History Main / NewerThanTheyThink

* NewerThanTheyThink/{{Comics}}

Contrast OlderThanTheyThink, which goes the other way.

[[FeelingTheirAge Man, Do I Feel Old]]

[[FeelingTheirAge Man, Do I Feel Old]]
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* [[NewerThanTheyThink/ProverbsAndSuperstitions Provers & Supersitions]]

* NewerThanTheyThink/AnimalsAndPlants

* NewerThanTheyThink/DressAndCostume
* NewerThanTheyThink/FilmAndTelevision
* NewerThanTheyThink/FoodAndDrink
* NewerThanTheyThink/GamesAndToys

* NewerThanTheyThink/LawsAndPolitics

* NewerThanTheyThink/ProverbsAndSuperstitions

[[foldercontrol]]













[[folder:Personal names]]
* The name Kevin is pretty old by itself, but it only became remotely popular outside Ireland in the mid-20th century and later (as recently as 1933 it was outside the top 1000 names in the US). So Captain Darling's first name is possibly the most anachronistic thing in ''[[Series/{{Blackadder}} Blackadder Goes Forth]]''.
* Erin is often considered a "classic" Irish name and is therefore often used by Irish immigrants to honor their heritage. In fact, it is rarely used as a name in Ireland as it is a poetic name for the country itself. It'd be akin to naming your daughter America -- it's been done, but not very often and it sounds a bit odd[[note]]At least, if you're Anglo. It's common enough to be unremarkable among Spanish speakers[[/note]]. Erin from ''Series/DerryGirls'' actually has an unusually rare name.
* Colleen has only once broken into the top 200 names in Ireland itself.[[note]]In 1992 it peaked at 197th. Since then never more than 20 babies have been named Colleen any year, usually far less.[[/note]] Not too surprising, since it just means "girl". It only became popular after the 1920s among the Irish diaspora.
* And, while on the subject of Irish names, "Caitlin" is simply the Anglicized version of ''Caitlín'' (note the difference in the second "i"), the Irish spelling of "Kathleen" (which itself is a variant of "Catherine"). In Irish, it's pronounced, roughly, "Kathleen", making its modern English-language usage a mispronunciation.
* Oscar, although dating back to an ancient Irish name meaning "friend of deer", was almost unknown until Charles XIV's son became King Oscar I of Sweden in 1844.
** There also was an Old English Oscar, usually interpreted as equivalent to the German name Ansgar -- both meaning "god-spear" -- and part of a whole group of Germanic names beginning "Os-", notably Osmond, Oswald, and Oswin. Saint Ansgar or Oscar (801-865), first archbishop of Hamburg and Bremen, was known as the "apostle of the North". The name Oscar was popularized in the late 18th century by James [=MacPherson=]'s literary forgery ''Ossian'', which was where French General Bernadotte, later King Charles XIV of Sweden, got the idea to name his son Oscar.
* [[UsefulNotes/QueenVictoria Victoria]] was practically unheard of as a girl's name in English-speaking countries before it became clear that Princess Victoria was going to inherit the crown of Britain. When she was given it, she was expected to remain an obscure minor princess: it was a (probably deliberate) WhoNamesTheirKidDude choice.
** Her mother Victoria was from Germany. Victoria and its variants were in use in continental Europe long before. (The name itself is of ancient Roman origin.)
** It's also commonly forgotten that Victoria did not become her name until she assumed the throne and she chose to drop her first name, Alexandrina.
* Cedric, which is often seen as a quintessentially Saxon name, did not exist before Walter Scott used it in ''Literature/{{Ivanhoe}}'' in 1820. Scott seems to have misspelled the actual Old English name Cerdic (most famously a 6th century king of Wessex), creating the far more famous modern version of the name. He also changed the pronunciation - Cerdic was pronounced "Cherditch", but Scott's version basically invented "Sedrick".
* The Russian name Svetlana may seem to have an ancient feel to it... and was first used in 1802, in an all but forgotten poem by Alexander Vostokov. It was popularized by Vasily Zhukovsky in 1813. Even after that, the popularity was limited by the fact that the church didn't recognize it until 1943 -- by then, of course, few cared, but everyone did care that UsefulNotes/JosephStalin had a daughter named Svetlana.
* "Selina", too. [[Franchise/{{Batman}} Bill Finger]] used the name as early as 1940 as the "real name" of Catwoman, but only in the past few decades has it seemed to have acquired anything resembling mainstream popularity -- and now commonly as "Selena" (to reflect the Spanish spelling), in a nod to singer [[Music/{{Selena}} Selena Quintanilla-Pérez]] and actress-singer Music/SelenaGomez. Interestingly, the name is also OlderThanTheyThink: it has its roots in the ''very'' ancient Greek term ''selene'', meaning "moon-goddess."
* Jennifer did not become a popular name outside Cornwall until the 20th century. It is actually a variation of an ancient English name, ''Guinevere'' from Arthurian myths, but considered a peculiar local variation until, supposedly, Creator/GeorgeBernardShaw's play ''The Doctor's Dilemma'' where the character with this name actually does have to explain the origin of her name. But it only shot to fame in the mid-1940s, via actress Creator/JenniferJones (born Phyllis Lee Isley), and even more by way of the tragic heroine of the film ''Film/LoveStory'', released in 1970.
