Why Is So Much of What We Call "History" Wrong?

[GreatGazoo]

History has for many centuries been a branch of literature, eg fiction. Nice stories but like the term "legend" the term history has long implied that it may or may not be true.

When we read about Gilgamesh or Romulus and Remus we recognize a mixture of fact and fantasy. Gilgamesh is an epic poem from around 2100 BCE. It embodies the history of a people, the Sumerians, even though it conveys almost no facts. The Bible is a collection of books, a canon, which was treated as an account of the lives of various Judeo-Christian people and groups. Until very recently, the Bible WAS the history. The Puritans, among others, had no concept of secular history. IOW everything that has happened or will happen had to be viewed within the narrative of the Bible.

One very significant shift came in the 1700s. Building on the foundations of rationalism laid by Descarte, Locke, Spinoza and others, Thomas Jefferson published a version of the Bible which omitted the miracles. Meanwhile in the secular branch of history biografiction remained the dominant format. Most famously Washington Irving (1783 - 1859) wrote a fictional biography of Colombus by imagining what Colombus's family, beliefs, decisions, etc were.

Biografiction makes heavy use of fictional anecdotes perhaps because people love little moralistic life lessons even if they are total bullshit. "Shakespeare poached deer" "Washington cut down a cherry tree" and could not lie about it. But to the present these lies persist and new ones are being added. The purpose of history according to some is to advance a unifying narrative. James Loewen in his best selling "Lies My Teacher Told Me" (1995) said that 'What is taught in public high schools would more accurately be called 'Patriotism'." He also cites that after sex education, history is the most common reason for strong disagreements between parents and school systems.

Even at the college level, history is treated as literature; a Bachelor of Arts not Science. Yet the arc that began before Jefferson, from myth to science, continues. Recent advances in science have created something of a crisis for traditional history. For example DNA confirmed what prior to advances had been unprovable rumors about Sally Hemings and Jefferson. Major historians of Jefferson, aka "experts", had denied Jefferson's paternity of Hemings' children for over 150 years. Science won that one but it doesn't always win.

In 2016 a GPR scan of the nameless and dateless 3-foot slab on the floor of Trinity Church in Stratford Upon Avon confirmed what skeptics had said for 400 years: Shakespeare isn't buried there. It's empty. We didn't need LiDAR to tell us that 3-feet is not big enough for an adult body but even with the scan the myth of Shakespeare is uncorrected. Science be damned. BY the thousands, people still come to Stratford and many pay $30 to stand in a room called "Shakespeare's birthplace" even though that entire house was built in 1857. Why? Because Shakespeare is a national icon and the myth unifies Anglophiles (except Henry James and Mark Twain).

As the saying goes "You cannot reason a person out of belief which they did not arrive at by reason in the first place." The strength of our attachment to beliefs is proportional to the amount of time we have held those beliefs. Emotion often beats fact but a sea change is underway.

College History departments are being abandoned. Far better would be to revitalize them and embrace science and primary source materials. Currently a Bachelor of Arts in History is good prep for law school or teaching but there is no good reason not to integrate new tools and teach students how to use those -- DNA, LiDAR, AI, GPR, comparative analysis. Accurate history gives us lessons in what can go right and wrong. How dictators emerge. How they are overcome. How entire societies fall into immoral and catastrophic practices. Accurate history tells us how we are doing. It is data points that form an arc of progress or decline.

As literature, history is full of lies and biases, many of which hide scandals, crimes and failures. We will be well served to empower younger generations to pursue the truth with all of the tools and primary sources we can give them, and to discount the myths which prevent learning and course-corrections. Let history finally become a science.

[H2O Man]

1. The "winners" write it.

[NewHendoLib]

2. This

[thucythucy]

4. That, and the fact that most people don't give a damn

about history, unless it stokes their nationalist ego/agenda, in which case it's more often than not skewed for that purpose.

What sort of resources do we as a society devote to accurately uncovering and reporting our history? How much do we devote, yearly, to the preservation of history for future generations? I'm not talking about tourist attractions and such. I mean "history" as an important area of study and scholarship.

Compare that to the cost of a single football stadium, or the money spent on developing, marketing, and purchasing video games, and you'll get an idea of how much we view "history" as a priority.

