Artistic License History: Difference between revisions
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** Or, it may have been a deliberate metaphor, in that Keats and Cortes were surveying a scene which was new to them but had already been viewed by others.
* ''[[Harry Potter/Harry Potter and The Chamber of Secrets|Harry Potter]]''. Witches weren't being burned at the stake or persecuted in any noticeable way in the 10th century, and the Founders probably wouldn't have had surnames.
* ''[[Alex Cross's Trial]]'' by James Patterson. This book, set when Teddy Roosevelt was president (i.e., between September 14, 1901 and March 4, 1909) and which claims to be historically accurate, makes the following mistakes:
** The book focuses on lynchings taking place in the South, stressing that this is unusual and is not happening anywhere else, even though lynchings have taken place EVERYWHERE in America—the South, the Midwest, the West and yes, in the North.
** Roosevelt sends the white hero, Ben Corbett to his hometown of Eudora, Mississippi and report on lynchings and Klan activities. The modern version of the Klan was not founded till 1915, in Georgia, and wasn't any kind of a really big deal until after World War I. The Reconstruction Klan was dissolved after ca. 1877.
** Three "White Raiders" (read: Klansmen) are arrested ([[You Fail Logic Forever|by a sheriff who's a Klansman and who believes in what they're doing]]) and Roosevelt sends one Jonah Curtis to prosecute the case. Jonah is, of course, a black man. It's not that Jonah's black and practicing law; the first African-American to be admitted to a state bar was [http://www.duhaime.org/LawMuseum/LawArticle-467/Allen-Macon-1816-1894.aspx Macon Bolling Allen] in July 1844. The problem is that Jonah is a black man who, between 1901 and 1909, apparently works for the federal government and is recognized by the state of Mississippi as an attorney. To find a situation that's more or less analogous, the first black man to serve as an assistant U.S. Attorney in Mississippi since Reconstruction was [http://www.mssc.state.ms.us/appellate_courts/coa/bios/judgeirving.html Tyree Irving]. He was hired by the Northern District of Mississippi in 1978. NINETEEN SEVENTY-EIGHT.
** Roosevelt claims that the above lawsuit will ensure him the black vote for all time. I guess Patterson hasn't heard of common ways that white people of the period kept blacks and other minorities from voting. Like, oh, [[wikipedia:Poll tax|the poll tax]] and [[wikipedia:Literacy test|literacy tests]].
** At the end of the book, Ben takes Moody Cross (Alex's ancestor) into Eudora, walking hand in hand with her and walking into restaurants and stores demanding that they be served—and actually expecting the store owners to comply. Because it's not like segregation and Jim Crow laws existed, or that an attorney would know about either.
** Special mention must be made of the treatment of black civil rights leaders in this book. Leaders of the time, like [[wikipedia:W.E.B. DuBois|W.E.B. Du Bois]] and [[wikipedia:Ida Wells-Barnett|Ida Wells-Barnett]], are mentioned, but the book doesn't say who they are or what they did. Consequently, all we have are names and no context. And in the end, they're reduced to leading a group of blacks through town, chanting. Although it's never stated, it's implied that they're doing this because that's what civil rights leaders ''do''. It's not like they found things like the [http://www.naacp.org/content/main/ NAACP] (which Du Bois did in 1909) or work as journalists for Chicago papers and write books and give lectures throughout Europe about lynching (which Wells-Barnett did, starting in 1893).
* In ''The Chalet School in Exile'', which is set during World War 2, the [[Chalet School|titular school]] relocates to Guernsey. As [http://lampandbook.blogspot.co.uk/2010/04/chalet-school-in-exile-2.html this article] points out, the school would have been ''utterly screwed'' if it had relocated there, as it was occupied by the Nazis at the time.
* Anne S. Lindbergh does this a lot. In ''The Hunky-Dory Dairy'' which features some families from 1881, trapped in the present day, the families still believe in witchcraft. When they hear of modern technology, such as helicopters, they believe it is literally powered by devils. Never mind that, by the 1880s, the Industrial Revolution had started a century before, and experiments in human flight were already underway.
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