* Same case for Brooke, which did not become a popular name until the late 1940s, and, like Jennifer, it only shot to fame through someone famous, the socialite Brooke Astor (née Roberta Brooke Russell), and only became trendy through the fame of actress-model-socialite Creator/BrookeShields.
* Pamela was invented in the late 16th century by Sir Philip Sidney in ''Literature/OldArcadia'', but remained largely unknown until Richardson's mid-18th-century novel. Contrary to the usual pronunciation, Sidney had originally intended for the name to be pronounced "pa-MELL-uh".
* Vanessa was invented by Creator/JonathanSwift in the early 18th century as a nickname for his pupil Esther Vanhomrigh ("Van" from her last name and "essa" as a diminutive for "Esther"). It was first seen in print in 1726, but didn't actually become popular until the 20th century, though.
* Samantha seems like it should be an ancient name (perhaps Greek or Celtic or Hebrew). It's actually a British coinage first recorded in 1633, and it became more common in America than England in the 1700s, though it didn't really take off in popularity in either country until the mid-20th century.
* Jessica appears to have been invented by Creator/WilliamShakespeare for ''Theatre/TheMerchantOfVenice''. Since the character was a Jewish girl in Venice, he may have intended it as an [[AsLongAsItSoundsForeign Italian-sounding]] version of the name Iscah from the Literature/BookOfGenesis, which was rendered "Iesca" in the most popular English Bible translation at the time the play was written. He's also credited with inventing Miranda for ''Theatre/TheTempest'', thought that name has more clear Latin roots (basically meaning "admirable").
* The name "Karen" only entered the English-speaking world in the 1940s; prior to then, it was a Danish diminutive form of "Katherine".
[[/folder]]

* NewerThanTheyThink{{Chronology}}

[[folder:Professional Wrestling]]
* While people had been accusing pro wrestling of being a work since at least 1930 (there being evidence of worked matches as far back as the 1880s and the sport being ''almost entirely'' worked by 1920) the accusation that the pro wrestlers were actually all friends who hung out when not in matches wasn't even remotely true until the late 1990s and was still the exception rather than the rule until the collapse of Wrestling/{{WCW}}. (As late as 1970, some feds such as Wrestling/AllJapanProWrestling had a truce in which wrestlers would agree to take photos together but it was a ''{{truce|zone}}''.) Pro wrestlers not only were often hostile about "having to lose to inferior athletes" but even when they were amicable would still work as hard as they could not to be seen together in public if the were [[{{face}} differently]] [[{{heel}} aligned]], let alone feuding. Sometimes even babyfaces would avoid one another in public, [[Analysis/AntiHero given the degree thereof]]. Wrestlers became more friendly as the business shrank, and thus more could afford to be and conversely, many literally couldn't afford not to be seen together, needing all the help on road trips they could get.
* In the post-territory era, most people seeking to enter the business are recommended to a "wrestling school", a fairly new concept that had its roots in the 1950s with areas such as the "Hart Dungeon", which weren't schools so much as the basement/attic/barn of some wrestler with a ring in it (if you were lucky). Before that and sometimes after, the standard practice was to simply beat on a promising athlete while no one was around the ring and if they kept coming back, actually start training them. By the 2000s, entire facilities dedicated solely to training pro wrestlers had became somewhat common, though even then, quite a few were still basically barns.
* Prior to the mid 1980s or so, one fall was not the standard pro wrestling match, as it would become in the majority of regions. In Mexico, two out of three falls is till the standard singles match and isn't even uncommon in {{tag team}}, tercia or even the wildest of GimmickMatches.
* The concept of a "choreographing matches" is largely the product of the 1990s, namely a specific match between Wrestling/HulkHogan and Wrestling/UltimateWarrior, which was considered to be an instant classic. Traditionally, the idea was simply to decide who would win and who would lose, maybe a couple other spots and a time limit, with the majority of the wrestling being improvised based on how crowds reacted. Attempts to repeat the success of Hogan and Warrior through choreographing persisted well into the 2000s but remained mostly frowned upon by the wider wrestling community (in part because most of these efforts failed to live up to it, ''including Hogan and Warrior's attempts to duplicate their own success''.)
* While the concept of a "tap out" had been around since at least the 1970s, these did not become common in pro wrestling until Wrestling/{{Tazz}} in Wrestling/{{ECW}}, especially as far as USA pro wrestling goes, where verbal submission was most common.
* The image of Wrestling/TheUndertaker with which so many people are familiar today (black tank top, trench coat, grinning cattle skulls on the tights, and a wide-brimmed homburg hat) was not how the he originally dressed: in earlier eras he was costumed more as a medieval executioner or a [[ComicStrip/FlashGordon "Ming the Merciless"]] type, or as a ''literal'' undertaker in a suit and necktie! He didn't adopt the "classic" look until 2004, after having spent four years as a basically non-supernatural biker. Furthermore, he hasn't worn the homburg or the trench coat or worn his hair long since 2012, but fans still picture him that way.
* Wrestling/{{WWE}} didn't acknowledge Wrestling/VinceMcMahon on-camera as the company's owner and boss until the emergence of the "Mr. [=McMahon=]" heel character in 1997. Until then, Vince was merely the announcer, with [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Tunney Jack Tunney]] playing the role of "WWF President" when needed.
