For example, I asked my history teacher friend who specializes in the Civil War this question. He answered that General Lee had huge admiration for Grant, the Confederate States actually had quite a bit of opposition in the South and that the Confederacy had many sympathizers in the midwest, and that in hindsight the South had no real chance of winning the war.
I work on the history of nineteenth-century popular culture. Perhaps the most enduring misconception about the period centres on the idea that the Victorians were somehow humourless; that they were, in the famous words of their Queen, terminally 'not amused'. After studying the period in school - lessons filled with grim descriptions of workhouses, poverty, and disease - I bought into this tired old stereotype without much resistance. The idea is still in widespread circulation within modern popular culture, and it has long-informed the focus of more academic history. The great works of nineteenth-century art, literature, and science are still preserved, celebrated, analysed, and restaged - but the period's popular humour is much less recognised. Punch magazine and music hall songs get the occasional bit of attention, but can anybody tell me a Victorian joke?
In fact, a vibrant culture of joke-telling existed in the nineteenth century. Millions of them were written, printed, performed, stolen, retold, and continually refashioned by professional and amateur jokers alike. For the past few years I've been leading a project with the British Library that aims to extract jokes from nineteenth-century books and and newspapers, and then combine them into a new digital archive of historical humour. The archive is still under construction, but we've been sharing a new joke every day on twitter and facebook - @VictorianHumour.
I wrote a brief article about Victorian humour for The Conversation a few days ago.
If you’d like to read more about the history of Victorian jokes then you might also like some of the more scholarly articles I’ve written:
‘The Victorian Meme Machine: Remixing the Nineteenth-Century Archive’ [Open Access]
Working largely in pulp studies, with a focus on H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Clark Ashton Smith (the Big Three of Weird Tales in the 1930s)...I went into it having bought into the myth of these two, more than I had realized: that Lovecraft was some sort of sexless, creepy, humorless recluse; that Robert E. Howard was an unstable Texan acting out weird power fantasies in his Conan the Cimmerian tales; Clark Ashton Smith a broken poet and living thesaurus; etc. and that most of their work lived in the pages of Weird Tales and none were particularly good writers.
This led me to think that not many scholars and critics had written about sex in their life and work, and that this was an area ripe for further development. I was mistaken about the first part, since there actually is quite a bit of material out there, such as Howard Phillips Lovecraft and Sex: or The Sex Life of a Gentleman and Elements of Sadomasochism in the Fiction and Poetry of Robert E. Howard... and I was wrong about a lot of other things as well.
Folks that get their impression of Howard, Smith, and Lovecraft from introductions to their popular fiction miss out on how pervasive their interests and activities were - Howard having a considerable corpus of western and sports fiction, for example - as well as the depth of humor and human feeling revealed through their letters. These were men that, despite often dire financial circumstances and the cultural upheaval of the Great War, Prohibition, and the Great Depression, were determined to live and work on their own terms; with limited education but pervasive interests, they became exhaustive readers and autodidacts; struggled with editors and censors; borrowed and lent their creations as part of a literary game many people are still playing.