They Never Taught You THIS In School!
When we teach history to children, it’s often easiest to pick from the highlights and ignore the smaller details. We also tend to emphasize people’s successes and contributions while forgetting about their shortcomings or misdeeds.
Naturally, it would be impossible to give fair and thorough accounts of every single historical person and event, but that means we end up putting the focus on certain people, places, and things and skim over them. The result is that we skim over some of the darker facts, hold bad people in esteem, accept vicious rumors about good people, and completely ignore some of history’s most important players.
Remember: history is always taught with an agenda. Who is teaching history? Who wrote the books? Where are you from? What are your beliefs?
We all make mistakes, but would you forgive these people?
Source: wikipedia.org
Start the slideshow below to see some of the most famous people in history who were actually pretty awful, even though nobody ever taught us so. SHARE with someone else who will appreciate this!
Charles Lindbergh
Source: wikipedia.org
When we learn about Charles Lindbergh in history class, all we cover is his historical solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean, from Long Island, NY to Paris, France. What you rarely hear is that Lindbergh was actually a terrible racist, and almost everything he did was based in pro-white and isolationist American ideals, even when Europe needed our help in WWII. He accepted the Nazi definition of Jewish in that he considered even Christian descendants of Jews to be Jewish.
In 1939, he wrote, “We can have peace and security only so long as we band together to preserve that most priceless possession, our inheritance of European blood, only so long as we guard ourselves against attack by foreign armies and dilution by foreign races.”
Ranking: Douche
Henry David Thoreau
Source: wikipedia.org
Famous for his transcendentalist beliefs and the experiences that led him to write Walden, it’s hardly ever mentioned what a misanthrope Thoreau actually was. Thoreau was actually a very austere man, against many of life’s pleasures such as drinking alcohol and other such celebratory activities. Though Walden depicts his life in the wilderness, in reality he only lived a short walk from home, in the center of bustling Concord, Massachusetts. He often went home for dinner. Famous for not refusing to pay his taxes, Thoreau came from a wealthy and respected family who paid his taxes for him. This guy was a total snob.
“I never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude.”
Ranking: Jerk