Pocahontas was about 11 when she met John Smith in Virginia, and the love story came centuries later
Smith's own 1616 letter called her a child of 12 or 13, and his first account of his 1607 captivity, written in 1608, has no rescue scene at all.
History
The real stories behind famous quotes, people and moments from the past, checked against the original records.
Claudette Colvin refused her Montgomery bus seat 274 days before Rosa Parks, then helped win in court
Colvin was 15 when police took her off a Montgomery bus on March 2, 1955; her fingerprint card now sits in the file of the federal case that ended bus segregation.
Was India’s anthem written for King George V? Tagore’s 1937 letter and the 1911 records say no
Two songs were sung at the Calcutta session on December 27, 1911. Some British-run papers mixed them up, and Tagore answered the rumor in letters in 1937 and 1939.
George Washington Carver did not invent peanut butter, and his own Tuskegee recipe mentions ‘manufacturers’
A Montreal pharmacist patented peanut paste in 1884 and John Harvey Kellogg patented “nut-butter” in 1897. Carver’s 1916 bulletin came decades later.
Patrick Henry’s ‘Give me liberty’ speech was written down four decades after Richmond, by his biographer
No one wrote down Henry’s words in March 1775. His biographer William Wirt, who never heard him speak, built the famous text from one old judge’s memory.
Did Hitler snub Jesse Owens in Berlin? Owens said the snub that hurt came from Roosevelt
Hitler stopped congratulating medalists after the first day of the 1936 Games, and in October Owens told a Kansas City rally the president never sent a telegram.
Was ‘I have a dream’ improvised? King’s own account of his 1963 Washington speech says yes
The refrain was not in the text King prepared for August 28, 1963, but he had used it in Rocky Mount in 1962 and in Detroit two months before the march.
Akbar’s Rajput queen was never called ‘Jodha Bai’ in Mughal records: the name came from an 1829 British book
Akbar's chronicle calls her only Raja Bihari Mal's eldest daughter. Her son knew her as Mariam-uz-Zamani; 'Jodh Bai' was Jahangir's Jodhpur wife.
Napoleon was not short: his 1821 Saint Helena measurement was in French feet, about 5 ft 6½ in
His doctor recorded five pieds, two pouces and four lignes. French units were longer than English ones, and a British cartoonist did the rest from 1803.
Paul Revere never wrote ‘The British are coming’ in his 1775 or 1798 accounts of the ride
Revere's sworn 1775 deposition and his 1798 letter to Jeremy Belknap both say he 'alarmed' the countryside, and Longfellow's 1860 poem never quotes the famous shout either.
George Washington’s teeth were never wood; a 1784 ledger records cash paid to enslaved people for 9 teeth
Mount Vernon's account books show £6 2s paid in May 1784 for nine teeth from unnamed enslaved people, entered 'on account' of a French dentist; the surviving dentures hold ivory, metal and human teeth.
Rosa Parks was 42 and a veteran civil rights organizer, not a tired old woman, when arrested in Montgomery
Her 1992 autobiography says "the only tired I was, was tired of giving in." The arrest file at the National Archives and her papers at the Library of Congress show 12 years of activism first.
Caesar’s ‘Et tu, Brute?’ appears in neither ancient biography; it was printed in a London play in 1595
Suetonius reports Caesar died silent or said, in Greek, "You too, my child?" Plutarch has him pull his toga over his head when he saw Brutus.
Sojourner Truth’s Akron speech, as printed in 1851, never asks ‘Ain’t I a woman?’
Marius Robinson's June 21, 1851, transcript has no such refrain. Frances Gage added it four times in 1863, along with a Southern dialect Truth, a Dutch-speaking New Yorker, never used.
How a Connecticut mother’s bread for her asthmatic son became Pepperidge Farm, sold for $28 million
Margaret Rudkin was selling 4,000 loaves a week within a year of her 1937 start; the 1961 stock deal with Campbell Soup is worth roughly $316 million in September 2026 dollars.
Mandela never said ‘Our deepest fear’ at his 1994 inauguration; the lines are Marianne Williamson’s
The 874-word Pretoria speech of May 10, 1994, never uses the passage, which first appeared on page 165 of A Return to Love in 1992. Mandela's one line about fear promised the opposite of the myth.
44 years ago this week, Dolly Parton’s I Will Always Love You topped the US country chart for a second time
The film re-recording hit No. 1 on the chart dated October 16, 1982, eight years after the 1974 original, making Parton the first artist to top it with two versions of one song.
Did Harriet Tubman say she could have freed a thousand more slaves? The line first appears in 1993
Sarah Bradford's 1869 and 1886 books record Tubman's real creed of death or liberty; the famous line surfaced in a 1993 anthology dated 'c. 1865' with no citation.
Voltaire never wrote ‘defend to the death’: the 1906 London book where the famous line began
The sentence first appears on page 199 of The Friends of Voltaire by Evelyn Beatrice Hall, who wrote in 1939 that it was her own phrase and should never have been in quotation marks.
Marie Antoinette never said ‘let them eat cake’: the brioche line is in Rousseau’s Confessions
Rousseau put the words in the mouth of an unnamed 'great princess' in Book 6, written in the mid-1760s while the future queen was a child in Vienna; the line was pinned on her in 1843.
Mark Twain never said “reports of my death are greatly exaggerated”: his 1897 London words were plainer
The June 2, 1897 interview reads “The report of my death was an exaggeration”; within five months papers had made it plural and added “greatly.”
Who wrote “float like a butterfly, sting like a bee”? The 1964 Miami Beach chant behind Ali’s line
Cornerman Drew “Bundini” Brown supplied the couplet, which ended “rumble, young man, rumble” at the February 25, 1964 weigh-in; the “eyes can’t see” tail came later.
The ‘insanity’ line credited to Einstein first appears in 1981 recovery-group texts, not his papers
A Knoxville, Tennessee, report on an Al-Anon meeting in October 1981 holds the earliest known wording; the head of Caltech's Einstein Papers Project calls the line "Not his."
Maya Angelou’s ‘how you made them feel’ line was printed in Utah in 1971 under another man’s name
A 1971 Salt Lake City quote book credits Carl W. Buehner, a church official who ran for Utah governor; Angelou's name was attached only in 2003, via a chain list.
A Pittsburgh plumber built the first known aluminum observatory dome in 1930 for $178. How he met Einstein
Leo J. Scanlon's journal records every sheet of the 1930 Valley View dome. A 1934 archive photo confirms he met Einstein, but at a club exhibit, not at the observatory.