* [[Wrestling/BigShow The Big Show's]] "Goliath" beard was not sported by him regularly until 2008, when he returned to WWE after many had assumed he had given up on the business to become a boxer; prior to that, he usually had only a thick mustache. Similarly, he was not bald until 2004.
* Monthly pay-per-views didn't become standard until the mid-1990s (and Wrestling/{{WCW}} did them first).
** Similarly, weekly live wrestling television only dates back to Wrestling/WCWMondayNitro. Monday Night RAW was often taped in its early years.
* The use of music to introduce wrestlers is both this and OlderThanTheyThink. It was happening as early as the 1940s (when classical music was the arena standard)... but the use of HardRock or HeavyMetal dates only to about 1980 at the earliest [[note]] the TropeCodifier is generally thought to be the Legion of Doom using Music/BlackSabbath's "Iron Man" [[/note]] -- and even then, it was more the custom to (with permission, of course) use existing rock songs rather than commission Jim Johnston and others to write or co-write new ones.
* There was virtually no coverage of pro wrestling written outside {{kayfabe}} until the 1980s. The first "dirt sheet" was ''Wrestling/TheWrestlingObserverNewsletter'', published in 1982, before which all wrestling journalism (such as it existed) treated the storylines as real and the matches as legitimate competitions.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Chronology]]
* Minutes and seconds as we know them were first used near the end of the tenth century. (The names are a clue: ''minute'' fraction of an hour, and ''second'' minute fraction; "thirds" and "fourths" were once used in calculations, although not measured for obvious reasons.) Before that, the only culture ''not'' to use fractions of an hour was the Babylonians, who would divide ''days'' by sixtieths, into units of twenty-four minutes, twenty-four seconds, six fifteenths of a second, etc. Seconds could not be measured until the sixteenth century, and nothing resembling our concept of counting time by seconds shows up until late in the seventeenth.
* The AD dating system was not devised until AD 532, and not widely used until the 9th century AD. Before that, Christians often dated from the supposed date of the Creation (5492 BC), the supposed birth of Abraham (2016 BC), and many other epochs.
** If they dated years that way at all: many just used terms like "the 18th year in the reign of King Whatshisface". (This convention was commonly used in dating British legislation until quite late in the reign of UsefulNotes/QueenVictoria, and remained part of the official legal citation form until ''1963''.)
*** Still the case in some countries, e.g. Japan, where official calendars refer to the era name; since 1868 a calendar era coincides with the reign of an emperor, but before then they were shorter, new eras often being declared for recovery from major disasters. The current era (beginning in 2019) is Reiwa, the reign of Emperor Naruhito.
*** Legislation is also still numbered by regnal year in Canada; thus Canadian statutes passed in 2015 are dated to the 64th year of the reign of Elizabeth II. (It's slightly more complicated than that, as statutes are dated to the session of Parliament, which generally spans two calendar years, but that's enough of that now.)
*** In some regions of Europe historians continued to use AUC or other Roman chronologies [[note]]For example, the "Spanish Era" in the Iberian Peninsula, which began in 38 BC when the region was declared pacified by Augustus[[/note]] well into the 14th and even 15th centuries. It's ironic that this practice died precisely during UsefulNotes/TheRenaissance.
*** It is also sometimes stated the Ancient Greeks counted the years by the Olympic Games. In reality, this system was only used since the 4th Century BC, and then only by historians. Any official documents used years ''named'' after officials, with each state, naturally, having its own calendar.
*** Fun fact: The earliest event which we can date with any certainty is the Battle of Halys (May 28, 585 BC), which was called off due to a solar eclipse (which is how we know it was on May 28th).
* New Year's Day, until a few centuries ago, could fall on a number of different days depending on the country, most commonly March 25th and September 1st. Great Britain didn't move New Year's to January until 1752, concurrent with its adoption of the Gregorian Calendar.
* The concept of decade as a unit of time (and its [[TwoDecadesBehind associated tropes]]) did not exist until the 20th century, and was only popularized by a 1931 book by Frederick Lewis Allen. Until then, periods of time shorter than a century but longer than a year, would be expressed in ages, eras or periods, but not decades. The word itself could just as easily mean ten ''days'' - and in many languages still does.
* The idea of date changing in the midnight was coined only in the 18th century. Before that, ''sunset'' was considered to be the time of the change of the date. The sunset as date change is still followed by observant Jews, Muslims, and some Christian sects. For Romans and Greeks, it could start as sunrise. Also, the day and the night were each divided into twelve hours separately, making for different lengths depending on the season.
* The Chinese adopted the twelve hour day only in the 18th century. Before that, they used decimal reckoning. They considered the twelve hour day as a ''retrograde'' step.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Proverbs and Superstitions]]
* "The greatest thing since sliced bread" implies that sliced bread is an old, old concept. Pre-sliced loaves have been around only since 1928: [[http://blog.modernmechanix.com/slicing-bread-by-machinery/ See the astounding announcement]] from ''Modern Mechanics''!
** [[WesternAnimation/TheSimpsons Abe Simpson]] recalls, in his childhood, his father talking about America as if it was the greatest thing since sliced bread, adding that "Sliced bread had been invented the previous winter." Given that article's publishing date and Abe's record in UsefulNotes/WorldWarII, the comment was probably much more accurate than the [[GagSeries writers intended]].
