Fake History: Ten Great Lies and How They Shaped the World

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Allchin has a tendency to put words in my mouth. He writes ‘Fritze renders pseudohistory as willful irrationality (an early working title of the book was Irrational Science)’. Let me set the record straight, the working and contracted title of my book was The Twilight Zone of History: Pseudohistory and Popular Culture. That remained its title until after the book was submitted and approaching the end of production. At that point concerns were raised that potential readers would think the book was about the classic television series The Twilight Zone. Various new titles were suggested and debated. Irrational Science formed a part of one such title but it was not my suggestion and I rejected it. The fact is, I consider pseudohistorians to be generally rational in their approach to their scholarship. It is the improbably and sometimes fantastical assumptions that underlay their scholarship that are problematic and tendentious. Fake news about the King being ill was printed from sources on the side of the rebels. It didn’t take long before these stories were seen by other printers who then republished them. This harmed the King’s public image, and although the rebellion wasn’t successful, showed how fake news can be used to try and change people’s opinions. A plausible manner and confidence in speech may lend weight to claims that are fake news – or, let us more nobly say, “factitious”. What is factitious is, oddly, not a fact. Both words derive ultimately from the Latin facere, to make or do, but while a fact (Latin factum) is something done, a factitious thing (Latin factīcius) is something “of the made sort”, something manufactured or artificial – and so, in English, often deceptive, false or inauthentic. Perhaps, just as Stephen Colbert’s coinage “ truthiness” means the quality of seeming but not really being true, we might employ “factitiousness” for the quality of seeming to have, but not really having, something to do with the facts. About 400,000 scientists, engineers, technologists, machinists, electricians, worked on the Apollo program,” Fienberg points out. “If in fact the main motivation for believing in the moon hoax that is you don’t trust the government, you don’t trust our leaders, you don’t trust authority, how can you feel that 400,000 people would keep their mouths shut for 50 years? It’s just implausible.”

Fake History: Ten Great Lies and How They Shaped the World

It turned out that he was the victim of an elaborate plot: envious colleagues of Beringer had planted the fossils. In the third paragraph of his review, Allchin asserts, ‘Fritze epitomizes a tradition that equates the right method with the right answer’. That is a caricature of what I think. In fact, I recognize that science done in a methodologically proper way frequently yields negative results that do not bear out the hypothesis. Such negative results are, in fact, useful but they don’t go very far when it comes to impressing grant-giving agencies. Allchin is correct to assert that there are cases in the history of science where people operating outside of accepted scientific methods have made important discoveries. I am not, however, writing about those scholars. Instead, my book is about people like Madame Blavatsky, Barry Fell, Wallace Fard, and Erik von Däniken among others. I am hard-pressed to discern where any of them has made an important discovery that advanced scientific or historical knowledge. Allchin is talking about the history of scientific endeavor through the ages, whereas I wrote a book about some aspects of the phenomenon of pseudohistory that came into being during the 19th century and is a product of mass culture of the industrial and post-industrial West.Nia Dennis competes on the floor during an NCAA gymnastics meet against Arizona State, a performance which went viral Photograph: Kyusung Gong/AP

A brief history of fake news - BBC Bitesize

Mainstream historians have categorized psychohistory as pseudohistory. [67] [68] Psychohistory is an amalgam of psychology, history, and related social sciences and the humanities. [69] Its stated goal is to examine the "why" of history, especially the difference between stated intention and actual behavior. It also states as its goal the combination of the insights of psychology, especially psychoanalysis, with the research methodology of the social sciences and humanities to understand the emotional origin of the behavior of individuals, groups and nations, past and present. The Chinese are often credited with creating the first “nail polish”, in 3,000 BC. Women soaked their nails in a combination of egg whites, gelatine, beeswax and dyes from flower petals; roses and orchids were the most popular. The result was shiny nails tinted reddish pink. Long, coloured talons – usually worn with highly decorative nail guards created with hammered brass sheets inlaid with semi-precious stones – were an indication of wealth and social status. The assumption was that you could not possibly have such nails if you were of a lower class. Field work and 15cm talons do not coexist well.

No, Ukraine didn’t release a postal stamp of a pro-Nazi soldier

a b c d e Williams, Stephen (1991). Fantastic Archaeology: The Wild Side of North American Prehistory. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press. Often maintains that there is a conspiracy to suppress its claims because of racism, atheism or ethnocentrism, or because of opposition to its political or religious agenda [9] Some societies are matrilineal or matrifocal but in fact have patriarchal power structures, which may be misidentified as matriarchal. Of animals, he classified nine species of mammalia, and five of ovipara. Among the former is a small kind of rein-deer, the elk, the moose, the horned bear, and the biped beaver. The last resembles the beaver of the earth in every other respect than in its destitution of a tail, and its invariable habit of walking upon only two feet. It carries its young in its arms like a human being, and moves with an easy gliding motion. GREAT ASTRONOMICAL DISCOVERIES Lately Made, The Sun, Thursday, August 27, 1835 Robert E. Van Voorst (2000). Jesus Outside the New Testament: An Introduction to the Ancient Evidence. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. pp.14–16. ISBN 978-0-8028-4368-5.

