The truth and nothing but the truth-Richard Shenkman sheds light on America's most believed legends. The story of Columbus discovering the world was round was invented by Washington Irving. The pilgrims never lived in log cabins. In Concord, Massachusetts, a third of all babies born in the twenty years before the Revolution were conceived out of wedlock. Washington may have never told a lie, but he loved to drink and dance, and he fell...

An anthology of popular American stories, pîms, songs, and lore that have become part of the folklore of the United States.

The folklore surrounding history's towering figures often overshadows actual scholarship, both in terms of quantity and in terms of prevalence in the public consciousness. As one might expect with a revered national icon, nearly every facet of Abraham Lincoln's life has been subject to mythmaking as well as academic inquiry of widely varying quality and accuracy. In Lincoln Legends, noted historian and Lincoln expert Edward Steers Jr. carefully scrutinizes...

"Why did Elizabethan adventurers believe that the interior of America hid vast caches of gold? Who started the rumor that British officers purchased revolutionary white women's scalps, packed them by the bale, and shipped them to their superiors? And why are people today still convinced that white settlers--hardly immune as a group to the disease--routinely distributed smallpox-tainted blankets to the natives? Rumor--spread by colonists and Native...

Presents the life story of Molly Pitcher, a heroine in the Battle of Monmouth Court House, during the American Revolution.

Witness the birth of Tenacious D, the self-proclaimed greatest rock band of all time. On a fateful day on Venice beach, JB and KG meet and realize that they were destined to make history by combining their musical genius. But when overnight success eludes them, they set out to find the legendary "Pick of Destiny"--A special guitar pick believed to possess magical powers that can turn any open-mike wannabe into a rock legend.