[GreatGazoo]

7. "How much do we devote, yearly, to the preservation..."? Billions of $$$

According to the National Park Service, their sites alone get close to 100,000,000 visits per year. Including:

Independence Hall, Philadelphia - 909,090 visits

MLK Jr Memorial, DC - 1,083,671visits

The Vietnam Wall - 1,585,525 visits

Lincoln Memorial - 2,980,075 visits

"More than 700K visited Gettysburg, provided $88.5M economic impact..."
https://www.abc27.com/gettysburg/more-than-700k-visited-gettysburg-provided-88-5m-economic-impact/

[thucythucy]

15. I specifically tried to exclude tourism and tourist attractions,

but thank you for doing this research. The question was somewhat rhetorical, but since you took the time to answer with some data I feel I owe you an answer of my own.

Buildings and memorials, significant as they may be, are not necessarily preserving or conveying accurate history.

How much did we as a culture spend on confederate monuments? Was that preserving history, or distorting it?

I've been to the Vietnam Wall, and as touching as it is, it says nothing about the causes of our involvement there, nothing about the actual history aside from the fact that Americans died during that conflict. Similarly, Independence Hall says little if anything about, say, how one reason for the revolt was the British signing of treaties with Native nations restricting Anglo settlement west of the Appalachians.

I've been to Gettysburg. It's been a while. but when I was there I saw relatively little about, for instance, the history of the African slave trade and its impact on American culture and society. This may have changed--like I say it's been a while-but in the current political climate if there is more than I remember it's now in danger of being purged in our current campaign against "woke."

Ditto the Lincoln Memorial.

To use what might be an outrageous analogy, millions and millions of people visited Lenin's tomb at the Kremlin--I've been there too--and the Soviet government spent tens of millions of dollars--probably more--preserving that carcass and the building in which it was housed. I'd hardly call that a commitment to history.

How much history is taught in school? How historically literate are we as a people? I run across young people who have no idea what the Cuban Missile Crisis was about. I saw a video on Youtube in which a seemingly very bright young American woman wondered why Berlin was an issue between east and west. Hell, a candidate for Vice President of the United States--Sarah Palin--reportedly didn't know that Germany was our enemy during World War II. And our current president evidently believes there were fighter aircraft used during the American revolution. In a culture with any degree of historical literacy a statement like that would have been immediately disqualifying.

And have you seen the recent figures on those who believe the Holocaust never happened, or that the moon landing was faked?

"One in 10 young Americans believes that the Holocaust never happened, while 23 per cent think it’s a myth or that the number of those killed has been exaggerated.

In a 50-state survey of Americans aged between 18 and 39, 12 per cent said they had never heard, or thought they had never heard, the word “Holocaust” before."

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/holocaust-denial-conspiracy-theories-america-b1869838.html

Money spent on monuments, while important, doesn't mean we're actually taking history as seriously as we should.

And then again, just for comparison:

"NFL revenue eclipsed $23 billion across the 2024 fiscal year, as reported by Ben Fischer of the Sports Business Journal. It marked the second consecutive year where NFL revenue jumped by at least $2 billion and represented record-setting revenue for the league once again."

https://sportsnaut.com/nfl/where-does-nfl-revenue-come-from/

And that's just the revenue posted by the NFL. It doesn't include college or high school football, nor is it a measure of "economic impact" which is probably far higher.

Anyway, thanks again for taking my post seriously enough to do some research. I'm glad so many people visit our memorials and monuments, and worry about the impact the Trump cuts and layoffs at the National Park Service will have. And I apologize for this overlong and wordy post.

Best wishes.

[GreatGazoo]

17. I hear you on NFL expenses vs history preservation

History has been revitalized by many recent developments but yes, many of the sites are inaccurate or lacking in broader context.

I was trying to detail the shift in history as a genre and a discipline. It is moving steadily toward a more scientific approach and one of the things AI is helping with is decoding ancient texts.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-04161-z

It is a great time to be studying history as we gain tools and information that lets us put more of the pieces together, sometimes literally.

I love "wordy posts" - Thanks for yours!

[thought crime]

18. Americans are more interested in science fiction than history.

[malaise]

8. That simple

Rec

[TnDem]

12. Not always

The Bible was written by many people that weren't considered "winners" by any secular meaning.

[Aristus]

16. But which "holy" texts were chosen to be included in the Bible,

and which were to be excluded, were determined by powerful people in the Eastern Roman Empire in the Fourth Century. The “winners”, if you will.

[thought crime]

19. The Bible isn't history.

[Kid Berwyn]

27. "Nobody reads anymore."

Allan Dulles to Lyndon Johnson on the heft of the un-indexed Warren Commission report on the assassination of President Kennedy.

