Five stories the textbooks still get wrong
A cow, a cricket ball, a poker, a library, and a town that nobody remembers.
5 questions. Pick an answer to see the explanation. Share your result at the end.
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: Frederick, Prince of Wales died in 1751 from being struck on the chest by a cricket ball.
False. The cricket-ball story appears in the memoirs of Lord Hervey (his political enemy, published posthumously in 1848) and was repeated by Victorian historians for over a century. The 1751 autopsy by royal physician Frank Nicholls actually found a pleural empyema — a chronic respiratory abscess, almost certainly from tuberculosis. There was no external chest injury at all. The cricket ball was invention.
True or false: Edward II of England was killed in 1327 by a red-hot poker.
False — almost certainly. The red-hot-poker story first appears in the Chronicle of Geoffrey le Baker, written around 1355, about thirty years after Edward's death at Berkeley Castle. Contemporary sources from 1327 say only that he died of natural causes; sources from the 1330s say he was suffocated. The poker detail was a later elaboration intended to fit a theological judgment about his sexuality. Modern historians regard it as invention.
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.
Why did the Peshtigo Fire of 1871 — the deadliest in American history — receive almost no national press coverage?
The Peshtigo firestorm of 8 October 1871 killed at least 1,200 people (estimates range up to 2,500) — roughly four times the death toll of the Great Chicago Fire that began the same night. Chicago was a major city; Peshtigo was a Wisconsin timber town. The national press covered Chicago and barely noticed Peshtigo. The pattern has held for 150 years.