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Hiawatha
The famous poem bearing his name has almost nothing to do with him; it borrowed his identity for an unrelated Ojibwe legend, burying the real political story underneath it.
Mythology
The stories a culture tells to explain itself to itself.
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Adolf Hitler
Hitler's earliest written statement calling for the removal of Jews predates his rise to power by fourteen years, and historians now largely agree it grew out of a specific wartime myth rather than any lifelong conviction.
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Ahmad Baba al-Timbukti
A jurist exiled for fourteen years after a foreign invasion still produced work specialists treat as the best surviving source on his field, proof of how portable book-based scholarship could be.
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Akbar
A widely repeated legend has two Rajput warriors' statues honouring their loyalty to Akbar, but a modern historian traced the story back only as far as a Dutch chronicle written decades after the event it claims to describe.
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