[Goonch]

28. ;--{)

&t=91s

[Kid Berwyn]

29. Countering Criticism of the Warren Report (CIA, PDF)

Last edited Fri Aug 1, 2025, 06:20 PM - Edit history (1)

https://ia800109.us.archive.org/8/items/COUNTERINGCRITICISMOFTHEWARRENREPORT/COUNTERING%20CRITICISM%20OF%20THE%20WARREN%20REPORT.pdf

[Ping Tung]

3. There are no facts. Only interpretations. Friedrich Nietzsche

Everything is both subjective and relative. It's in the eyes of the beholders.

Differences of opinion are what make horse races. Mark Twain

[ITAL]

5. To a certain degree it can only be an art

There are facts of course (such and such happened on whatever day), but much of history will always be debated or viewed through various prisms. Is history as a contest between oppressors and oppressed (and all the various subgroups of that, like men/women or colonialist, etc.) as some say, or is there more nuance? Do leaders lead really popular movements and shape opinion, or do they generally follow the popular zeitgeist (hence leaders aren't actually that important) whatever it is?

Historians will often disagree on what makes a great president or a top general (or nearly as often WHO was a great president or general), and often what traits work for one person won't work for another. Why is that? Just circumstance?

[GreatGazoo]

6. "Why it happened" is much more debatable than 'What happened'

Forensics, DNA and other tools offer proof of what happened. But why something happened is how an event gets put into the larger narrative. And narratives are what resist correction.

[malaise]

9. Nice OP

Rec

[muriel_volestrangler]

10. Ironically, your version of the scan of Shakespeare's grave is completely wrong

Key findings:

The GPR survey found that William Shakespeare, his wife Anne Hathaway and other members of the family whose ledger (grave) stones lie beside his, were not buried in a large family vault deep underground, as has long been thought, but in shallow graves beneath their tombstones.
Each grave is shallow in depth, less than 3 feet, and there is no evidence of coffins.
There is evidence of a mysterious and significant repair to the head end of William Shakespeare’s grave, leading to Kevin Colls’ theory that this localised repair was needed to correct a sinking of the floor possibly caused by a previous disturbance to the grave.
Kevin Colls believes these findings give new credence to a story published in The Argosy magazine in 1879, hitherto dismissed as fiction, which claimed that Shakespeare’s skull was stolen from his shallow grave by trophy hunters in 1794.
William Shakespeare’s grave was found to be significantly longer than his short stone – extending west towards the head end, making it the same size as, and in line with, the other family graves. (Anne’s grave is also longer than her stone suggests.

https://blogs.staffs.ac.uk/archaeology/projects/secret-history-shakespeares-tomb/

"Lidar", by the way, stands for "light detection and ranging" or "laser imaging, detection, and ranging", and would be useless for examining an underground grave. They used Ground Penetrating Radar.

[GreatGazoo]

11. GPR shows no skull, no casket or coffin, not even nails from a rotted coffin.

There is no name or date on the Trinity "grave".

The disastrous 2016 GPR scan backfired on the true believers who permitted it only after pressure resulting from the 2014 discovery of Richard III's remains. To my point about denial in the face of evidence, Holy Trinity Church's Patrick Taylor issued this formal denial:

“We are not convinced that there is sufficient evidence to conclude that his skull has been taken. We intend to continue to respect the sanctity of his grave, in accordance with Shakespeare’s wishes, and not allow it to be disturbed. We shall have to live with the mystery of not knowing fully what lies beneath the stone.”


GPR results seem to confirm what was not found during prior looks into the "grave". During a visit to this church in late 1815, American author Washington Irving spoke with an elderly sexton who told Irving that a few years earlier that he had an opportunity to see beneath the gravestone in the floor when an excavation was underway. The sides of the excavation collapsed and in the process created a hole permitting a view of what was underneath the alleged floor tomb for Shakespeare. Irving states in his Sketch Book, published in 1819, that the sexton “told me he had made bold to look in at the hole, but could see neither coffin nor bones, nothing but dust.”

After the 2016 disaster of "tomb-gate" they spun the results as showing only that no skull was found but meanwhile they quietly started looking at other potential sites such as near the Hathaway Cottage.

Thanks for the LiDAR clarification.

[muriel_volestrangler]

13. The irony of your attempt to spin this against the reality is quite hilarious

Comic thread is comic.

[GreatGazoo]

14. I cited the Shakespeare myth specifically for the dynamic you are helping to illustrate

To believe that is "Shakespeare's grave" one has to believe that the Bard was buried beneath a blank slab with no coffin and no head in a hole too small for an adult body which is now confirmed by ground penetrating radar to be devoid of human remains.

Emotional attachment to legend blocks all evidence to the contrary. That is what keeps history inaccurate.

