in 1741, 121 years after the Pilgrims reached Massachusetts, that a 94-year-old descendant of a Pilgrim who arrived in 1623 reported that Plymouth Rock was where the first settlers had landed. It is thus quite possible that the account of the Pilgrims’ landing at the famous rock is just a myth.

18. How Russian Officials Kicked Off One of History’s Ugliest Hoaxes

One of history’s most insidious hoaxes began in 1903, when a conservative Russian newspaper published what it claimed were the minutes of a late-nineteenth century secret meeting between Jewish leaders. Per the minutes, the Jewish leaders discussed their goal of global Jewish domination. It was to be brought about by Jewish infiltration and domination of the global media and economy. From such positions of influence and power, the Jewish infiltrators would act as agents saboteur, and subvert the morals and undermine the foundations of Gentile societies to render them weak and vulnerable. In reality, the minutes, which came to be known as The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, were crude forgeries that had first made the rounds in Russian right wing circles.

Sergei Aleksandrovich Nilus, a Russian Tsarist official, edited several versions of the Protocols, each time with a different account of how he came by them. In 1911, for example, he claimed that his source had stolen them from a (nonexistent) Zionist headquarters in France. From Nilus and his conservative circles, the Protocols slowly spread. Eventually, they went viral, and gained widespread acceptance throughout Russia and the world beyond. For years after their creation, the Protocols languished in relative obscurity, confined to Russian right wing circles. That changed with the Russian Revolution of 1917, and the Bolshevik seizure of power later that year. Conservatives, whose ranks were rife with anti-Semites, sought to discredit the Revolution by painting it as part of a vast Jewish conspiracy for global dominance.

17. Although Repeatedly Debunked, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion Continued to Circulate for Over a Century

The false claims resonated, and soon, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion went from a Russian right wing curiosity to a global phenomenon. In Britain, The Morning Post published them, with an introduction that warned readers of the Jewish plot: ” …the Jews are carrying it out with steadfast purpose, creating wars and revolutions…to destroy the white Gentile race, that the Jews may seize the power during the resulting chaos and rule with their claimed superior intelligence over the remaining races of the world, as kings over slaves.” In America, Henry Ford paid to print and distribute half a million copies, titled The International Jew: The World’s Problem . The Nazis cited the Protocols for propaganda purposes during their rise to power, and made them assigned readings for schoolchildren after they took over Germany.

When it comes to such claims that reinforce preexisting prejudices and buttress longstanding beliefs, truth is immaterial. In 1921, The Times of London conclusively demonstrated that the Protocols were a forgery, and the evidence that they were a forgery was widely reprinted around the world. It made no difference in right wing circles, where the debunking of the Protocols was dismissed as self-serving “fake news” from the Jewish-controlled media. Convinced anti-Semites remained just as convinced of the Protocols‘ authenticity. Today, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion are no longer acceptable fare in the Western mainstream. However, they continue to circulate within anti-Semitic circles, white nationalist groups, the alt-right, and the like. Since the 2016 elections, their circulation has seen an uptick in the US. Outside the West, the Protocols continue to be reprinted, recycled, and quoted, with little challenge to their authenticity.

16. The Foundational Myth of Texas

Remember the Alamo! is at the heart of Texas’ foundational mythology. It is a dramatic tale of freedom-loving Anglos in Texas, who were oppressed by Mexican authorities. So they did what true blue Americans should: grabbed their guns. In the siege and Battle of the Alamo in 1836, they fought to the last man. They lost, but their sacrifice was worth it: it bought time for Sam Houston to gather an army that avenged them, and secured Texan independence. The American Thermopylae legend peaked in the 1960 hagiographic movie The Alamo. Starring John Wayne as Davy Crockett, Laurence Harvey as William B. Travis, and Richard Widmarck as Jim Bowie, it hit all the heroic highlights. In reality, the Alamo account contains more fiction than fact, whether the John Wayne version or the slightly less dramatic one taught generations of school children.

Much of what was long taken to be true about the Alamo is anything but. For starters, there had been no need to fight the battle in the first place. The Alamo’s defenders had not tried to hold off Santa Anna’s forces in a bid to buy Sam Houston time to raise a Texan army. Colonel William Travis, the Alamo’s commander, ignored many warnings that Mexican forces were on the way, and was trapped when they showed up. Nor did the Alamo’s defenders buy Houston any needed time. Santa Anna had expected to take San Antonio on March 2^nd, 1836, but instead took it on the 6^th. The Alamo cost him all of four days, and had no impact on his ultimate defeat six weeks later at the Battle of San Jacinto. So the mission’s defenders died for nothing. Also untrue, as seen below, is Travis’ line in the sand.

