Do you know of any examples of public events that were proported to have happened, but didn't?

June 21, 2012 11:25 AM

Do you know of any examples of publicly known historical events that have been purported to have happened, but later proven to have not happened?

I remember a while ago reading an article about a massacre by the Indians (or of a group of Indians) in a certain northeastern US state that was proven to be false. I can't remember where I saw it, but am looking for that or other similar examples.

posted by joshfeingold to Religion & Philosophy (29 answers total)

The Children's Crusade is based on some events that actually happened, the main story is untrue.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 11:28 AM on June 21, 2012

You might enjoy reading Lies My History Teacher Told Me, as well as the Josephine Tey book Daughter of Time, which is fiction but discusses this particular issue with regard to the supposed murder of the little princes in the tower by Richard II. Also perhaps Sarah Vowell's book The Wordy Shipmates, which talks about early colonists and goes into some discussion about clashes between Indians and colonists.
posted by PussKillian at 11:30 AM on June 21, 2012 [3 favorites]

Smallpox-infested blankets given to Indians by the US Army. That story was invented by Ward Churchill.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 11:30 AM on June 21, 2012 [7 favorites]

Regarding American history, Snopes has a page full of those. Look for all the ones marked red.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 11:33 AM on June 21, 2012 [2 favorites]

Iraqi soldiers ripping babies from incubators after invading Kuwait. The alleged witness proved to be the daughter of Kuwait's ambassador to the U.S.
posted by feral_goldfish at 11:34 AM on June 21, 2012

Response by poster: Let me restate the question a little.

I am looking for an example of a historical event that effected a community of people that was later shown to not be true. For example in the Indian example, there was a whole community that "got wiped out" but in fact, there was no such community.
posted by joshfeingold at 11:36 AM on June 21, 2012

Response by poster: Ideally, this example would be something where there would have purportedly been multiple witnesses to the event had it happened.
posted by joshfeingold at 11:42 AM on June 21, 2012

How about the Book of Abraham? Joseph Smith was introduced to some ancient Egyptian papyri which he translated into a story of the prophet Abraham's early life. Years later the original papyri turned up and were proved to be a pretty standard set of funerary texts bearing no resemblance to Smith's translation.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 11:44 AM on June 21, 2012 [2 favorites]

There is a case in the news right now about a Chinese Investor of Purchased an American Bank.
He rocketed to fame in China. He was given a government job.
His town and family were heralded as examples for all of China to emulate.

Only problem was that there was no bank at all - the whole thing was made up.
posted by Flood at 11:44 AM on June 21, 2012 [1 favorite]

You got your War of the Worlds broadcasts and you got your Gulf of Tonkin incidents. Two fakes of a very different kind. Except one (War of the Worlds) was proven after the fact to be outright fiction for the sake of entertainment; the other (Tonkin) was intentionally mis-reported for the sake of... Justifying a land war in Asia, I guess.
posted by andromache at 11:46 AM on June 21, 2012 [3 favorites]

The Spanish American War was begun after USS Maine was sunk by an explosion in Havana Harbor. At the time the explosion was blamed on a Spanish mine.

Later, many (including Admiral Rickover) disputed that and claimed that the explosion was caused by an accident on the ship.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 11:48 AM on June 21, 2012

Response by poster: OK, we are getting closer, but I'll refine it a little more. The case must have been disproved over 20 years after the event occurred, and it further must have been agreed upon by everyone to have happened for the 20 years until the disapproval. ;)
posted by joshfeingold at 11:52 AM on June 21, 2012

If you want something vague and very general, there's always the purported event of Columbus making the first European contact with North America and the subsequent discovery of L'Anse aux Meadows.

(I'd also point out the belief that Columbus "discovered" the North America and the subsequent recognition that there were already many established and successful native American cultures here, but we always knew that)
posted by RonButNotStupid at 12:04 PM on June 21, 2012

If you're accepting fakes, and if a meeting and the resulting document count as an "event," there's the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Many, many people believed (and still believe) that this was a real plot or conspiracy; it was completely made up.

A bunch of blood libels throughout history would also sort of fit for this kind of thing. Here's a list* of famous ones. Towards the end it gets into modern uses of the term and accusations various people have made, but in the historical examples, although in most cases someone really did die, the perpetrators blamed at the time, and their motives, were entirely fabricated. These accusations were believed for many more than 20 years after the fact.

*That's just the first list I found in a search, and maybe not the best, but there will be much more complete descriptions of these events elsewhere.
posted by DestinationUnknown at 12:05 PM on June 21, 2012

This is close to what you are looking for. The Order Has Been Carried Out is an examination of memory through oral history.

Basically, 335 civilians were murdered by Nazis occupying Rome near the end of the war. The reason given was in retribution for a bombing by the Resistance that killed 33 Germans. During oral history interviews, the Portelli discovers that the memories many have of the event do not match actual fact. Among those 'false memories' are the insistence that the 335 civilians were associated with the Resistence and that Germans gave those responsible for the bombing 24 hours to come forward and take the punishment themselves.

