Civil War Buzzkillers have been after me for months and months to put this commonly-heard legend to rest. To put it to bed, so to speak! So here goes. Union General Joseph (“Fightin’ Joe”) Hooker was one of the most fascinating generals of the American Civil War. (And that was a war with some real…

Hello again, Buzzkillers. In this week’s mini-myth, we tackle Isaac Newton’s famous apple – an object we all heard about in grade school that allegedly hit Sir Isaac Newton on the head some time in 1666, causing him to have a sudden epiphany about the universal law of gravitation. So, did Sir Isaac really discover…

There is no denying that Michelangelo’s frescos on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome are masterpieces, but did the great artist actually paint the ceiling while lying on his back on a scaffold high in the air? Well no, Buzzkillers, but this is one case where the truth is actually more amazing than…

“Ring Around the Rosie” has been a popular nursery rhyme for a very long time. Many of us learned it when we were children. But we often hear people claim that the rhyme is traceable to the time of the Black Death, and that each line is a morbid reminder of the horrors of Bubonic…

In our day, the silk top hat is associated almost exclusively with cartoonish caricatures of hackneyed old magicians and robber baron Monopoly men, but through the late 18th to mid 20th centuries, the top hat was common headwear for pretty much all well-heeled gentlemen. Fashion trends come and go, but this one lasted for at…

Like most Americans, I suppose I assumed that Jesse Owens was the only African-American athlete at the 1936 Olympic Games. All the documentaries I remember seeing didn’t say that directly, but they focused solely on Owens and gave that impression. A new documentary, Olympic Pride, American Prejudice not only shows that there were 18 African-American…

One of our earlier shows addressed some of the myths and misunderstandings about cracking the “uncrackable” German Enigma code during World War II. But perhaps the biggest popular misconception about Enigma really deserves more detailed attention. That biggest myth is that British codebreakers, led by Alan Turing, were solely responsible for breaking the code during…

This week’s mini-myth tackles the idea that slaves built the ancient and famous pyramids in Egypt. This myth goes all the way back to at least the 5th Century BCE, which is a fairly reliable estimate for when the Book of Exodus, in the Bible’s Old Testament, was finalized. Exodus says that the Israelites were…

Hello again Buzzkillers. In this week’s mini-myth, we take on the Iron Maiden! No, not the heavy metal band. I’m talking about the medieval torture device. It was a kind of a cabinet with spikes on the inside (and pointing inward). Allegedly, people were threatened with being put in the Iron Maiden and having the…