15. Reality vs Mythology at the Alamo

As the Battle of the Alamo neared its end, the Mexican commander issued an ultimatum: surrender or die. Travis drew a line in the dirt with his sword, and asked the men to choose their fate: surrender, or cross the line and join him in a fight to the death. To a man, they crossed the line. There’s no evidence that ever happened, and we know that the defenders did not fight to the last man. When it became clear that the battle was lost, about half the Alamo’s defenders tried to escape, only to get run down and killed in the open by Mexican cavalry. Nor did Davy Crocket fight to the end, as depicted by John Wayne. He surrendered, and was subsequently executed. Also, for generations, scholars tiptoed around an uncomfortable aspect of the Alamo and Texas Revolution myth of a noble fight for freedom against tyranny: slavery.

In the 1980s, scholars finally researched the relevance of slavery to the Texas Revolution. Their findings demonstrated conclusively that the main issue that drove a wedge between the American immigrants and the Mexican government was slavery. Mexican law prohibited slavery, and the American immigrants wanted to bring and maintain slaves on Mexican soil. All the Mexican governments that held power before the Texas Revolution were dedicated abolitionists. By contrast, many American immigrants to Texas wanted to farm cotton on its virgin soil, and wanted to do it with slaves. Stephen F. Austin, “the Father of Texas”, argued for years that slaves were necessary for Texan prosperity. In correspondence with Mexican bureaucrats in 1832, for example, he wrote: “Nothing is wanted but money, and negroes are necessary to make it“. The main “freedom” fought for at the Alamo was the freedom to own slaves.

14. The Soviet Union’s Revival of Genetic Pseudoscience

Nineteenth century French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck theorized that physiological changes acquired during an organism’s lifetime could be passed on to its offspring. Per what came to be known as Lamarckian Inheritance, if you worked out hard at the gym to develop six pack abs, you could pass six pack abs on to your kids. Lamarck was wrong: heritable traits are passed through genes, hard coded with their own instructions, and subject to occasional mutations. An organism’s genes neither know nor care what traits and characteristics the organism acquired during its lifetime. Your genes might pass on to your descendants a predisposition for six pack abs, but only if they were already coded for such a predisposition.

No matter how many sit ups and ab crunches you do, it will have zero impact on whether your kids will have an easy time developing six pack abs. By the late nineteenth century, only a few cranks still believed in Lamarckian Inheritance. In the 1930s, however, that discredited theory experienced an odd revival in the Soviet Union. A quack named Trofim Denisovich Lysenko (1898 – 1976) modified Lamarckian Inheritance into a theory that came to be known as Lysenkoism. Lysenko claimed to have discovered that, among other things, rye could be transformed into wheat, wheat could be transformed into barley, and that weeds could be transformed into grain crops.

13. When Textbooks Were Rewritten to Support Junk Science

Lysenko’s claims were as scientific as those of Middle Ages alchemists who claimed the ability to transform lead into gold, and were just as laughably ludicrous. However, in a sinister twist, Lysenko found a powerful supporter for his theories: Joseph Stalin. In the scary political environment of the Soviet Union at the time, criticism of Lysenko’s warmed over Lamarckian theories was equated with criticism of Stalin. You did not criticize Stalin, or even hint that you might disagree with him, if you knew what was good for you. Challenges to Lamarckian Inheritance were treated as political deviancy. The logic was lethal: Comrade Stalin endorses Lysenko and his Lamarckism. You disagree with Lysenko’s Lamarckism. Therefore, you disagree with Comrade Stalin.

Those who disagreed with Lysenko were deemed subversives, Trotskyites, foreign spies, fascist agents, or capitalist stooges out to sabotage the USSR. Soviet scientists who challenged Lysenko’s revived Lamarckism were arrested by the NKVD, brutally interrogated, tortured, sent to the gulag where many died, or simply executed. Lysenko launched a campaign to eliminate his opponents, in which more than 3000 mainstream biologists were fired, jailed, arrested, or executed. Before Lysenko, Russia and the USSR had been world leaders in the field of genetics. However, genetic research disproved Lamarckian Inheritance, so genetic research was abandoned. It was not revived until after Stalin’s death in 1953, by which point the Soviets had fallen decades behind.

