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No. No document or eyewitness records her saying it. The line appeared in Rousseau's Confessions when she was a child, and was pinned on her decades after her death.
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No horned helmet from the Viking Age has ever been found. The image comes largely from 19th-century art and from older Bronze Age horned helmets that predate the Vikings.
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No. Einstein excelled at mathematics. The myth likely grew from a failed entrance exam in other subjects and a reversed grading scale at his Swiss school.
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Almost certainly not. Revere's mission was secret, colonists still thought of themselves as British, and the phrase appears in the record only decades later.
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No. Educated medieval Europeans generally knew the Earth was a sphere. The flat-Earth story is largely a modern myth, popularised in the nineteenth century.
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Most specialists say no. No medieval chastity belt is known to survive, and the earliest drawing, from 1405, was probably a joke. Museum examples are mostly later.
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No. A vomitorium was a passage in an amphitheatre or theatre that let crowds enter and leave quickly. The vomiting-room idea is a modern misreading of the word.
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Newton did say an apple fall prompted his thinking about gravity, but no source says it hit his head, and the idea developed gradually rather than in one moment.
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Napoleon was about 5 foot 5 to 5 foot 7 in English units, average or slightly above for a Frenchman of his era. The myth grew from unit confusion, his surroundings and hostile caricature.
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No. Washington wore dentures made of ivory, human and animal teeth, and metals. Wood was never used, though stained dentures may have looked like wood.
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No. Electric light existed decades before him. Edison's achievement was a long-lasting, commercially practical incandescent bulb and the power system around it.
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Troy was a real city that was attacked and destroyed more than once. Whether any of this was Homer's ten-year war is unproven, though many specialists see a historical kernel.
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Yes. Cleopatra lived roughly 2,500 years after the Great Pyramid was built and about 2,000 years before Apollo 11, so the Moon landing is nearer in time.
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Yes. Teaching existed at Oxford by 1096, while Tenochtitlán was founded in 1325 and the Aztec imperial alliance formed in 1428, so Oxford is older by centuries under either dating.
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Probably, but not certainly. The evidence rests on two accounts, the date is unknown, and the popular picture of a lightning strike is a myth.
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Eye patches and wooden legs have some basis in fact, though they were not the norm. Walking the plank is mostly fiction, with at most a few poorly documented cases.
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Horse manure was a real urban nuisance, but the 1894 Times prediction and the 'crisis' story trace to a 2004 article and cannot be verified.
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No evidence shows the iron maiden existed in the Middle Ages. It appears in writing in the late 1700s, and surviving examples date from the 19th century.
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No. Nineteen people were hanged at Salem in 1692, and one man was pressed to death. Burning at the stake belongs to European witch hunts, not to Salem.
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No fiddle existed in Rome. Ancient writers disagree on whether Nero sang during the fire of 64 AD, and Tacitus called the story a rumor.
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Low historical life expectancy mostly reflects many infant and child deaths. Those who survived childhood often lived into their 50s, 60s and 70s, though evidence is patchy.
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Most gladiator fights did not end in death for the loser, though the rate varied by period. What the thumb gesture meant is uncertain, and the popular thumbs-down image is not securely supported.
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Mostly no. Medieval people drank both ale and water, and the idea that they avoided water out of fear is largely a modern myth, though some historians still stress its risks.
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