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5 Historical Misconceptions Rundown - Video học tiếng Anh
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5 Historical Misconceptions Rundown
5 Historical Misconceptions Rundown
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# 5.
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Vikings
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What would a Viking be without his trusty battle helmet and its impressive horns?
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The answer is: a more historically accurate viking.
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Think, for a moment about wearing headgear like that into battle: the horns are just
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easy targets for your opponent to hit and knock off your helmet.
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Or, if you strap on your helmet, now your opponent has a convenient lever with which
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to drag you to the ground and something to hold onto while slitting your throat.
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Horned helmets are a terrible idea, which is why archeologists have never found them
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at viking battle sites and there's no evidence that they were ever used.
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It was poets and artists -- people not known for caring about facts and reality -- who
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gave the Vikings their silly hats during the late 1800s, long after the vikings could 'correct'
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their misconceptions.
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4.
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Lady Godiva
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The story of this 11th century English noblewoman is that her mean husband the Earl raised taxes
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on the townspeople of Coventry which Lady Godiva -- and not surprising the locals -- thought
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were too high.
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She badgered her husband and he conceded in exasperation to lower the taxes if she rode
0:54
through town naked -- assuming that she never would, but she did.
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Because people don't likes taxes -- even though they're how civilization is purchased -- Lady
1:01
Godiva's story lives on notably in the Godiva logo and in popular songs.
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But while Lady Godiva was a real person and Coventry is a real town there is no record
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of her nude ride from the time when it happened -- so we can assume the story is false.
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Just as with the Vikings, again poets and artists are to blame, who made up the tale
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long after Lady Godiva's death.
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3.
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Napoleon
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Famously this tiny, tiny general -- perhaps to compensate for his short stature -- took
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control of France greatly expanded its influence and dubbed himself emperor.
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Napoleon's official height was indeed 5 foot 2 inches but at the time French inches were
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longer than English inches, so doing the unit conversion, Napoleon's height should have
1:35
been reported as 5'7 in England's imperial units -- which is short by today's standard
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but was average or slightly above average in the early 1800s.
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However England, with it's eternal love for all things French, didn't care and went the
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Napoleon-is-so-short-LOL version of the story in newspapers and cartoons.
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Meanwhile, Napoleon was busy introducing the Metric System to France and the wider world
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to standardize measurements so this sort of confusion would never happen again -- and
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thankfully the whole world now uses metric.
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Mostly.
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Sort of.
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2.
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Roman Vomit
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Ah, the Roman empire, so great and powerful, but corrupted by decadence from within.
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And what could be a better symbol of that decadence than the Vometorum: where Romans,
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after stuffing themselves with delicious foods, could vomit them all up to make room to feast
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anew.
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Vometoria are real but this idea of them is not, though confusion is understandable because
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their name -- Vomit-orium -- seems to make their purpose so clear.
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Even if for some reason you know latin -- perhaps because you live in a country that insists
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you waste hundreds of hours of your life learning a dead, useless language -- this knowledge
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still won't help you because the root word 'vomitum' means 'to spew forth'.
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So what is it really?
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If you've ever been to a big stadium, like say, the ones made by the romans, you have
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already used a vometorium.
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This is what the vometoria are -- the passageways that lets lots of people enter or exit at
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once.
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The people are what spews forth in the vometoria, not the contents of the people.
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1.
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Columbus
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There is so very much wrong with the common retelling of the story of Christopher Columbus
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that it's hard to know where to begin, but the biggest misconception is that everyone
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else thought the world was flat, but Columbus was the only guy smart enough to know that
3:00
it's round.
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It makes a daring story, but knowledge of a spherical earth goes back to at least 5,000
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BC that's six and a half thousand years before Columbus set sail -- and that knowledge was
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never lost to western civilization.
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In 200 BC Eratosthenes calculated Earth's circumference and his estimate was still well
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know and being used in Columbus's time.
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The argument Columbus had with queen Isabella was not over the shape of the earth, but of
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its size.
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Columbus estimated the Earth was much smaller than Queen Isabella and her scientific advisors
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did which was way he thought he could make it across the empty Atlantic to India.
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But Columbus's size estimate was wrong -- again, just like Napoleon's height -- because of
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mixed up units.
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However, his error did send him West to become the first European to discover America -- as
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long as you ignore the hornless vikings who beat him by 500 years.
