The latest excitement concerns a supposed portrait of Shakespeare, which is certainly bogus. This Likeness taken 1603 Age at that time 39 yrs. The huge 1623 Folio of Shakespeare s plays didn t even mention the years of his birth and death, let alone calendar dates. So the information on the portrait must have been added long after the painting was made, in an attempt to pass it off as an authentic likeness of Shakespeare. Whoever committed it was too naive to realize that his facts themselves would expose the fakery by being too precise to be true.
False history can have disastrous consequences.
Our own Civil War was the needless result of some bad history on the part of Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln denied the right of the Southern states to secede from the Union. He went on to say that the Union had been further matured in the Articles of Confederation. Apparently he never read those Articles, because they say at the outset that each state retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence. Obviously the states already recognized their own independence by emphatically reaffirming it.