** The phrase itself came about as soon as the 1930s; when it was originally used, it meant the "greatest new thing in a series of wondrous new technological developments". It would be like saying how something is the "greatest thing since the iPod" or "greatest thing since HDTV" today. The fact that the phrase stuck around longer than its cultural context is just one of those happenstances of history.
*** [[Creator/GeorgeCarlin "So...this is it, huh, folks? Sliced bread?? The fucking PYRAMIDS!! The Leaning Tower of Pi--even a LAVA LAMP!! What's the big deal?! You take a loaf of bread. You take a knife. And you SLICE the motherfucker! And get on with your life!"]]
*** These days the expression can be used with a touch of irony, underlining how ordinary sliced bread is now, as if to say, "This thing is not as great as it seems" by comparing it to mundane, pre-cut bread loaves.
** On the other hand, it underlines how much sliced bread was loved in America when it arrived- Creator/BillBryson, born in 1951, never saw an un-sliced loaf before he flew to Belgium in his twenties- "never even considered it a possibility."
** Oddly enough, the bread slicing machine wasn't a good idea in itself, alone, when it first appeared- a lack of modern packaging meant it went mouldy too fast to be practical. It was only when it was followed by cellophane that made sliced bread great ''at all''.
* The myth that England will not fall until the ravens leave the Tower of London came from the 1800s at the latest, since the earliest reference to ravens being there at all isn't until 1885. It didn't become popular until WWII (when, apparently, the ravens did leave).
** Prior to the ravens, the king's fate was supposedly linked with the lions kept at the menagerie at the Tower -- Richard II fell fatally ill after one died.
** There is also the idea that Gibraltar will stay British while there are Barbary macaques there. In reality nobody gave a damn about the monkeys until [=WW2=] (to the point nobody knows for sure *when* the first monkey arrived there to begin with), when the population had coincidentally dwindled to 7 and was about to die off, requiring the introduction of several new animals from North Africa. [[HilariousInHindsight Nowadays, the Barbary macaque is near extinct in North Africa but a pest in the Rock]]. Maybe it's time to return the favor.
* The idea that Friday the 13th is an unlucky day is an invention of the 19th century, although the separate ideas that Friday and [[ThirteenIsUnlucky the number 13]] were unlucky are older than that.
** According to a special about them on the History Channel, when the Knights Templar in France were rounded up as heretics on Friday, October 13, 1307, the infamous superstition began as a result.
** In most Spanish-speaking countries, the superstition is actually ''Tuesday'' the 13th, with the popular explanation that Tuesday (martes) is named after the Roman god of war, violence and bloodshed (as a matter of fact, the proverb ''Martes, no te cases ni te embarques'' ("On Tuesdays, don't marry or embark") traces back to medieval times). The Jason movies are sometimes retitled accordingly (until the recent reboot, that is).
*** The same is true for Greece, with the popular explanation being that Constantinople (modern day Istanbul) fell on a Tuesday (29th of May, 1453). 13 was traditionally seen as a bad number, since 12 was a holy/harmonic number in ancient Greece while another account attributes this to there being thirteen men present at the Last Supper (with Judas Iscariot as the unlucky thirteenth).
** While the idea of Friday the 13th being unlucky has gained popularity in Russian-speaking countries, before that, being born on a ''Monday'' was considered to be extremely bad luck.
* "The Curse of the Bambino", referring to the 1920 trade of Babe Ruth from the Boston Red Sox to the New York Yankees having a detrimental effect to the former team, was first referenced in 1990, meaning that it was believed for only 14 years before it was "broken".
* Robert F. Kennedy attributed the curse (which is one [[FridgeLogic if you think about it]]) "May you live in interesting times" to the ancient Chinese. There is no record of such a saying in China, and the curse in question can only be traced back to 1936.
* The proverb of the camel's nose is an invention of the mid-19th century Victorians, not Arabs.
* The first record of the proverb "The enemy of my enemy is my friend" dates to an 1884 political treatise by Gabriel Manigault, who adapted it from a Latin expression dating to 1711. It was not well-known until the 1950s, when the Cold War made it a guiding principle of American foreign policy.
* The saying "Be the change you want to see in the world" is [[https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/10/23/be-change/ first recorded]] in a 1974 book chapter by educator Arleen Lorrance; it was never said by UsefulNotes/MahatmaGandhi.
* The saying "Hell hath no fury like a [[WomanScorned woman scorned]]" derives from neither the Bible nor Shakespeare; it is actually a corruption of a line from William Congreve's 1697 RestorationComedy ''The Mourning Bride'', which reads as follows:
---> Heav'n has no Rage, like Love to Hatred turn'd, Nor Hell a Fury, like a Woman scorn'd.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Science]]
* The [[RainbowMotif "seven colours of the rainbow"]] as we know them derive from Isaac Newton's experiments in optics in the 1670s, where he first observed the spectrum of sunlight split by a prism. Finding that his numerological theories worked better with a seven colour spectrum, he convinced himself that the area between blue and purple was an entirely separate colour, which he named [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigo "indigo"]] after the blue dye. Since indigo is indistinguishable from blue and purple, it is possible that Newton's "blue" referred to cyan and his "indigo" referred to our blue, which would make more sense (other languages use a TranslationCorrection often enough). This can clearly be seen in the coin-op VideoGame/RainbowIslands, in which the "blue" gems are cyan and the "indigo" gems are blue. It would also make indigo not being perceived as a real color NewerThanTheyThink.