12. For Centuries, This Forgery Was Foisted Upon Medieval Europe

The Middle Ages’ greatest hoax, and one with a major historic impact, was the “Donation of Constantine“. It was a document that recorded a generous gift from Roman Emperor Constantine the Great, that transferred authority over Rome and the entire Western Roman Empire to Pope Sylvester I (reigned 314 – 315) and his successors. The donation of such vast territories to the popes elevated them from mere priests and religious leaders, to independent princes and sovereign rulers of territory in their own right. In reality, the Donation was forged in the eighth century by some unknown monks, hundreds of years after the days of Constantine and Sylvester I.

The forged text describes how Pope Sylvester I miraculously cured Constantine from leprosy. That convinced the emperor to convert to Christianity. To further demonstrate his gratitude, the emperor made Pope Sylvester supreme over all other bishops, and “over all the churches of God in the whole earth“. Vast landed estates throughout the Roman Empire are also granted, for the upkeep and maintenance of the churches of Saint Paul and Saint Peter. To top it off, the Holy Father and his successors were granted imperial regalia, a crown, the city of Rome, and all of the Western Roman Empire. The Donation was hardly noticed when it was first concocted, and was quickly forgotten. Not forgotten forever, however. Centuries later, amidst political upheavals that wracked medieval Europe, the Donation played a key role in shaping Christendom and the West.

11. A “Donation” That Had Never Been Made

After it was created, the forged Donation of Constantine was stashed away and forgotten for hundreds of years. In the eleventh century, however, Pope Leo IX dusted it off, and cited it as evidence to assert his authority over secular rulers. Surprisingly, the document was widely accepted as authentic, and almost nobody questioned its legitimacy. For centuries thereafter, the Donation of Constantine carried significant weight whenever a Pope pulled it out to figuratively wave in the face of secular rulers. It was not until the Renaissance and the spread of secular humanism that the Donation’s authenticity was finally challenged.

In the Renaissance, classical scholarship and textual criticism witnessed a revival. Scholars, most prominent among them Lorenzo Valla (circa 1407 – 1457), took a fresh look at the Donation. It quickly became clear that the text could not possibly have dated to the days of Emperor Constantine the Great and Pope Sylvester I. One hint was the use of language and terms that did not exist in the fourth century, but only came into use hundreds of years later. Additionally, the document contained dating errors that a person writing at the time could not possibly have made. The popes did not officially renounce the document. However, from the mid fifteenth century, onwards they ceased to refer to the Donation in their bulls and pronouncements.

10. How the Russian Government Actively Promoted Alcoholism for Centuries

No nation is as closely associated with a particular alcoholic drink as Russia is associated with vodka. It is now as symbolic of Russia as matryoshka dolls, brown bears, and caviar. Aside from rum and the British Royal Navy, no military in the world is as closely associated with a particular drink as Russia’s military is associated with vodka. It is not merely a popular perception based on little more than myth and legend. Russian armies and alcohol do go back a long way. From the perspective of military leaders, one of alcohol’s greatest positive effects is its ability to make warriors brave. It might be liquid courage, but it’s still courage, while it lasts. However, to strike the right balance between enough alcohol for liquid courage, and not overdo it, can be tricky.

In 1223, a small Mongol army crushed a much larger Rus army at the Battle of the Kalka River. The Mongols had genius commanders, but they were helped by their enemy’s alcoholism. Many Rus had gotten drunk, then launched themselves at the Mongols in a reckless charge that ended in disaster. In the 1500s, Russia’s tsars noticed their subjects’ love of booze, and set up establishments to distill and sell vodka. By the 1640s, vodka had become a government monopoly. The tsarist tax system was regressive, in that it fell proportionally heaviest not upon the richest, but upon the poorest. Much of that tax revenue came from sales taxes. By the 1850s, nearly half of Russia’s government revenue came from the taxes and duties on vodka sales. By the start of the twentieth century, the Smirnoff Vodka brand alone accounted for a full third of the Russian army’s budget.

9. The Role of Government in Russia’s Love of Vodka

The Tsarist government encouraged vodka consumption for generations, even at the price of widespread alcoholism among their subjects. Tsar Peter the Great reportedly decreed that peasant wives should be whipped if they tried to drag their drunk husbands out of taverns before they were ready to leave. He also used alcoholism to help with military recruitment: those who drank themselves into debt could avoid debtors’ prison if they enlisted in the Russian army for 25 years. Russia’s government was never known for enlightenment, and the Russian authorities’ attitudes towards vodka did improve with the passage of time. The Tsarist government was overthrown in the twentieth century and replaced with a communist one, but the encouragement of alcoholism continued. The communist Red Army issued its soldiers a daily vodka ration of 100 grams.

