So many historical 'truths' handed down by teachers or historians, and repeated by the press, prove on closer scrutiny to be at best misleading, and at worst deliberately falsified. Yet they are often so deeply rooted that we take them as fact - America's Founding Fathers must have been democrats, surely, and wasn't Captain Scott 'of the Antarctic' one of history's greatest leaders?Some historical 'facts' are little more than fables, distorted in the retelling; others are the result of deliberate attempts to mislead, or to cover up a discreditable past. Entertaining but authoritative, Bad History debunks a wealth of historical errors, accidental or deliberate. In doing so, it exposes many falsehoods that have wrongly - and sometimes dangerously - influenced our understanding of the world's history.

So many historical 'truths' handed down by teachers or historians, and repeated by the press, prove on closer scrutiny to be at best misleading, and at worst deliberately falsified. Yet they are often so deeply rooted that we take them as fact - America's Founding Fathers must have been democrats, surely, and wasn't Captain Scott 'of the Antarctic' one of history's greatest leaders?Some historical 'facts' are little more than fables, distorted in the retelling; others are the result of deliberate attempts to mislead, or to cover up a discreditable past. Entertaining but authoritative, Bad History debunks a wealth of historical errors, accidental or deliberate. In doing so, it exposes many falsehoods that have wrongly - and sometimes dangerously - influenced our understanding of the world's history.

So many historical 'truths' handed down by teachers or historians, and repeated by the press, prove on closer scrutiny to be at best misleading, and at worst deliberately falsified. Yet they are often so deeply rooted that we take them as fact - America's Founding Fathers must have been democrats, surely, and wasn't Captain Scott 'of the Antarctic' one of history's greatest leaders?Some historical 'facts' are little more than fables, distorted in the retelling; others are the result of deliberate attempts to mislead, or to cover up a discreditable past. Entertaining but authoritative, Bad History debunks a wealth of historical errors, accidental or deliberate. In doing so, it exposes many falsehoods that have wrongly - and sometimes dangerously - influenced our understanding of the world's history.