Free Bizarre History by Joe Rhatigan

nothing whatsoever to do with its invention.
    A committee was formed in the early twentieth century to determine the origins of baseball. Instead of attempting to find the truth, the committee wanted a feel-good story that proved baseball was a red-blooded American sport. The report stated, “The first scheme for playing baseball, according to the best evidence obtainable to date, was devised by Abner Doubleday at Cooperstown, New York, in 1839.” Their evidence was a single letter from a man named Abner Graves, a mentally unstable man who later killed his wife. A prolific writer, Doubleday left no notes or mention of even playing baseball. Also, he was at West Point in 1839, as his family had moved from Cooperstown the previous year.
    In 1953, Congress set out to correct this inaccuracy by officially crediting the invention of modern-day baseball to Alexander Joy Cartwright, a volunteer firefighter and member of the New York Knickerbocker Base Ball Club. He supposedly was the first to draw a diagram of a baseball diamond and write down the rules on which baseball is based. Legend has it he also taught the game to people he met while traveling to California during the Gold Rush. Though he did play for the Knickerbockers, there is written proof that the rules for the game already existed and that Cartwright’s descendants simply exaggerated his role.
    So who invented baseball? Nobody. It evolved over time from a children’s stick and ball game played in England for centuries.
Lizzie Borden
    Lizzie Borden took an axe
And gave her mother forty whacks.
And when she saw what she had done,
She gave her father forty-one.
    Now it’s no big stretch to say that a popular schoolyard chant is historically inaccurate, but since it’s all most people know about Lizzie Borden, it’s probably a good exercise to clear up the facts here. First off, Lizzie’s stepmother was the one murdered, and she only received eighteen or so whacks from an axe. Her father received only eleven. Also, though Lizzie was indeed accused of these murders, she was acquitted—mostly because police refused to use a newfangled crime prevention tool: fingerprinting.
The Rub on the Tub
    On December 28, 1917, journalist H. L. Mencken published a fictitious history of the bathtub in the
New York Evening Mail.
In it, he wrote that the bathtub was introduced into the United States in the 1800s and that Americans didn’t take to bathtubs until President Millard Fillmore had one installed in the White House. He wrote it to “have some harmless fun in war days”; however, he soon began to find his “preposterous ‘facts’” in other newspapers, medical literature, and reference books. Mencken wrote years later: “The success of this idle hoax … vastly astonished me. It had, of course no truth in it whatsoever, and I more than once confessed publicly that it was only a jocosity … Scarcely a month goes by that I do not find the substance of it reprinted, not as foolishness but as fact, and not only in newspapers but in official documents and other works of the highest pretensions.”
    Some historians think Mencken was up to more than some harmless fun. They believe that he was out to prove that Americans would believe any nonsense as long as it appealed to their imagination or emotions. Whatever his motives, this “fact” is still in circulation to this day.
The Tribe That Was … or Wasn’t … or Was
    Manuel Elizalde, Jr., a Philippine government minister, announced to the world in 1971 that he had discovered a Stone Age tribe that had had no contact with the outside world. The tribe, called the Tasadays, lived in caves, wore leaves for clothing, used stone tools, and didn’t have a word for “enemy.” The tribe was featured on the cover of
National Geographic
and received worldwide attention. After scientists started asking questions, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos declared the tribe off-limits. In 1986, after Marcos was deposed, a Swiss