[muriel_volestrangler]

22. Sure, go on denying what the people who did the scan said, if it makes you feel OK

but it's quite funny to see you try to use it to make your "I'm in favour of applying science and facts to the study of history". Also funny to see you quoting Washington Irving, when you started off by (correctly) pointing out his stories about Columbus were bunk - not that I'd call them 'history'. They were popular entertainment.

[GreatGazoo]

23. Kevin Colls says there is no skull under that stone and no coffin

Can we agree on that?

In Coll's final report:

"Neither grave appears to be full sized....The surprising result of the GPR survey is that there is no evidence for even a moderately sized family vault."

"As for the grave presumed to be that of William Shakespeare (grave 2) this appears at first sight to be
unnaturally short since, neither it nor any of the other family graves appear to extend into the area
beneath the altar step. From figures 10 and 13 this grave does not appear large enough to contain an
adult male and the evidence could potentially be construed, as has been suggested, that the grave does not
contain a burial."

"The results of the GPR investigation have laid to rest a number of historical myths about the Shakespeare
graves. The data are consistent with a historical tale which was originally thought unlikely since the data
confirm that the grave thought to be that of William Shakespeare has been partially cut across by another
feature, presumably in an attempt to restore the stability of the floor. The data also show that the
Shakespeare family was not buried in a traditional vault, although some of the area is delineated by
brickwork but in a discrete line of simple shallow graves. The use of a very high frequency antenna has
allowed the deduction that burial for each of the five members of the family was in a shroud, not in a
coffin from the absence of small metal artefacts in the area of their interment. Comparison of the data for
the central three graves suggests that there may be foundation to the story of Susanna Shakespeare's grave
being disturbed even if it is not possible to conclude whether she was exhumed and subsequently reinterred
elsewhere. "

https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/231752969.pdf

[muriel_volestrangler]

24. So we've gone from "Shakespeare isn't buried there. It's empty" to 5, including him, buried in shallow graves in shrouds

If you're going to quote something and put it in bold, then expect people to check the context in the original. Your emboldened part is followed by (still in the same paragraph) "This seems unlikely given the apparent existence of a subsurface air gap above material that is both mixed but also approaches the soil beneath in its relative permittivity (cf Figures 8 and 12)." If you're going to try and pretend the "this seems unlikely ..." doesn't exist by cutting off the paragraph, then you're cherry-picking. That is not a responsible attitude to history, and that what's makes this thread ironic and comic.

Yes, they don't think they used coffins. From the same source: " The change in fashion from burying in a shroud to using a wooden coffin occurs around the period of these burials". So it wouldn't be surprising either way. The disturbance of one end of the grave lends credence to a story that someone had taken the skull (nearly 200 years after he died). That, however, is not "Shakespeare isn't buried there. It's empty", and it's an extremely minor bit of late 18th century history. For that to be the centrepiece of your OP "other people aren't taking history scientifically enough" is, frankly, poppycock.

[GreatGazoo]

25. According to Colls and science, Is Shakespeare's skull in that infant-sized "grave"? Yes or No

And why would Colls theorize that Susanna was exhumed and buried elsewhere if his GPR proved 5 bodies in those 5 "graves"?

My OP explores a long trend in the genre and discipline of history moving away from legend, myth and biografiction toward accuracy, primary sources and reality. The Shakespeare myth is heavily defended yet it crumbles under any scrutiny so it is a great example of how inaccuracy is defended, excused, perpetuated and monetized. The "Shakespeare Birthplace" was built in 1864. The "grave" is unmarked and contained no skull or coffin. The will of Shakspere was suppressed and mistranscribed because its contents do not fit the popular myth. The bogus deer poaching story was repeated as truth for 100+ years. The mulberry tree was sold as trinkets a hundred times over. Thousands of innocent tourists are ripped off by these fraudsters every year. I don't find any of that to be funny or ironic.

Colls is being coy but reasonable people can read his conclusions for themselves and understand that, at the very least, he is saying there is no skull or evidence of a coffin in that bogus child-sized "grave".

[muriel_volestrangler]

30. They don't know if the skull is in there or not, but the grave is not "infant-sized"

The GPR does not detect bones; it detects the soil, and thus the graves. On its size: "William Shakespeare’s grave was found to be significantly longer than his short stone – extending west towards the head end, making it the same size as, and in line with, the other family graves. (Anne’s grave is also longer than her stone suggests."