100 grams was not enough to get wasted, but a few days’ ration could be saved for a good drunk. It was also easy for soldiers to get their hands on more than the official ration. In the Winter War of 1939 – 1940, there were reports of wild drunken charges by Soviet soldiers. In World War II, the vodka daily ration was increased, and military authorities actively encouraged its distribution and consumption. The Soviets’ sheer grit and super courage played a key role in their triumph over the Nazi “super men” to close out the war. However, that courage was boosted by the rivers of vodka that helped fuel the Red Army’s soldiers and kept them well lubricated. In their recollections of WWII, many Soviet veterans described the daily vodka ration as having been: “as important as Katyusha rockets in the victory of Nazism“.

8. A Government’s Dilemma to Round Up Recruits for an Unpopular War

By 1966, America was getting sucked ever deeper into a bottomless quagmire in Vietnam. When President Lyndon B. Johnson assumed office after JFK’s assassination in 1963, the US had 16,000 troops in Vietnam. The next year, the figure grew to 23,000. In 1965, however, in response to requests from American commanders in Vietnam for ever more US troops, the figure mushroomed to 185,000. It would more than double again in 1966, to 385,000. That insatiable and growing demand for ever more troops put the LBJ administration in a bind: where to get enough recruits, without a public backlash? The way the draft system was set up back then, college students got deferments. Ending college deferments would have furnished enough recruits.

The hiccup was that college students were predominately the kids of the middle and upper classes. That is, the people whose opinion counted the most with Congress and the media. Without their support, or at least acquiescence, American involvement in Vietnam could not continue. Such support or acquiescence would not last long if their kids’ student deferments were cancelled, and they were drafted and sent to fight and die in a far off country most Americans could not place on a map. An alternative was to mobilize reservists to furnish enough bodies. However, that posed a similar dilemma: the reserves and National Guard were overwhelmingly filled with the children of the well off and connected. Sending the sons of the rich and powerful to Vietnam would also produce a fierce backlash. The solution, as seen below, was awful.

7. A Tragic and Dishonest Recruitment Drive Dressed up as a Helpful Government Program

The Pentagon needed to square the circle of finding more recruits, without alienating the demographics whose support was most necessary to continue the Vietnam War. So Defense Secretary Robert McNamara came up with a shameful brainchild: Project 100,000. It was touted as a Great Society program that would take impoverished and disadvantaged youth, and break the cycle of poverty by teaching them valuable skills in the military. In reality, Project 100,000 simply amounted to the lowering or abandonment of minimal military recruitment standards, in order to sign up those who had previously been rejected by the draft as mentally or physically unfit. Recruiters swept through Southern backwaters and urban ghettoes, and signed up almost anybody with a pulse. That included at least one recruit with an IQ of 62. In all, 354,000 were recruited.

Needless to say, the Project 100,000 recruits received no specialized training and were taught no special skills. Once they signed on the dotted line, “the Moron Corps“, as they were derisively called by other soldiers, were rushed through training, then bundled off to Vietnam in disproportionate numbers. Once in Vietnam, they were sent into combat in disproportionate numbers. In combat, the mental and physical limitations that had caused them to be rejected by the draft ensured that they were wounded and killed in disproportionate numbers. The toll fell particularly heavily on black youths: 41 percent of Project 100,000’s recruits were black, compared to 12 percent in the US military as a whole.

6. Japan’s Love of Archaeology

For most people, archaeology is not exactly the kind of stuff that generates excitement. Not so in Japan, where archaeology is quite a popular subject. The Japanese people revel in their country’s uniqueness, and exhibit greater fascination with their pre-history than just about any other people in the world. In that country, new archaeological finds are often announced in bold headlines on the front pages of major newspapers, and bookshops usually have entire sections devoted to Stone Age Japan. Because of that, Japan went into a tizzy in 1981, when self-taught archaeologist Shinichi Fujimora announced his discovery of 40,000-year-old Stone Age artifacts. The most important thing about his discovery for the Japanese public was that it established that human beings had been present in Japan for at least that long.

