Myths the textbooks still teach
Five famous historical stories, four of them false. Can you spot the survivor?
5 questions. Pick an answer to see the explanation. Share your result at the end.
True or false: Julius Caesar burned down the Library of Alexandria in 48 BC.
False. Caesar set fire to a shipyard in the Alexandria harbor during his 48 BC war against Ptolemy XIII. The fire spread along the docks and damaged some dockside warehouses (which may have contained scrolls). The main Library, several blocks inland in the royal quarter, was not affected — it is described as still functioning by Strabo, who visited the city 23 years later. The Library actually declined gradually over six centuries.
True or false: Mrs. O'Leary's cow started the Great Chicago Fire by kicking over a lantern.
False. The cow story was invented in 1871 by a Chicago Tribune reporter named Michael Ahern, who in an 1893 interview admitted he had made it up to make his coverage more vivid. The actual cause of the 1871 Chicago Fire's ignition is genuinely uncertain. The Chicago Board of Police and Fire Commissioners' 1871 investigation specifically exonerated Catherine O'Leary, but the exoneration received almost no coverage.
True or false: A prisoner in a Saint-Pierre dungeon was one of only two survivors of the 1902 Mount Pelée eruption.
True. Louis-Auguste Cyparis, a stevedore arrested for fighting two days earlier, survived in a windowless stone cell with one east-facing door — away from the volcano. He was severely burned through the cell's ventilation grate but lived. He was later signed by Barnum & Bailey Circus and toured as 'the man who lived through Doomsday.' The other survivor, Léon Compère-Léandre, was at the southern edge of the city in a thick-walled stone house.
Who began the 1518 Strasbourg dancing plague?
In early July 1518, a woman named Frau Troffea stepped out of her house in Strasbourg and began dancing in the street. She did not stop for several days. Within a week, thirty-four others had joined her. By August, around four hundred people were dancing. The Strasbourg city council's official response was to build stages and hire musicians.
Where did Mary Shelley begin writing Frankenstein in 1816?
In June 1816, Mary Godwin (later Mary Shelley) was at the Villa Diodati on the south shore of Lake Geneva, trapped indoors by the cold rain of the Year Without a Summer — the climate consequence of the 1815 Tambora eruption. Byron proposed a ghost-story competition. Frankenstein was the result.