The Wild West had stricter gun laws than most US cities today.

What actually happened: The seceding states explicitly said, in their own official Declarations of Causes, that they were leaving over slavery. Mississippi's declaration begins: "Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery — the greatest material interest of the world." Texas, Georgia, and South Carolina said the same. The Confederate Constitution actually forbade member states from outlawing slavery, the opposite of a states'-rights position.

The South didn't just fail to support states' rights — they actively demanded that federal power be used to override Northern states' laws. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 required Northern states to return escaped enslaved people and punished anyone who helped them. When Northern states passed Personal Liberty Laws to resist — effectively asserting their states' rights — the South was furious. The argument was "states' rights for us, federal enforcement for you." The "states' rights" framing was largely a post-war "Lost Cause" reinterpretation pushed by groups like the United Daughters of the Confederacy beginning in the late 1800s.

Sources: American Battlefield Trust, Duke Law

What actually happened: Columbus never set foot on the North American mainland in any of his four voyages. He landed in the Bahamas, Cuba, Hispaniola, and later parts of Central and South America, but believed until his death that he had reached Asia. Norse explorers, led by Leif Erikson, actually established a settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland around 1,000 CE, nearly 500 years before Columbus. Of course, Indigenous peoples had been living throughout the Americas for at least 15,000 years. 

What actually happened: Revere was one of at least 40 riders that night, including William Dawes (who set out at the same time on a different route) and Dr. Samuel Prescott (who joined them and was the only one to actually make it to Concord). Revere never finished his ride. A British patrol captured him, and his horse was confiscated. He also didn't shout "The British are coming," because in 1775, the colonists were all British. According to Revere's own account, he warned, "The Regulars are coming out!" The famous solo-hero version was popularized by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's 1860 poem, written to stir patriotic sentiment on the eve of the Civil War. 

Sources: Paul Revere House, American Battlefield Trust

What actually happened: None of Washington's four documented sets of dentures contained any wood. They were made of hippopotamus and elephant ivory, brass, gold, lead, animal teeth (cow, horse, donkey), and human teeth. According to Mount Vernon's own ledger book, Washington in 1784 paid enslaved people at his plantation for nine teeth, channeled through his dentist, Dr. Le Mayeur. Whether those specific teeth ended up in Washington's mouth is unclear, but historians agree that some of his dentures included human teeth purchased from poor people and likely the enslaved. The wood myth probably arose because Washington's ivory dentures, stained dark by his fondness for port wine, took on a wood-grain appearance. 

Sources: George Washington's Mount Vernon, Live Science, JSTOR Daily

What actually happened: Not a single person was burned at the stake in Salem in 1692. Of the 20 people executed, 19 were hanged at Proctor's Ledge, likely from a tree, since lumber was too scarce and expensive for a proper gallows. The 20th person, an 80-year-old farmer named Giles Corey, was pressed to death, slowly crushed under heavy stones over two days, because he refused to enter a plea. According to legend, his last words were "More weight." Burning at the stake was common in continental Europe, but the Massachusetts colony followed English law, which classified witchcraft as a felony punishable by hanging, not burning.

Sources: History.com, Salem Witch Museum, Snopes

What actually happened: Congress voted for independence on July 2 — the day John Adams predicted Americans would celebrate forever — and approved the wording of the Declaration on July 4. However, most delegates didn't actually sign it until August 2, 1776.

Even then, it wasn't a single event. Some delegates signed in the weeks and months that followed. Matthew Thornton of New Hampshire didn't sign until November. Thomas McKean of Delaware may not have signed until as late as 1781, five years after independence was declared. New York abstained from the original vote entirely. The famous painting of all 56 men signing together in one room depicts a scene that never actually happened.