It was a spectacular find that launched Fujimora’s career. It gained him national and international fame, and quickly put him in the forefront of Japanese archaeology. The Japanese, whose culture is heavily indebted to that of China, have often sought to differentiate and set themselves apart from the Chinese. Historic discoveries that support the uniqueness of Japanese culture and origins are bound to make their discoverer hugely popular. So it was in that environment and against that backdrop that Fujimora’s archaeological finds made him a national celebrity. His discoveries were incorporated into school textbooks, and taught to Japanese children for years.

5. Japanese Archaeology Textbooks Were Based on Massive Fraud

Shinichi Fujimora worked on over a hundred archaeological projects around Japan after his first discovery. Amazingly, the spectacular good fortune with which he began his career continued without cease or letup, and Fujimora continued to find older and older artifact. As his lucky streak continued, Fujimora’s finds pushed Japan’s human pre-history further and further back. His fame and prestige, already high, reached stratospheric levels in 1993, when he discovered Stone Age evidence of humans near the village of Tsukidate, that dated back over half a million years. At a stroke, Japan became the equal of its rival, China, in the archaeological antiquity scale. That streak was remarkable. So fortunate did Fujimura seem in his ability to unearth objects that few if any other archaeologists could find, that awestruck admirers referred to the seemingly divinely guided Fujimora as “God’s Hands”.

The man’s archaeological skills seemed too good to be true. As is often the case, things that seem too good to be are usually just that. In 2000, Japan was rocked when a daily newspaper published three photographs that showed the respected and celebrated archaeologist planting supposedly ancient Stone Age tools at a dig site. Fujimora was forced to come clean after he was caught red handed on film. He admitted that he had planted evidence not only at that site, but in other locations across Japan, and throughout his entire career. When asked why he did that, a sobbing Fujimora tearfully responded: “the devil made me do it“.

4. A Scenic Tourist Attraction’s Dark Past

Lake Sidney Lanier is a 38,000-acre artificial lake about forty five miles north of Atlanta, GA. It was filled when the Chattahoochee River was dammed in the 1950s. The lake was originally created by the US government to ease navigation, help with flood control, and provide hydroelectricity. The lake’s reservoir is a key water source for Atlanta’s growing population, and supplies not just Georgia residents, but those of Alabama and Florida as well. Its shoreline of almost 700 miles has made the lake a scenic spot that attracts about ten million tourists per year. Not many visitors know that Lake Lanier’s waters cover a tragic story. The lake lies atop what had once been a thriving black community, whose members were violently forced out of their homes in the early 1900s.

Oscarville, in Forsyth County, GA, was a thriving black community of about 1100 souls. In 1912, it included farmers who owned or rented their land, craftsmen, and other laborers. The local school was attended by more than 300 black children. Churches collected tithes, organized picnics, and overall, Oscarville was a modestly prosperous community. Unfortunately, even modest black prosperity ticked off many of Forsyth County’s whites. One such wrote the local newspaper to decry the fact that so many black kids attended school, while many white children did not. He feared that black children who attended school might become eligible to vote, while the children of white farmers who did not might become ineligible to vote. Such resentments, as seen below, exploded into violence the ended with the ethnic cleansing of Oscarville.

3. From Ethnic Cleansing to Pretty Park

Many white Forsyth County residents resented Oscarville’s blacks for years. The resentment finally exploded into mass violence on September 5^th, 1912. That day, a white woman alleged that she had been assaulted by two black men. Two black men were duly arrested shortly thereafter. When a black preacher suggested that she might have had a consensual relationship with one of them, a white mob attacked and beat him. The sheriff put the preacher in jail to protect him from angry whites eager to lynch him. A few days later, the corpse of a teenage white girl was found in the woods near Oscarville. Several black men were suspected, and one of them reportedly confessed and implicated others. He was transferred to Atlanta for his own safety. A white mob nonetheless marched on the local jail, which held another black man.

He was beaten to death by a lynch mob broke into the jail. Thousands of whites flocked to Forsyth, and began to attack the county’s blacks. Blacks were beaten up, bullets were fired into their residences, their homes and barns were torched or dynamited, and their livestock were killed. They were threatened with worse, if they did not leave Forsyth County. Authorities did nothing to stop the terror campaign. Within weeks, 98% of Forsyth County’s blacks, including all of Oscarville’s residents, had fled, never to return. Some sold their land for pennies on the dollar, but many others simply had their farms seized by whites. When the US government created Lake Lanier decades later, its waters covered what had once been the thriving black community of Oscarville. Almost none of its expelled black residents or their heirs were ever compensated for their property.