** Thanks to the urban myth that "the" primary colours (actually the ''subtractive'' primaries) are "yellow, red and blue", magenta and cyan are sometimes referred to in the printing trade as "process red" and "process blue" respectively. This is borne out by a colour-mixing chart on Wiki/TheOtherWiki, which shows "red" and "blue" which are clearly what we now call magenta and cyan.
** Even Newton only managed to find seven colors in light separated by a prism (that is, under controlled laboratory conditions). In an actual rainbow, you'll be lucky to see ''four'' colors.
* The notion that our universe is staggeringly big (even bigger than can be physically observed) is relatively new. Even in the 1920s there was still a heated debate going on among astrophysicists on whether the universe is the size of the Milky Way (other galaxies being just small objects within it) or whether it's bigger. (To put this in perspective, consider that, for example, the General Theory of Relativity was published in 1916.) The debate was finally put to rest thanks to the work of Edwin Hubble and others.
** For the case, that the Milky Way is actually composed of many millions of stars too faint to be seen with the naked eye as well as that the Moon's surface is pockmarked by countless craters are something known from the early XVII century onwards, the former having been suggested it floated in the upper atmosphere as a sort of vapor clouds.
** On the flip side, ironically, the idea that the Solar System is of vast size is quite old. Diagrams of the old geocentric conception tend to show the Sun and planets moving relatively close above a huge Earth, but in fact Plato pointed out the size of the Earth could be treated as a mathematical point in comparison with the distance to the Sun.
* The theory that a meteor strike was the cause of the extinction of the dinosaurs was first proposed in 1980 by Luis and Walter Alvarez, and didn't become the orthodox explanation until the early 1990s.
* The idea that we may be "alone in the universe" is very new as well. For most of its time on Earth, humanity accepted that it coexisted with fairies, demons, ghosts, gods and other alien beings. The earliest observers of the other planets in our Solar System, like Huygens and Herschel, took it for granted that they must be inhabited, or God would not have placed them there.
* The Catholic Church first recognized heliocentrism in 1822. However, they simultaneously rejected and embraced (depending on who you talked to) Kepler's heliocentrism in the early 17th century, decades before they hired Galileo. Needless to say, Church history is annoyingly complicated. Note that Galileo's problems with the Church leadership had less to do with challenging established orthodoxy (which was actually science) and more to do with his being an InsufferableGenius who would mostly back up his theories with "Because I'm smarter than you" rather than explain how he arrived at his conclusions. Since the Pope was financing his research, you can imagine how well that went over.
** Note also that the early 19th century was the first time stellar parallax could be reliably observed. Before that, there was no conclusive scientific proof of heliocentrism.
* The possibility of life on Mars was generally taken seriously until Mariner 4 took the first pictures of the barren Martian landscape in 1965; likewise, Mariner 4 ended hopes that Martian canals contained liquid water, Or, for that matter, ''even existed.'' They turned out to have been an optical illusion, which explains why the various sketches of Mars drawn by astronomers were so inconsistent on the canal patterns.
* The theory that mosquitos propagate malaria (and, as it turns out, other diseases) was formulated around 1880. For the longest time it was believed that the disease was caused by the "rotten" air in swamp areas, rather than by the mosquitoes breeding in them. Malaria's name, in fact, means "bad air" in Italian.
* While humans first domesticated dogs well before written history and have been selectively breeding them for at least that long, nearly every single popular breed of dog used today was actually first bred quite recently, during the mid-to-late 19th century. Advancing technological advancement among breeding as well as the extension of what were once aristocratic pastimes to the lower classes allowed an explosion in dog breeds in late Industrial England. Over a century later, most of the purebred varieties of the breeds invented here still preserved today have become deformed, inbred versions of their former breeds. Chihuahuas, for example, can only give birth by C-section, and most bulldogs have hip dysplasia and don't live longer than a decade.
* Seasonal allergies weren't identified as a condition until 1819. They were named "hay fever", after the mistaken belief that they were caused by exposure to recently cut hay (by coincidence, allergy season coincided with haying season). A link between hay fever and pollen was demonstrated in 1859, but the condition was still not really understood. It wasn't until 1902 that allergies were discovered. The term "allergy" itself was coined in 1906 and it didn't come into wide currency until the 1920s. All in all, an awareness that some people are allergic to certain things is only about one century old. One reason for this may be that allergies appear to have been rare in pre-industrial times, just as they continue to be rare in developing countries. Even when hay fever was first documented in the 19th century, it was considered to be a rare condition associated with the upper classes. A common theory is that allergies are an unintended side effect of improved sanitation, the result of immune systems attempting to compensate for the sudden lack of real disease.
* Cosmetic uses for Botox were first described in a 1992 journal article, and first legalized in the United States (via FDA approval) in 2002.
* Painkillers and anesthetics were not generally used when operating on babies until after 1987, as medical consensus before then was that babies could not feel pain. Little research was done into the matter until mother Jill Lawson discovered in 1985 that her infant son had gone through open heart surgery without any form of analgesic; she thereafter started an awareness campaign on the issue.
* Plate tectonics were first theorized in the 1960s and became consensus among geologists in the 1970s. Its predecessor, continental drift, was first proposed in 1912.
