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6 Ridiculous Lies You Believe About the Founding of America. When it comes to the birth of America, most of us are working from a stew of elementary school history lessons, Westerns and vague Thanksgiving mythology.

6 Ridiculous Lies You Believe About the Founding of America

And while it's not surprising those sources might biff a couple details, what's shocking is how much less interesting the version we learned was. It turns out our teachers, Hollywood and whoever we got our Thanksgiving mythology from (Big Turkey?) All made America's origin story far more boring than it actually was for some very disturbing reasons. For instance ... #6. The Myth: Our history books don't really go into a ton of detail about how the Indians became an endangered species.

When American Indians show up in movies made by conscientious white people like Oliver Stone, they usually lament having their land taken from them. But if we had to put the whole Cowboys and Indians battle in a Hollywood log line, we'd say the Indians put up a good fight, but were no match for the white man's superior technology. The Truth: #5. . #4. The 5 Most Ridiculous Lies You Were Taught In History Class. High school was hard enough, what with all the video games and boobies to distract us from our homework.

The 5 Most Ridiculous Lies You Were Taught In History Class

What makes it even harder is having to unlearn all of the stuff they taught us in elementary school that turned out to be utter bullshit. To this day you can even hear some adults repeating these "amazing" historical tales that, years ago, somebody just pulled out of their ass: Columbus Discovered the Earth is Round The story we heard: In 1492, an Italian ponce by the name of Christopher Columbus won his long-standing feud with the monarchy and the Catholic church to get funding for a voyage to East Asia.

They were afraid that he would fail spectacularly, because everybody knew that the Earth was a flat disc, and the direction Columbus was sailing in would cause him to fall off the edge and into the mouth of the giant turtle that supported it. The truth: In the 1400s, the flat-earth theory was taken about as seriously as the Time Cube theory is today, if not less so. 6 Things From History Everyone Pictures Incorrectly. It's a running theme here at Cracked that a lot of what we think we know about history has been filtered through many centuries of utter bullshit.

6 Things From History Everyone Pictures Incorrectly

Our image of the past is largely made up of Hollywood inventions, propaganda and uneducated guesses. So you will probably be surprised to find that... Note: We don't want to be cruel, but your life is pretty much the most boring life that could possibly exist. First off, you probably won't ever see the apocalypse, and if you do, it won't be anything like the movies have taught you. Second, there are millions of awesome horror movies happening all around you, all the time, but your eyes literally can't even perceive them. No, if you want adventure, the only reliable place to look for it is in the past -- only you've got all that shit wrong, too! The Perception: We get so busy being amazed by the Pyramids, with their massive, meticulously layered sandy golden bricks, that we forget that what we're seeing are the broken-down remnants.