2. The Story of the Original Stars and Stripes

For generations, American schoolbooks brought up American children on the tale of Betsy Ross (1752 – 1836), the woman who sewed America’s first flag. A Philadelphia seamstress and upholsterer, Ross made tents, and sewed uniforms and flags for the Continental Army and Navy. In 1776, she reportedly received a visit from her relative, Colonel George Ross, accompanied by George Washington and financier Robert Morris. They asked her to make a flag based on a sketch that featured thirteen six-pointed white stars, and thirteen red and white stripes. She accepted, but suggested some changes: arrange the stars in a circle, and reduce the star points from six to five. Congress adopted that design as the national flag on July 14^th, 1777.

In reality, aside from the fact that the Stars and Stripes was not America’s first flag, the account that Ross had sewn it is a myth. There is no contemporary documentary support to back it up. Indeed, the first mention of Betsy Ross and the original Stars and Stripes only came a century later. In 1870, her grandson William Canby claimed that Ross had relayed that account to her daughter, niece, and granddaughter. Harper’s New Monthly Magazine published the story in 1873, and it was uncritically accepted and made it into schoolbooks. So, what is the truth about the origins of the Stars and Stripes?

1. The Truth Behind Betsy Ross and the Flag

Betsy Ross actually did make flags for the Patriots during the American Revolution. However, she was not the only flag maker. For example, the Grand Union Flag, which featured the British Union Jack where the stars are today and served as the national flag from 1775 to 1776, was sewn by Rebecca Young. Betsy Ross’s relative, Colonel George Ross, might well have recommended her to sew the Stars and Stripes. And it is conceivable that she was acquainted with George Washington and Robert Morris, both of whom attended her church. However, there is no proof – other than her grandson’s assertion a century later – that she made the original Stars and Stripes. Furthermore, William Canby’s account that his grandmother sewed the original Stars and Stripes has some serious holes.

Canby claimed that a Continental Congress committee had commissioned a new flag in 1776. No records of such a committee exist. He claimed that said committee was headed by George Washington. However, Washington had left Congress to head the Continental Army in 1775, so he could not have served on a congressional committee in 1776. The first documented congressional discussion about a national flag did not take place until 1777. The only flag payments made to Betsy Ross in 1777 were not from Congress for the Stars and Stripes, but from Pennsylvania’s State Naval Board for Pennsylvania naval flags. It is thus highly unlikely that the tale of Betsy Ross and the first Stars and Stripes is anything more than a myth.

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Where Did We Find This Stuff? Some Sources and Further Reading

Archaeology Magazine, Volume 54, Number 1, January / February 2001 – “God’s Hands” Did the Devil’s Work

Atlantic, The, September 25^th, 2013 – How Alcohol Conquered Russia

Atlantic, The, December 19^th, 2017 – Trofim Lysenko: The Soviet Era’s Deadliest Scientist is Regaining Popularity in Russia

Big Think – Project 100,000: The Vietnam War’s Cruel Experiment on American Soldiers

Boleslaw, Mastai – The Stars and the Stripes: The American Flag as Art and as History from the Birth of the Republic to the Present (1973)

Burrough, Bryan; Tomlinson, Chris; Stanford, Jason – Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth (2021)

Encyclopedia Britannica – Donation of Constantine

Furlong, William Rea – So Proudly We Hail: The History of the United States Flag (1981)

Gainsville Times, January 5^th, 2022 – The Truth Behind Oscarville and the Violent Removal of Black Residents from Forsyth County Years Before Lake Lanier Was Built

Gardner, Martin – Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science (1957)

History Collection – 10 of the Deadliest Global Pandemics of All Time

Holocaust Encyclopedia – Protocols of the Elders of Zion

Listverse – 10 Times Governments Edited Textbooks to Rewrite History

Macalister College – Vodka: The Bitter Stuff

Phillips, Patrick – Blood at the Roots: A Racial Cleansing in America (2016)

Salon – McNamara’s “Moron Corps”

Scroll In, August 14^th, 2016 – Why do Indian and Pakistani Textbooks Tell Wildly Different Histories?

Smithsonian Magazine, November 22^nd, 2011 – The True Story Behind Plymouth Rock

Time Magazine, June 9^th, 2021 – We’ve Been Telling the Alamo Story Wrong for Nearly 200 Years

Travel Noir – 5 Black American Towns Hidden Under Lakes and Ultimately from History Books

United States Senate, Committee on the Judiciary – Protocols of the Elders of Zion: A Fabricated ‘Historic’ Document

World History Encyclopedia – Donation of Constantine