Invented Knowledge: False History, Fake Science and Pseudo Invented Knowledge: False History, Fake Science and Pseudo

Mark Allan Powell (1998). Jesus as a Figure in History: How Modern Historians View the Man from Galilee. Westminster John Knox Press. p. 168. ISBN 978-0-664-25703-3. Novikov, S. P. (2000). "Pseudohistory and pseudomathematics: fantasy in our life". Russian Mathematical Surveys. 55 (2): 365–368. Bibcode: 2000RuMaS..55..365N. doi: 10.1070/RM2000v055n02ABEH000287. S2CID 250892348. This is unsurprising. There is a reason why artists such as Chaun Legend (whose clients include Kylie Jenner and Cardi B), Mei Kawajiri (named one of the 2019 New Wave Creatives at the British Fashion awards) and Betina Goldstein (responsible for the talons of Zoë Kravitz, Florence Pugh and Gemma Chan) are known as “nail artists”. And there is a reason why nail salons such as DryBy (responsible for the Duchess of Sussex’s wedding manicure), the uber-cool Camberwell-based Reecey Roo and Ama Nails, the Brixton salon led by British Vogue favourite Ama Quashie, are making waves in the industry. Under their watch, manicure has been elevated to an art form. Robert Todd Carroll has developed a list of criteria to identify pseudo-historic works. He states that: Cline, Eric H. (2009). Biblical Archaeology: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-974107-6.

Ancient history

Another form of ethnocentric revisionism is nationalistic pseudohistory. The " Ancient Macedonians continuity theory" is one such pseudohistorical theory, which postulates demographic, cultural and linguistic continuity between Macedonians of antiquity and the main ethnic group in present-day North Macedonia. [37] [38] Also, the Bulgarian medieval dynasty of the Komitopules, which ruled the First Bulgarian Empire in its last decades, is presented as "Macedonian", ruling a "medieval Macedonian state", because of the location of its capitals in Macedonia. [39] Marchand, Laure; Perrier, Guillaume (2015). Turkey and the Armenian Ghost: On the Trail of the Genocide. McGill-Queen's Press. pp.111–112. ISBN 978-0-7735-9720-4. The Iğdır genocide monument is the ultimate caricature of the Turkish government's policy of denying the 1915 genocide by rewriting history and transforming victims into guilty parties. Michael S. Heiser. "The Myth of a Sumerian 12th Planet" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 20 November 2008 . Retrieved 30 July 2017.

Fake Viral Photos People Believed Were Real | Bored Panda 30 Fake Viral Photos People Believed Were Real | Bored Panda

An account was published in the London Magazine in 1783 by a Dutch surgeon named Foersch (his initials were variously given as NP and JN). It claimed the existence of a tree on the island of Java so poisonous that it killed everything within a 15-mile radius. Cheterian 2015, pp.65–66. "Some of the proponents of this official narrative have even gone so far as to claim that the Armenians were the real aggressors, and that Muslim losses were greater than those of the Armenians." harvnb error: no target: CITEREFCheterian2015 ( help)

The Sokal hoax

Ortiz de Montellano, Bernardo & Gabriel Haslip Viera & Warren Barbour (1997). "They were NOT here before Columbus: Afrocentric hyper-diffusionism in the 1990s". Ethnohistory. Duke University Press. 44 (2): 199–234. doi: 10.2307/483368. JSTOR 483368. As we brace for yet more Trump and Brexit in 2020, the identification of any modern collection of persons that might be thought to comprise a “sequacious herd” is here left as an exercise for the reader. a b Fritze, Ronald. "Ronald H. Fritze, On his book Invented Knowledge: False History, Fake Science and Pseudo-Religions, Cover Interview". July 08, 2009. Rorotoko.com . Retrieved July 17, 2012. Fritze asks, 'how can a person know what is truth and fact, and what is lie and error in history, or science for that matter?', and replies plainly, 'the answer is evidence' (p. 11). Any 'educated person' or 'competent reader', he claims, 'can and should be able to identify it [pseudohistory]' (pp. 11, 152). This is the conventional rationalist's stance, echoed in other books about pseudoknowledge for a popular audience. (6) Of course evidence is foundational. But when epistemics is naturalized, the problem is not so simple. One major cognitive phenomenon is confirmation bias: early perceptions and interpretations tend to shape later perceptions and interpretations. (7) As a consequence, we often draw conclusions before all the relevant information is available or when evidence is essentially incomplete (the conventional fallacy of 'hasty generalization'). In addition, our minds unconsciously filter observations, tending to select or highlight confirming examples, while discounting or peripheralizing counterexamples. Ultimately, all the 'available evidence' is not really cognitively available. The believer in pseudohistory typically does respect the need for relevant evidence – and believes that it has been secured (witness their expansive volumes). Merely rehearsing the evidence against pseudohistorical claims, as Fritze largely does, is hardly sufficient for remedying those beliefs – or for understanding why anyone holds them.