Sources: National Archives; National Constitution Center; Encyclopedia Britannica

What actually happened: Parks was 42 (not elderly), and she was a seasoned civil-rights organizer who had served as secretary of the Montgomery NAACP since 1943. She had spent more than a decade investigating racial violence (including the gang-rape of Recy Taylor by six white men), campaigning for the Scottsboro Boys, and registering Black voters. Months before her arrest, she'd attended training at the Highlander Folk School, a civil-rights organizing center in Tennessee. In her own words: "I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. … No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in." NAACP leaders strategically chose her case because of her "quiet dignity," an image they then helped construct. 

Sources: NAACP, Teaching American History

What actually happened: The Pilgrims (technically Separatists) had already escaped England. By 1608, they were living in Leiden in the Netherlands, one of the most religiously tolerant places in 17th-century Europe. They left Holland after about 12 years, not because they were persecuted but because the Netherlands was too tolerant for their taste. As William Bradford fretted in Of Plymouth Plantation, their children were being "drawn away by evil examples into extravagant and dangerous courses" — i.e., assimilating into Dutch culture. They didn't want religious freedom in the abstract, but a place where they could enforce their religion without competition. Once in Plymouth, they did not extend that freedom to others. Later Quaker missionaries, for example, were banished or executed. 

Sources: John Turner, They Knew They Were Pilgrims, History Today, NASA Earth Observatory

What actually happened: The 1621 harvest gathering wasn't called "Thanksgiving" at the time. The Wampanoag (around 90 men, far outnumbering the 50 Pilgrims) may not have even been invited. Some accounts say they came to investigate after hearing the colonists firing celebratory guns. The event was a tense diplomatic moment built on a fragile political alliance as the Wampanoag, devastated by a European-introduced epidemic that had killed up to 90% of their population, were seeking allies against the rival Narragansett. Within a generation, English settlers and the Wampanoag would be at war (King Philip's War), and the Wampanoag would lose most of their land and political independence. Many modern foods (mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie) weren't there, but deer and fowl were. 

Sources: Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, National Archives Museum

What actually happened: The story was invented by Mason Locke "Parson" Weems, a traveling bookseller and minister, in the fifth edition of his bestselling 1800 biography of Washington, published in 1806, seven years after Washington's death. There is zero historical evidence that the event ever took place. Weems explicitly wanted to create morally instructive stories for children. He actually attributed the tale to "an aged lady, who was a distant relative." The story spread thanks to William Holmes McGuffey, who included it in his McGuffey Readers, the textbooks that taught generations of American schoolchildren. 

Sources: George Washington's Mount Vernon, National Park Service

What actually happened: There is no contemporary evidence that this happened. The story first surfaced in 1870 — 94 years after the supposed event and 34 years after Ross's death — when her grandson William Canby presented family oral tradition to the Pennsylvania Historical Society. There are no records of a congressional flag committee in 1776, no records of Washington dealing with Ross, and no period documents tying her to the design. Most historians credit Francis Hopkinson, a New Jersey signer of the Declaration of Independence, who in 1780 actually billed Congress for designing "the flag of the United States" (he was paid in wine). Ross did, however, run an upholstery shop and made flags for the Pennsylvania Navy.

Sources: National Geographic, Smithsonian National Postal Museum, Colonial Williamsburg

What actually happened: The Proclamation only applied to enslaved people in states "in rebellion" against the Union. It explicitly exempted the loyal border states (Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri) and parts of the Confederacy already under Union control — exactly the places where Lincoln had the legal power to free them. As Secretary of State William Seward wryly noted, "We show our sympathy with slavery by emancipating slaves where we cannot reach them and holding them in bondage where we can set them free." Slavery wasn't fully abolished in the US until the 13th Amendment was ratified in December 1865, eight months after Lincoln's assassination. That said, the Proclamation did transform the war's purpose, allowed Black men to enlist (nearly 200,000 did), and freed enslaved people as Union armies advanced. 

Sources: National Archives, American Civil War Museum

What actually happened: Historians estimate that roughly 1 in 4 cowboys in the late 19th-century American West — about 5,000 to 9,000 of an estimated 35,000 — were Black. Many were formerly enslaved men who headed west after the Civil War for freedom and work. Many more were Mexican vaqueros, whose techniques, gear, and vocabulary (lasso, rodeo, ranch, chaps) literally created the American cowboy tradition. Famous figures include Bass Reeves, the formerly enslaved deputy US Marshal who many historians believe inspired the Lone Ranger. Hollywood largely whitewashed all of this, beginning with Buffalo Bill's Wild West shows in the late 1800s. 

