Everything You Know About History Is Wrong: Part IV

Debunking common historical myths.

From left to right: Caligula, Sir Isaac Newton, and Matthew Shepard.

Myth: Matthew Shepard was murdered by bigots in a homophobic hate crime

On the night of October 6th, 1998, Matthew Shepard, a gay 21-year-old student, was brutally beaten, tied to a fence, and left for dead in the frozen wastelands outside of Laramie, Wyoming. Shepard had been pistol-whipped so hard that it crushed his brain stem and put him into a coma from which he died days later. Covered by the media as an anti-gay hate crime, the murder of Matthew Shepard sparked widespread outrage and became a watershed moment in American culture. It inspired the play/television film The Laramie Project (2000, 2002), the Matthew Shepard Foundation, and a 13-year campaign that saw the passage of the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Prevention Act in 2009, which expanded US hate crime laws. It’s become part of the hallowed lore of LGBT history. But like so much of the sacred, it’s based mostly in falsehood.

The first cracks in the story came in a 2004 report on ABC’s 20/20 which introduced more prosaic motivations involving robbery and drugs. Building off of this, investigative journalist Stephen Jimenez, in his 2013 exposé The Book of Matt: Hidden Truths About the Murder of Matthew Shepard, dealt the hate crime narrative a fatal blow. Through interviews with a number of sources close to the story, including Shepard’s friends, his two murderers, their then-girlfriends, and law enforcement officers involved in the case, Jimenez reveals the incident in an entirely new light. Shepard knew his killers, Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, and all three were involved in Laramie’s crystal meth scene as both users and dealers. McKinney, believing that Shepard could lead them to a trove of meth, tried to beat the information out of him, but in his drug-induced frenzy, ended up beating him to death.

Local authorities did not believe the murder was motivated by homophobia. As detective Ben Fritzen told Jimenez, “Shepard’s sexual preference or sexual orientation certainly wasn’t the motive in the homicide … What it came down to really is drugs and money.” 

The hate crime narrative originated with two of Shepard’s friends, Alex Trout and Walt Boulden, who, despite having no direct knowledge of the crime, told reporters that Shepard had been murdered for being gay, and the press ran with it. Seizing on this angle to deflect from his drug crimes and to shield his friends, McKinney — who may even have had a sexual relationship with Shepard — claimed, as his defense, to have been caught up in a “gay panic” that caused temporary insanity. In an interview from prison years later, he told Jimenez that the gay panic defense was bogus. Some real progress may have flowed from the Matthew Shepard hate crime myth, but it nevertheless remains a myth.

Myth: The Inventor of the guillotine was guillotined himself

Along with the ideals of Liberté, égalité, fraternité (liberty, equality, fraternity), there is nothing as closely associated with the French revolution as the image of jeering, bloodthirsty crowds watching aristocrat after aristocrat get decapitated by the guillotine. It’s commonly believed that in an ironic twist of fate, Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, the guillotine’s inventor, ended up being executed by his own horrifying creation as the revolution started eating its children. Fact check: false.

Guillotin advocated for a more humane form of execution, and the killing machine that became synonymous with the capital-T “Terror” of the revolution was in fact conceived as a more civilized and less brutal alternative to the executions methods of earlier eras. But while Guillotin called for the construction of such a device, the actual inventors of the machine were the lesser-known physician Antoine Louis and German engineer Tobias Schmidt. Guillotin himself survived the purges, finally dying of natural causes in 1814, almost in time for the end of the Napoleonic era and thus the revolution.

Myth: All Confederate generals were unrepentant racists

It’s certainly understandable to believe that the leadership of the Confederate Army during the US Civil War were all lifelong, dyed-in-the-wool racists even by the standards of their day. Indeed, General Robert E. Lee was a slave owner (despite calling it “a moral and political evil”) and was known to have written in a letter that “The painful discipline [black Americans] are undergoing, is necessary for their instruction as a race.” It’s also not surprising that, following the end of the war, Southern attitudes toward blacks didn’t even come close to changing. However, the notion that all those who fought for the Confederacy remained unrepentant racists for the rest of their days is false. One need only look at one of the most racist Confederate generals: Nathan Bedford Forrest.

