To many Americans the Alamo is holy ground. Here, revolutionaries were transformed into all-American heroes. It was at Alamo Fort that a tiny band of men faced off a far larger Mexican army. After a week of sustaining heavy fire, they eventually lost the battle and their lives ... Yet had the real events of the battle been lost in popular folk law? Unsolved History: The Alamo, Discovery 2002
A controversial memoir claims one of America’s most cherished myths might be wrong. ibid.
Santa Anna ordered David Crockett executed like a common criminal ... What really happened to David Crockett? ibid.
On April 14th 1865 John Wilkes Booth crept into the State Box at the Ford Theatre in Washington DC and assassinated Abraham Lincoln ... There were numerous plots to kill the president. Unsolved History: Plot to Kill Lincoln, Discovery History 2013
This is the story of the birth of the United States. It’s a tale of David and Goliath, of high ideals … But how much of America’s founding story is founded on fact? American History’s Biggest Fibs with Lucy Worsley, BBC 2019
But the 2nd of July of course was soon forgotten. ibid.
The line between fact and fiction is blurred … A glorious stunt that sparked a revolution. But the protest came after years of dark and bloody violence between American colonists and British troops in the city ... This wasn’t called a tea party at the time. Many in America saw it as a crime. ibid.
According to Revere’s own account there’s a second rider … It was the third rider that warned Concord. ibid.
Whatever really happened, American patriots hoped that George III would intervene when he understands the injustice against his colonial subjects. ibid.
1775: The majority of Americans were still opposed to independence. Their beef was with parliament. ibid.
He [Thomas Paine] was casting George III as the villain of the story. ibid.
‘All men are created equal’ was open to interpretation. ibid.
Imperial France saw the American War of Independence as the chance to get its revenge. ibid.
Historical accuracy was often sacrificed in favour of a good story. ibid.
The Liberty Bell’s starring role in the American Revolution only entered the story 71 years after the Declaration of Independence was signed. ibid.
Washington was a slave owner. ibid.
The American Civil War: It’s gone down in history as a battle to liberate the slaves in the south and reunite the nation. But is that really true? American History’s Biggest Fibs with Lucy Worsley II
Conflicting accounts of the Civil War continue to divide the nation to this day. History is a murky business. ibid.
11 southern states broke away from the United States and set out to create a confederacy. ibid.
‘In 1858 Lincoln is decidedly not for racial equality.’ ibid. Professor Medford
It was a very limited kind of freedom. Many state quickly institution racial segregation laws. ibid.
The end of slavery was a lie. ibid.
I feel in the depths of my soul that it is the highest, most sacred, and most irreversible part of my obligation to preserve the union of these states, although it may cost me my life. Andrew Jackson
Slavery is such an atrocious debasement of human nature, that its very extirpation, if not performed with solicitous care, may sometimes open a source of serious evils. The unhappy man who has been treated as a brute animal, too frequently sinks beneath the common standard of the human species. The galling chains, that bind his body, do also fetter his intellectual faculties ... To instruct, to advise, to qualify those, who have been restored to freedom, for the exercise and enjoyment of civil liberty ... and to procure for their children an education calculated for their future situation in life; these are the great outlines of the annexed plan, which we have adopted. Benjamin Franklin
That man over there say that women needs to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place. And aren’t I a woman? ... I have ploughed, and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me – and aren’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man (when I could get it), and bear the lash as well – and aren’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children and seen them most all sold off into slavery, and when I cried out with a mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard – and aren’t I a woman? Sojourner Truth, speech to Women’s Rights Convention, 1851
There is a great stir about coloured men getting their rights, but not a word about the coloured women; and if coloured men get their rights, and not coloured women theirs, you see the coloured men will be masters over the women, and it will be just as bad as it was before. So I am for keeping the thing going while things are stirring; because if we wait till it is still, it will take a great while to get it going again. Sojourner Truth, speech to Equal Rights Convention, 1867
As much as I value a union of all the states, I would not admit the southern states into the union, unless they agree to the discontinuance of this disgraceful trade, because it would bring weakness and not strength to the union. George Mason
The compact which exists between the North and the South is ‘a covenant with death and an agreement with hell’. William Lloyd Garrison, 1843
My respect is worn out. And I have no sympathy for slave-holders. Spotswood Rice
I attack the monsters, the phantoms of imagination that have ruled the world. I attack slavery. I ask for room – room for the human mind. Robert G Ingersoll
The generation from 1830 to 1860 was perhaps one of the greatest generations of white people we have had in this country. They were very much like the civil rights generation of the 1960s and the 1970s. They marched, they organised against slavery, they organised in the churches, they staged sit-ins, they refused to capture fugitive slaves, and they prepared the ground which made it possible for emancipation to triumph. Lincoln did absolutely nothing. Lerone Bennett junior, historian
What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?
I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy – a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. Frederick Douglass
The more I read, the more I was led to abhor and detest my enslavers. I could regard them in no other light than a band of successful robbers, who had left their homes, and gone to Africa, and stolen us from our homes, and in a strange land reduced us to slavery. I loathed them as being the meanest as well as the most wicked of men. Frederick Douglass
In thinking of America I sometimes find myself admiring her bright blue sky, her grand old woods, her fertile fields, her beautiful rivers, her mighty lakes and star-crowned mountains. But my rapture is soon checked when I remember that all is cursed with the infernal spirit of slave-holding and wrong, when I remember that with the waters of her noblest rivers the tears of my brethren are borne to the ocean, disregarded and forgotten, that her most fertile fields drink daily of the warm blood of my outraged sisters. I am filled with unbottled loathing. Frederick Douglass
What upon Earth is the matter with the American people? Do they really covet the world’s ridicule as well as their own social and political ruin? The national edifice is on fire. Every man who can carry a bucket of water or remove a brick is wanted. Yet government leaders persistently refuse to receive as soldiers the slaves, the very class of men which has a deeper interest in the defeat and humiliation of the rebels than all others. Such is the pride, the stupid prejudice and folly that rules the hour. Frederick Douglass
Any attempt now to separate the freedom of the slave from the victory of the government, any attempt to secure peace to the whites while leaving the blacks in chains, will be labor lost. The American people in the government in Washington may refuse to recognise it for a time but the execrable logic of events will force it upon them in that the war now being waged in this land is a war for and against slavery. Frederick Douglass