Sources: Smithsonian Magazine, History.com

What actually happened: The Tea Party was a carefully planned act of political theater, and the Tea Act of 1773 actually lowered the price of tea by giving the British East India Company a tax break and a near-monopoly. The colonists' grievance wasn't that tea was too expensive but that Parliament was protecting a corporate monopoly without colonial representation and bypassing local merchants. The event was organized by the Sons of Liberty over the course of weeks, with mass meetings at Boston's Old South Meeting House. Protestors first tried to peacefully send the ships back to London (as happened in New York and Philadelphia) and only resorted to destroying the tea after Massachusetts Governor Hutchinson refused to let the ships leave. Hundreds of men disguised themselves as Mohawks to protect their identities and dumped 92,000 pounds of tea (worth around $1.7 million today) over several hours.

Sources: Smithsonian Magazine, Harvard GSAS Colloquy

What actually happened: Ellis Island inspectors didn't write down immigrants' names. They checked passenger lists already prepared at the port of departure in Europe. Roughly a third of the inspectors were themselves immigrants, and translators were available for some 60 languages. There was no form, process, or legal authority for changing names, and inspectors were specifically instructed not to alter information unless the immigrant requested it. Immigrants who did change their names typically did so themselves, years later, often during the naturalization process, to assimilate, find work, or fit in. The myth was hugely amplified by Vito Corleone's renaming scene in The Godfather Part II (1974) and persists despite decades of debunking by genealogists and the New York Public Library. 

Sources: Roam Your Roots, MyHeritage Knowledge Base

What actually happened: More than a year into the war, Lincoln wrote to newspaper editor Horace Greeley: "If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it." His 1861 inaugural address had explicitly promised not to interfere with slavery where it already existed, and he spent the war's first year working to keep the slaveholding border states from joining the Confederacy, which meant not threatening their right to own people.

That said, Lincoln's views were more complicated than that letter suggests. He closed the same letter with: "I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men everywhere could be free." By the time he wrote it, he had already drafted the Emancipation Proclamation and was waiting for a military victory to give it credibility. Emancipation became a war aim gradually, driven in large part by enslaved people who freed themselves by fleeing to Union lines in numbers the military couldn't ignore. Though Lincoln's thinking evolved significantly during the war, the idea that he launched it as a moral crusade against slavery isn't true.

Sources: Abraham Lincoln Online, Teaching American History, History.com, President Lincoln's Cottage

What actually happened: Many of the most famous frontier towns in America had stricter gun laws than most US cities do today. When Dodge City, Kansas, formed its municipal government in 1878, the very first law it passed was a ban on carrying firearms within city limits. A large wooden billboard on the main street read: "The Carrying of Firearms Strictly Prohibited." Tombstone, Abilene, Deadwood, and Wichita had similar ordinances. Visitors arriving in Wichita in 1873 were greeted with signs reading: "Leave Your Revolvers at Police Headquarters, and Get a Check" — essentially a coat-check system for guns.

The famous gunfight at the O.K. Corral in 1881 was a dispute over enforcing Tombstone's gun ordinance. Marshal Virgil Earp and his deputies confronted the Clanton and McLaury brothers for refusing to disarm within city limits. As UCLA law professor Adam Winkler has noted, "Tombstone had much more restrictive laws on carrying guns in public in the 1880s than it has today. Today, you're allowed to carry a gun without a license or permit on Tombstone streets. Back in the 1880s, you weren't." Historians who've studied the actual crime data found that frontier towns averaged fewer than two murders per year. The "Wild West" of popular imagination is largely a product of dime novels, Buffalo Bill's touring shows, and Hollywood.

Sources: Smithsonian Magazine, HuffPost, The Daily Beast