Forrest was (in)famous both for his exploits in battle and his alleged role in what became known as the Fort Pillow Massacre. During this massacre of Union troops, Forrest’s men made it a point to slaughter two-thirds of the black soldiers and one-third of the whites, despite their numbers in the Union forces being roughly equal. Furthermore, after the war’s end, Forrest suffered incredible financial losses due to the emancipation of his slaves and became involved in the first incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan in 1866-1867. He rose to the rank of Grand Wizard and presided over the organization during its violent attempts at black voter suppression. However, Forrest became disillusioned by the Klan’s increasingly barbaric terrorism, eventually writing to Tennessee governor John C. Brown that he would volunteer “To exterminate the white marauders who disgrace their race by this cowardly murder of Negroes.”

Forrest’s evolution culminated in his final public appearance in 1875 where he gave what the New York Times called a “friendly speech” to the Independent Order of Pole-Bearers Association, an organization of black Southerners who advocated for better economic living standards and equal rights. Forrest encouraged all present to work hard and “act truly” and promised that “when you are oppressed, I'll come to your relief.” Following his remarks, he was given a bouquet of flowers by a young black woman who he kissed on the cheek. Forrest’s come-to-Jesus moment late in his life does not expunge his voluminous track record of perpetrating, aiding, and abetting racist atrocities, but it serves as an example that people’s minds can be changed, even those of the most abject villains.

Myth: The Roman empire fell in the late 400s with the sack of Rome

If you paid any attention during history class, you’d know that from 500 BCE to 476 CE, Rome went from an obscure city-state to an empire that stretched from Scotland to the eastern borders of Mesopotamia and from Spain to the Balkans. Rome spread civilization where they went, in the typically brutal fashion of an ancient empire. But then a number of factors converged — war, disease, disunity, decadence, complacency, increasingly strong enemies, weak leadership, etc. — and the Roman empire collapsed in 476 CE. Except, it didn’t really.

By that point, the Eastern and Western Roman empires had already split, being united only on paper, and when the Goths sacked Rome and the Western empire fell to the pressure of the Visigoths, Vandals, Franks, and Huns; the Eastern half — by far the wealthier and more economically productive of the two — kept on trucking all the way up to 1452, almost 1,000 years after this collapse. Through Bulgarian and Hungarian raids and Arab invasions, they kept going until the Ottoman Turks finally displaced them in the late Middle Ages.

The Byzantines, as these easterners are known to history, never stopped thinking of themselves as Romans just because they were cut off from Italy. To be Roman was a cultural identity that had expanded well beyond the city-state, and although Byzantium would take on a different character over time, the name is mostly a post hoc construction by historians to differentiate the two.

Wait a minute, if they took on a totally different identity, how could we call them Romans? Think about it like this: the early Romans would probably not have recognized much about the late Roman empire, but would they have been any more or less Roman because of it? Would the English today be any less English than their forefathers under say, Henry VII, just because the concept of what it means to be English changed? The Byzantines were no less Roman than their predecessors, and the fact that they’re largely overlooked by popular culture doesn’t mean Rome ended in 476.

Myth: Isaac Newton’s falling apple is a myth 

The story of Isaac Newton and his falling apple is one of the most famous tales in science. Every school child learns that the great physicist, while sitting under an apple tree, was conked on the head by a falling fruit. The moment of jarring impact, the story goes, led him to realize that there must be a force of nature — gravity — that caused objects to fall downward and not in other directions. As we grow up, however, we become convinced that Newton's falling apple must be a bit of apocrypha concocted to make scientific history a little more colorful. It turns out that the story is true — mostly.