You also may want to look at works by Fitzhugh Brundage on the American Civil War and the impact of memory on the interpretation of events by Southerners. Also interesting is Karen Cox's Dixie's Daughters which examines how the concerted efforts of the United Daughters of the Confederacy re-shape how the South interpreted the war and perpetuated a number of lies and myths about the war for generations.
posted by teleri025 at 12:06 PM on June 21, 2012

A volcanic eruption was reported in Hot Springs, NC associated with the New Madrid earthquakes of 1811-1812. Never happened, though.
posted by workerant at 12:35 PM on June 21, 2012

The Kirov Assassination, Leningrad, 1934.

Prominent and (relatively, to Stalin) progressive high-level party member Sergei Kirov was assassinated in St. Petersburg. There were no witnesses, I don't think. I can't remember the details, but this took prior to a party Congress or some other notable party event.

This happened at a critical time in Stalin's rise to power and he used outrage over the murder to harangue and cow what opponents he had left and it ended up being a pretty important stepping stone to his eventual absolute control.

Except Kirov was also the most dangerous living political obstacle to Stalin. Wikipedia still files the idea that Stalin had something to do with it under 'Conspiracy Theory,' but I am fairly sure I remember hearing from professors and quality books that at this point it is virtually certain that it was ordered by Stalin. Maybe some info came out after the fall of the regime or something, I'm afraid I can't remember.

Anyway, it was long considered and suspected but no one was able really to give it legitimacy until blah blah some decades later. I also recall that even America was pretty surprised, it wasn't a case where the only people who didn't know what happened were the repressed subjects, like North Korea or something.

Too long, didn't read: Stalin gets a huge boost toward absolute power from his defiant and determined public bereavement for a leading Party member, a member whose usual bodyguards were suddenly reassigned, and found himself alone with someone he didn't know very well, an assassin was let into wherever the two of them were, everybody else in the vicinity basically vanished, and he was shot and killed, Stalin's orders.. My understanding is that this is known to be true now but there is no actual physical evidence. And it was many decades before some testimony or documents or something surfaced that caused historians to move beyond mere suspicion.
posted by TheRedArmy at 12:43 PM on June 21, 2012

How about the Piltdown Man? Several archeologists, mostly lead by Charles Dawson, claimed to have discovered the skeletal remains of a proto-human, missing link in 1912.

The Piltdown Man became the back-bone of defending evolution for nearly 40 years. The skeletal remains were used as evidence in the Scopes-Monkey Trial.

In the 1950s, it was revealed that the Piltdown man in fact the skeleton on an orangutan that had been altered, for example the teeth were filed down.
posted by Flood at 12:48 PM on June 21, 2012 [1 favorite]

even though it started the study of the bystander effect, it seems like kitty genovese's murder wasn't actually witnessed by all her neighbors and the cops were called at least once by the people who did see it.
posted by nadawi at 12:51 PM on June 21, 2012 [3 favorites]

For centuries, most everyone in Christendom believed that the Emperor Constantine (in the Fifth Century) had donated the city of Rome, the command of the Church, and in fact the entire Western Empire to the office of the Pope. On this basis rested much of papal authority during the middle ages, including the coronation of Charlemagne.

It turns out that the Donation of Constantine was a forgery and did not happen. Someone just made it up sometime around the 800s.
posted by General Tonic at 1:07 PM on June 21, 2012

Whoops. Just saw clarification. Nevermind.
posted by General Tonic at 1:11 PM on June 21, 2012

That Ward Churchill piece is kind of misdirecting; it's really a quibble with a single author over whether it was the US Army who introduced smallpox blankets in 1830. In reality it was an idea that was at least considered, and seems very likely to have been implemented, by the British Army in the 1760s. See the Straight Dope page and the H-Net discussion on the same question, and this if you have JSTOR. There's a lot of shading and argumentation, but it's not something entirely made up. In other words, Churchill as a single scholar may be on shaky ground extrapolating this technique to the 1830s, but the evidence that this was on the table and probably used as a viable tactic of war against Indians is not corrupt.
posted by Miko at 1:27 PM on June 21, 2012 [1 favorite]

there's some real questions into the historical accuracy of the events described in exodus.
posted by nadawi at 1:32 PM on June 21, 2012

How about the myth of the great Chicago cholera epidemic?
posted by interplanetjanet at 2:36 PM on June 21, 2012

OP, it might help us if you'd tell us what you're trying to accomplish with the example you seek.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 3:36 PM on June 21, 2012 [2 favorites]

What about the common belief that the Black Death was caused by Jews poisoning wells? Innocent people were convicted and executed for that; presumably witnesses testified against them. I don't know how long it took before these poisonings were demonstrated not to have happened, though.
posted by Perodicticus potto at 4:14 PM on June 21, 2012

(By "common," I meant "common at the time," of course.)
posted by Perodicticus potto at 4:18 PM on June 21, 2012

Weapons of mass destruction in Iraq doesn't meet your 20 year criteria, but it seems to meet the others.
posted by cnc at 4:54 PM on June 21, 2012

There's a decentish example in the NYT today: a football match between a Ukrainian team and Nazi occupiers in 1942, where the Ukrainians' victory was believed to have led to reprisals against the players. The piece does a good job of separating the factual consensus from the surrounding mythology.
posted by holgate at 12:59 PM on June 23, 2012