On Susanna, it says " there may be foundation to the story of Susanna Shakespeare's grave being disturbed even if it is not possible to conclude whether she was exhumed and subsequently reinterred elsewhere. " Richard Watts was apparently buried close to her, nearly 50 years later. Saying "it is not possible to conclude" is not "theorizing that Susanna was". That attempted sleight of hand by you is just the sort of jiggery-pokery that your OP is pretending to be against. As is your claim of a 'bogus child-size "grave"', complete with scare marks. Or your gut feeling that "Colls is being coy", as if you suddenly don't see him as a scientist, but as someone dropping hints. The birthplace house was extensively renovated in the 1860s; no-one denies that the house was there before that.

You pontificate about "the Shakespeare myth", while distorting what Colls wrote. Beyond your original false claim that the scan showed that Shakespeare wasn't buried there, you're picking nits about tiny details that no one cares about (I'd never heard about poaching deer, or a mulberry tree, for instance. Why would that count as "history"? It's gossip.) What exactly is the "myth", according to you? And how do you claim it has "crumbled"? Are deer, trees and graves really what you think is most important about Shakespeare?

Your OP, frankly, has very little to do with history at all. It's an obsession with small details about the past (which you often distort), and a basic criticism of a few things like Washington Irving's popular writing, not the study of history.

[GreatGazoo]

31. "It's very very convincing to me that his skull isn't at Holy Trinity at all." - Colls

Thanks for your feedback and challenges. They will help me write in a way that is less prone to misinterpretations.

The Shakespeare myth is very emotional and political. Colls is certainly a scientist but he is not immune to the kind of blowback that comes when science contradicts a national myth and when it diminishes the revenue of the biggest tourist draw in rural England.

The best science is peer reviewed and debated so while it would have better to look at how other scientists reacted to Colls work I stayed with Colls because 1) you suggested that, and 2) Colls admits enough. When I say Colls was being coy in his final report I am referring to how he buried the headline that Reuters and those outside the Stratford tourist business went with:

"Radar scan of Shakespeare's grave confirms skull apparently missing"

https://www.reuters.com/article/lifestyle/radar-scan-of-shakespeares-grave-confirms-skull-apparently-missing-idUSKCN0WQ1G5/

The Shakespeare myth starts mostly in 1769, the 205th anniversary of the birth of William Shakspere. It provides a fascinating look at how myth is created, defended and monetized. Way too much to detail here but the part relevant here is that the myth said William Shakespeare is/was buried beneath an uncarved 3-foot stone on the floor of Trinity Church with no name, no date, no "We are such stuff as dreams are made on and our little lives are rounded with a sleep" Shakespeare quote. It has always been de facto absurd, like almost every other part of the myth, yet it endures.

Many lawyers study Shakespeare as undergrads and nearly all of them balk at the myth. Meanwhile until very recently it was absolutely forbidden to question it with English Literature departments. That is why I love it as an example of what happens when science and literature collide.

Some lawyers become obsessed with the issue. Disproving the myth is fairly easy. Replacing it with truth or warranted uncertainty is far more difficult. This lawyer tries to do both in 45 minutes:

But the lesson here for me is that my OP was not a narrow enough slice of this 'science rewrites history' dynamic to avoid distractions and misunderstanding. The Shakespeare myth is a quagmire which few have the patience to wade through. Colombus is more bite-sized (although not without its own tangents).

Thanks again for your well considered posts and pushback!

[muriel_volestrangler]

32. In your arguments in this thread, you have said:

"Emotion often beats fact"
"Emotional attachment to legend blocks all evidence to the contrary."
"The Shakespeare myth is very emotional and political."

I really think you need to look in the mirror about this. The idea that William Shakespeare didn't write the vast majority of the Shakespeare plays (a case can be made for co-authorship of bits) is an emotion-only argument - if you like conspiracies, it's romantic, or thrilling. But you have to ignore the actual facts (publication of many during his lifetime, publication of the rest not long after his death (and after the monument in the Stratford church was put up)), in favour of personal subjective feelings - that you feel someone who hadn't been to Oxford or Cambridge couldn't have written the plays, that you feel someone from a richer family would have had to write them, but also spend their time constructing an elaborate smokescreen, and so on.

I can't see what lawyers have got to do with this. They're not historians, or scientists. I'd like to see your statistics for "many lawyers study Shakespeare as undergrads and nearly all of them balk at the myth" - link, please, since you say you're keen on facts. But it seems a bit insulting to lawyers unless you can back it up.

I'll note, again, that your original claim was that the grave is empty - and that the 2016 scan showed that. That was a simple untruth. It's not the way to start a thread on how truth ought to be an essential part of history. It is the way to trash your own reputation.

[RedWhiteBlueIsRacist]

21. SInce you mentioned "Gilgamesh", I'll leave you this historical tidbit: Gilgamesh gave birth to Hamas.

[intrepidity]

26. Well said! nt