* Wind chill was only developed as a meteorological concept in the 1940s. The familiar "it feels like" temperature as the common use of wind chill in weather forecasts only dates to the 1970s (before that it was expressed as an esoteric three-or-four digit "wind chill index" number), and the most common formula for calculating wind chill was finalized in 2001.
* The common cold virus was discovered in 1956, before which the cause of colds was unknown.
* The first known use of the word "zero" in English dates to 1598, and its first use in other European languages was only slightly earlier. The 0 symbol representing zero was introduced to Europe c. 1200 (about 200 years after the rest of the Arabic numerals), but it was not widely used until c. 1450 with the advent of the printing press, after which Arabic numerals (including zero) rapidly replaced Roman numerals as the dominant numeral system. The concept of ''zero'' was imported from Arabic mathematics, which in turn imported it from India; classical mathematics does not use it, instead representing nothing as either literally nothing or as the word "nothing" (in whatever language.) Pre-modern mathematicians were generally suspicious of the idea of representing nothing with something.
* The theory of [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter nuclear winter]]--that is, the idea that nuclear war would lead to severe cooling of the Earth and result in widespread crop failure--was first proposed in 1983 by Richard P. Turco.
* The idea that the inherited traits of an organism were carried by a nucleic acid 'giant hereditary molecule' (later confirmed to be DNA) was first proposed less than a century ago in 1927 by Nikolai Koltsov. He correctly predicted the double-helix structure of DNA well before Crick and Watson confirmed it in 1953.
* Many veterinarians didn't consider anaesthetizing animals before operating on them mandatory until the 1990s except as a measure to keep them still; prior to then, [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pain_in_animals#History a lot of researchers weren't certain]] that animals actually felt pain the way humans do. Of course, as Creator/JamesHerriot's books show, that opinion wasn't quite universal among the veterinarians themselves.
* Decimals were first used in Europe in 1585 by Flemish mathematician Simon Stevin.
* Considering the ubiquity of interplanetary travel in pop culture, [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exoplanet#Confirmed_discoveries exoplanets]] must have been discovered a long time ago, right? Nope. The very first discovery of a planet outside our Solar System occurred in 1992, orbiting the pulsar PSR 1257+12. All but a few dozen of the 4000+ exoplanets now known were discovered after 2000.
* Chicken pox was not clearly distinguished from smallpox until the [[https://web.archive.org/web/20150207091230/http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/pubs/pinkbook/varicella.html late 19th century.]]
* Although the planet Saturn is about 4.5 billion years old, its famous [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rings_of_Saturn#Formation_and_evolution_of_main_rings rings]] are, at most, 100 million years old, and maybe as little as 10 million. This means Saturn's rings are likely newer than the extinction of the dinosaurs. Also, although Saturn has been known to humanity since ancient times, its rings weren't discovered until Galileo observed them via telescope in 1610.
* The knowledge that every person has a unique fingerprint is relatively recent, having been [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fingerprint#19th_century discovered]] in 1892 by English mathematician Francis Galton. His discovery was almost immediately put to use by police forces around the world, beginning with Argentina that same year.
* The evidence that alcohol is harmful to fetuses was first proposed in 1973, and was not widely accepted for another decade after that; until the 1980s, doctors commonly [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fetal_alcohol_spectrum_disorder#History gave pregnant women alcohol intravenously]] to ward off premature labor.
* The [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Earth#Early_calculations idea]] that the Earth is billions of years old dates only to the rise of radiometric dating in the 1920s; 19th-century scientists estimated Earth's age to be a few hundred million years at most, and often less than 100 million years. And before the 19th century, most thinkers assumed, using the Bible as a reference, that Earth was about 6000 years old.
* The idea of [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction#History_of_scientific_understanding extinction]] of a species was first proposed in 1686 by Robert Hooke, and even then, he was dismissive of it, believing, as with every other thinker of his time, that God had created the world complete and perfect. The first serious argument that a species had gone extinct occured in 1796 in a lecture by Georges Cuvier, who contended that a recently-discovered elephant-like fossil skull did not belong to any extant animal; this animal is now known as the woolly mammoth. Even then, Cuvier's ideas remained on the fringe for the next few decades, and the concept of extinction only started to gain wide traction with the advent of Darwinian evolutionary theory in the 1860s.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Literature]]
* [[InnerMonologue Stream-of-consciousness]] in writing was first used in 1888 in Edouard Dujardin's ''Les Lauriers sont coupés'' (although ''Literature/AnnaKarenina'' (1873-77) contains some proto-examples). Creator/JamesJoyce, the modern codifier for this technique, himself expressed annoyance at people's SmallReferencePools:
--> '''Creator/JamesJoyce''': When I hear the word "stream" uttered with such a revolting primness, [[TakeThat what I think of is urine]] and not the contemporary novel. And besides, it isn't new...[[Creator/WilliamShakespeare Shakespeare]] used it continually, much too much in my opinion, and there's ''Literature/TristramShandy'', not to mention [[Theatre/TheOresteia the Agamemnon]].
* The [[AnAesop Aesops]] in Literature/AesopsFables were not made explicit and clear when the stories were first written, let alone when they were first told.
* The prose poem "Literature/{{Desiderata}}" has been widely attributed to being [[http://www.fleurdelis.com/desidera.htm found in an old church and dated 1692]], but was actually written by Max Ehrmann in 1927. The 20th-century English it's written in kind of gives it away.
