Number 5. Vikings. What would a Viking be without a trusty battle helmet and its impressive horns?

The answer is a more historically accurate Viking. Think for a moment about what wearing headgear like that into battle would mean.

The horns are just easy targets for your opponent to hit and knock off your helmet. Or if you strap on your helmet, now your opponent has a convenient lever with which to drag you to the ground and something to hold on to while slitting your throat. Horned helmets are a terrible idea, which is why archaeologists have never found them at Viking battle sites and there's no evidence that they were ever used. It was poets and artists, people not known for caring about facts and reality, who gave the Vikings their silly hats during the late 1800s long after

the Vikings could correct their misconceptions. Number four, Lady Godiva. The story of

this 11th century English noblewoman is that her mean husband the Earl raised taxes

on the townspeople of Coventry which Lady Godiva and not surprisingly the locals thought

were too high. She badgered her husband and he conceded an exasperation to lower the taxes

if she rode through the town naked, assuming that she never would, but she did. Because people don't like taxes, even though their house civilization is purchased, Lady Godiva's story lives on, notably in the Godiva logo and in popular songs. But while Lady Godiva was a real person and Coventry is a real town, there's no record of her nude ride from the time when it happened, so we can safely assume the story is false. Just as with the Vikings, again, poets and artists

are to blame who made it the tale long after Lady Godiva's death.

Number three, Napoleon. Famously, this tiny, tiny general, perhaps to compensate for

his short stature, took control of France, greatly expanded its influence, and dubbed

himself Emperor. Napoleon's official height was indeed 5'2 inches, but at the time French inches were longer than English inches,

so doing the unit conversion, Napoleon's height should have been reported as 5-7 in England's imperial units,

which is short by today's standards but was average or slightly above average in the early 1800s.

However, England, with its eternal love of all things French,

didn't care and went with the Napoleon is so short, LOL version of the story in newspapers and cartoons.

Meanwhile, Napoleon was busy introducing the metric system to France in the wider world to standardize measurements,

so this sort of confusion would never happen again. And thankfully, the whole world now uses metric.

Mostly, sort of. Number two, Roman vomit. Ah, the Roman Empire, so great and powerful but corrupted by decadence from within. And what could be a better symbol of that decadence than the vomatorium, where Romans, after stuffing themselves with delicious foods, could vomit them all up again to make room to feast anew? Vomitoria are real, but this idea of them is not, though the confusion is understandable because their name Vomitorium seems to make their purpose so clear. Even if for some reason you know Latin, perhaps because you live in a country that insists you waste hundreds of hours of your life, learning a dead, useless language, this knowledge still won't help you because the root word Vomitum means to spew forth. So what is it really? If you've ever been to a big stadium like, say, the ones made by the Romans, you've already used a vomatorium. This is what the vomitoria are, the passageways that let lots of people enter or exit at once. The people are what spews forth in the vomitoria, not the contents of the people. Number 1. Columbus. They're so very much wrong with the common

retelling of the story of Christopher Columbus that it's hard to know where to begin, but the biggest

misconception is that everyone else thought the world was flat, but Columbus was the only guy smart

enough to know that it's round. It makes a daring story, but knowledge of a spherical Earth goes

...