Embellished History

History is the backbone of a society. It is the foundation of civilization from which we learn the mistakes of the past and how to avoid them. Historians lay the image of the past like a weaver design on a loom. The historian has the power to change the details of any event and twist it until it is more to their liking. Religion and beliefs can effect how information is presented. Kings can demand that their misdeeds be left out and his achievements be the emphasis of a historic document. Churches and religious groups can demand that disproves their belief system be left out or changed. Events and people in history- President Lincoln, the Salem witch trials, Ben Franklin- details of these can be changed, either accidently or purposefully, and lead to the event being seen as a completely different event. And hundreds of years later, who would know the difference?
Take, for example, on of the most basic questions in American History: Who discovered electricity? Most, if not everyone, who answered would say it was Benjamin Franklin. We all remember the image of a man standing in a rain storm, holding a kite string with a key tied onto the end, surrounded by lightning. While this scene did take place, according to Franklin's diary, all that was discovered that dark and stormy night was that Benjamin Franklin proved his theory that lightning was electricity, and had he been struck by lightning that night he would not have been there to tell the tale the next morning. In 1600, William Gilbert named the force that certain substances created when rubbed together "electricity". In 1800, the Italian physicist Alessandro Volta constructed the electric battery (the "voltaic pile"), the first device to produce a steady, usable current, and he also named the electrical current "voltage". In 1831, electricity became viable when   English Scientist Michael Faraday created the first crude version of a generator, known as the "electric dynamo". All Benjamin Franklin did was fly a...