* Lower-case letters were first developed in the 8th century, as a kind of shorthand used by bureaucrats who worked for Charlemagne. Documents and literary works older than this were written IN ALLCAPS ONLY.
** There was a form of shorthand for the latin alphabet prior to this, but it had largely been forgotten by the time modern minuscules were created. It can still be seen on some inscriptions.
** Lower-case and upper-case letters weren't mixed until the 14th century. Before then, documents would only use one or the other (formal documents and books were upper-case, while informal bureaucratic notes were lower-case.)
** Until the early 19th century, nouns were usually capitalized in English writing; this practice survives in German to this day.
* The concept of standardized spelling is also a relatively recent phenomenon, generally traced back to when dictionaries were first compiled. Mainly Samuel Johnson's first dictionary in 1755. Medieval scribes spelled words however they wanted, and didn't care about consistency, often spelling a word multiple ways even within a single page of text.
* Until approximately 1800, the letter 's' had two forms, the more common being the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s long s]], which looks almost identical to an 'f'.
* Most depictions of ''Literature/{{Frankenstein}}'' have little to do with Creator/MaryShelley's original work. In the original book there is no Igor, castle, or angry peasants storming the place. In fact Victor Frankenstein realizes right after making his monster what a horrible mistake he made (in fact, that's rather the problem). The monster himself, in contrast to most depictions, is quite articulate and of remarkable agility. The story most people think of originates from the 1931 film of the same name. Igor was popularized by 1970s ''Film/YoungFrankenstein'' which parodied a tradition that coalesced from various mad scientists' henchmen over the years, some being named variously Igor or Ygor, since ''Son of Frankenstein'' in 1939. (The 1931 film didn't have an Igor though it contained a similar character named Fritz.)
** And various movies notwithstanding, Victor Frankenstein was neither a doctor nor a baron, and he was not [[Film/YoungFrankenstein from Transylvania]]; he was a Swiss student from Geneva at Ingolstadt University.
** Likewise, the monster was ''never'' referred to as Frankenstein in the novel, even though people have started doing so in recent years. Frankenstein was his ''creator''. Also, in the book, the monster isn't a mindless killing machine. He displays many human traits, and can even be viewed as sympathetic in some parts, although he certainly does some pretty terrible things as the plot progresses.[[note]] The real monster is, arguably, "good" Victor's horrible parenting skills, as they are what drive the creature to desperation and murder.[[/note]]
*** This may be a case of the viewers being better than expected at catching the themes rather than worse. The implication of the book is that the creature is effectively Victor Frankenstein's son. Traditionally in Europe, a son carries the surname of the father. Ergo the monster's name is, in fact, Frankenstein... no matter how much time Victor spends throughout the book denying it.
** Also, when people think of the creation of the Monster, they envision it being brought to life by a bolt of lightning, which is what happened in the 1931 film. In the novel, the reader never learns how Frankenstein was able to bring his creature to life because he explicitly [[AndSomeOtherStuff left the details out so that nobody could ever repeat his mistake]].
*** Though it may have been how Victor made the creature in the novel, as he marvels at the power of a lightning bolt striking an oak tree shortly before leaving for Ingolstadt, the place of creation.
** The Monster was not made from corpses. Victor Frankenstein studied dead bodies and decay to learn the secrets of life, but the creature itself was made from scratch.
** The book also alludes to several historcial alchemist which kind of implies that Victor used a method similar to that of a [[OurHomunculiAreDifferent Homunculi]].
* Orcs, "halflings" and tall, beautiful elves are such a staple in fantasy nowadays that when one reads ''Literature/TheLordOfTheRings'' it's tempting to react with ItsBeenDone. However, Tolkien invented much of those concepts, with the exception of his elvish depiction. This originated in ancient Icelandic and Germanic beliefs about TheFairFolk -- he talks about the history, in terms of beliefs about elves or fairies being little creatures, in his essay "[[http://brainstorm-services.com/wcu-2004/fairystories-tolkien.pdf On Fairy-Stories]]". Lord Dunsany's ''The King of Elfland's Daughter'' was the first work of literature to depart from the concept of elves as "little people". Despite that, most of the modern depictions of elves take their inspiration from Tolkien's elves, and in more than just appearance.
** Ents, too. Many people are unaware that ents were not actually a part of traditional mythology.
* Ivan Barkov is best known for his obscene poem "Luka Mudischev", with all the other works being secondary, and non obscene works being all but forgotten. Except that even the most basic analysis of "Luka" shows it was written about a century after Barkov, and other works attributed date from as late as the 20th century.
* {{Novel}}s as we know them are only 200-300 years old (''Literature/DonQuixote'', the first modern novel, was published in 1605-1615). Older long-form fiction was mostly BasedOnAGreatBigLie or an epic poem.
** Though you could argue that Chretien de Troyes wrote quite an epic... novel in the XIIth century, which was adaptated a few years later by Robert de Boron under the name Le roman du Graal - literally "The novel of the Graal". And in the [=XIVth=], Helie de Boron even avoided verses.
* In the musical ''Theatre/TheMusicMan'', Harold Hill refers to "Captain Billy's Whiz Bang", which was a joke magazine that didn't exist until UsefulNotes/WorldWarI. However, the show is set in 1912. Ironic, considering that the story makes a plot point that Gary, Indiana, is newer than Harold Hill thinks (or would rather have River City believe).
