Description
The truth and nothing but the truth--Richard Shenkman sheds light on America's most believed legends:
- The story of Columbus discovered that the world was round was invented by Washington Irving.
- The pilgrims never lived in log cabins.
- In Concord, Massachusetts, a third of all babies born in the twenty years before the Revolution were conceived out of wedlock.
- Washington may have never told a lie, but he loved to drink and dance, and he fell in love with his best friend's wife.
- Independence wasn't declared on July 4 (and the Liberty Bell was so little regarded that Philadelphia tried to sell it for scrap metal but nobody wanted it).
- After World War II, the U.S. Government concluded that Japan would have surrendered within months, even if we had not bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.