In an early manuscript of a Newton biography titled Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton's Life (1752), archaeologist and biographer William Stukeley writes a firsthand account of a conversation he had with Newton himself: “After dinner, the weather being warm, we went into the garden and drank [tea], under the shade of some apple trees…he told me, he was just in the same situation, as when formerly, the notion of gravitation came into his mind. It was occasion’d by the fall of an apple, as he sat in contemplative mood. Why should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground, thought he to himself…”

No, the apple never hit Newton on the noggin, but the truth is very close to the story we all learned in grade school, if slightly embellished. Sometimes, the myth is believing that something is a myth.

Myth: Emperor Caligula was an insane monster

For over two millennia, the reputation of the third Roman emperor, Caligula, has calcified into that of a monstrous tyrant who treated his imperial subjects (as well as his sister and his horse) as his personal playthings. This isn’t just thanks to the 1979 eponymous pornographic film covering his life, penned by Gore Vidal and produced by Bob Guccione. It owes also to original sources, like that of the Roman chronicler Suetonius, who was writing nearly a century after Caligula’s death and may have had a bone to pick with the allegedly mad emperor. The fact is, however, that of all the most psychopathic tales told about Caligula, none of them come directly from eyewitnesses, and those that do mention nothing of his supposedly perverse appetites.

This is not to say that he wasn’t a spoiled narcissist — of this, there is little doubt. He was an emperor, after all. A Cambridge archaeologist even found possible evidence of a bridge Caligula had built between the imperial palace and the Temple of Jupiter so he could convene with the gods at his ease. It’s also not to say that he didn’t have a temper, though historian Stephen Dando-Collins has suggested that this was brought on by a “near-fatal illness seven months into his reign.” This explanation seems to correlate with his constant irritation at the most trivial things (including “half-jokingly” saying that he would like to have groups of chariot-racing fans executed for supporting the Red team instead of his favorite Blue team). Likewise, the claim that Caligula appointed his horse to the consulship likely came from an exasperated joke made by the emperor that simply got repeated into existence as time went on.

Considering that the emperor's death came at the hands of usurpers who then installed Caligula’s uncle Claudius as the new Caesar, it’s hardly surprising that the narrative of Caligula as a madman with unquenchable bloodlust became firmly established once the “correct” leader sat on the throne. As the BBC wrote, “The propaganda machine of his successors was keen to blacken his name partly to justify his removal — hence all those terrible stories.” When someone is able to sell their sovereign as being so self-evidently awful that it justifies their own treason, it’s more likely than not that the villain they’ve created won’t live up to the hype when scrutinized.

Myth: The Emancipation Proclamation ended slavery

At the time of President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, there had already been debate about what to do with escaped slaves who fled to the North, or found themselves behind Union lines (see the First and Second Confiscation Acts). And while Congress was taking some steps against slavery, they deserve only limited credit, given how quick they were quick to say that the president should resettle these freed slaves in “some tropical country.” That’s a direct quote, because being anti-slavery and being bleedingly racist weren’t mutually exclusive. 

Lincoln issued the Proclamation, not as a political leader, but as the head of the military. He did so as the commander in chief seizing the property of a belligerent. The Proclamation listed the states it applied to by name, which didn’t include slave states who remained in the Union. It also didn’t apply to Tennessee, because they’d already been kicked in the teeth by the Union Army. So, imagine being a slave in Middelsboro, KY or Chattanooga, TN knowing that if you’d been a mile yonder across an imaginary line, you’d be free right now. 

True freedom wouldn’t come until the passage of the 13th Amendment. The Proclamation was nice, but like seeing Mick Jagger in concert at age 75, it’s a little overblown. It’s just that the specifics of passing a constitutional amendment are nasty and complicated, and we’d all much rather remember the simpler story of when the idea of freedom had its national debut.

See also: “Everything You Know About History Is Wrong” Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part V

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Jamie Paul is the Founder of American Dreaming and Managing Editor of Queer Majority.

Alexander von Sternberg is a US-based writer and editor, and the host of the History Impossible podcast.

Johan Pregmo is a Sweden-based writer and contributor to American Dreaming.

Timothy Wood is a US-based writer and editor, and contributor to American Dreaming.

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