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aldoushuxley001

Thanks for the insightful answer and many leads to follow up on.

Just goes to show you what people will do to frame the narrative (& how valuable that narrative is!).

It's like that ol' 1984 quote "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past."

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>You do realize this was simply bad teaching, right?

It was in the history textbooks.

I suspect you are misremembering.

Update: to be clear, absolutely there would have been people who thought they’d fall off the edge of the earth. There are always uneducated people, presumably large numbers in the 15th century.

Primary/secondary textbooks are not professional academic publications, and typically lag far behind the latter. Your primary/secondary teacher's behavior is not a reflection of professional archaeologists' behavior.

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