* Creator/DrSeuss' book ''Oh, the Places You'll Go!'', that ubiquitous graduation gift. It must be from the 1950s or earlier, right? Nope. It was first published in 1990, and was the last thing he published before his death in 1991.
* "Literature/{{Goldilocks}}" must be a ridiculously ancient tale, right? Nope. It was invented by British author Robert Southey and first published in 1837, and in his version, the protagonist is an unnamed, ugly, elderly woman. An 1849 edition changed her to a little girl named "Silver-Hair", and a 1904 version finally named her "Goldilocks".
* The whole concept of writing itself counts: the oldest known written words (well, pictographs at least) are about 5200 years old. While this ''is'' a pretty long time from the perspective of a human lifespan, even the shortest estimates of the age of the human species (''homo sapiens'') are around 100,000 years old, meaning humans have only had writing for (at most) 5 percent or so of their existence. To put it another way, if you condense human history into a single year, ''homo sapiens'' emerged on New Year's Day, but they didn't develop writing until the 12th of December.
* [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalecarlian_runes Norse runes]] were still used in the Swedish province of Dalarna until the 20th century.
* The earliest published version of "Literature/TheThreeLittlePigs" [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Little_Pigs dates]] to 1840, and even then, was much different from current iterations, which are based on Joseph Jacobs' version from 1890, which introduced the familiar structure and phrasing of the tale ("Not by the hair on my chinny-chin-chin", etc.) Even then, it didn't become one of the pre-eminent children's stories until the smash success of the [[WesternAnimation/TheThreeLittlePigs Disney version]] in 1933.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Art]]
* Rodin's Thinker sculpture was made in 1902.
* ''Washington Crossing the Delaware'' is one of the most popular depictions of the American Revolution, though it was actually completed by Emanuel Leutze in 1851, 75 years after the event.
* The "tradition" of the diamond engagement ring is sometimes thought to have been the result of a 1940s de Beers ad campaign, but this is a slight exaggeration. The "tradition" of having a second, separate ring for the engagement (i.e., not just one for the wedding) actually began decades earlier, in the immediate post-World War I era; an expensive ring was intended as insurance that the man actually meant to marry the woman, and wasn't proposing just to get sex (SeriousBusiness at a time when single women had literally no access to birth control and unmarried mothers were thought of as worse than street whores). De Beers merely piggybacked onto a trend that was almost universal by the time their first ads ran. They did however create the idea that an engagement ring should cost two months' salary-- apparently a perversion of the long-standing rule of thumb that a house should cost two ''years''' salary.
** As well, most of the ideas surrounding the ring were at the very least played up and at the worst invented whole-cloth by De Beers' advertisers over the succeeding decades. See the idea that the size of the rock matters, the idea that selling or trading in an old engagement ring is bad luck, etc. Most JustForFun/{{egregious}} is De Beers completely making up the "rule of thumb" that a ring should cost the man two months' salary (in an effort to make it impossible to have one standard-sized ring that was "good enough").
*** Not to mention the idea that you should be buried with your diamond jewelry, in order to destroy the second hand diamond market and prop up the artificial scarcity.
*** Before that time a common engagement gift -- not necessarily a ring -- was acrostic jewellery: where the initials of the set gems spelled out words or names. REGARDS rings (Ruby, Emerald, Garnet, Amethyst, Ruby, Diamond, Sapphire) are acrostic jewellery, for example, although many rarer and unusual stones are required to fill other letters. Actual ''wedding'' bands, however, have reportedly been around since the Medieval period.
*** De Beers' real achievement was "a diamond is forever". This advertising campaign effectively destroyed (OK, vastly reduced) the supply of second-hand diamonds, which helped them keep their prices high.
*** They have also managed to smash Adam Smith's "invisible hand" by artificially inflating the rarity of diamonds. In fact, diamonds are not as rare as most people believe, but the companies making up the de Beers consortium weren't willing to let market forces and competition reduce their profit margins. Good luck trying to explain it to people, though.
** Wedding bands have existed for centuries, but of course weren't as common back when the masses could barely afford shoes and food, never mind gold rings. Rather than being symbols of eternal blah-blah-blah, they also symbolised exchange of wealth in return for marriage. One English account gives "with this ring I thee wed" followed by the words 'This gold and silver I give thee', at which point the groom was supposed to hand a leather purse filled with gold and silver coins to the bride. The unromantic Germans record the phrase "I give you this ring as a sign of the marriage which has been promised between us, provided your father gives with you a marriage portion of 1,000 Reichsthalers." In the 1920s, only 15% of marriages were two-ring affairs, men's wedding bands being slow to catch on.
*** No wedding rings were used at all in Japan until the 1990s, when De Beers started advertising there heavily.
** In Russia, since the 15th century, iron wedding bands were often used for one of the sides. And in Judaism (Orthodox, at least), a rabbi will not agree to oversee a wedding with a gemmed band present -- since it symbolizes the exchange of wealth, there should be no possibility of the value being unclear. As a variation of this trope, the use of rings to symbolize the exchange actually came from Rome -- hence the groom's specifying that the wedding is according to the law of Moses.
** Historically simple rings (i.e. wedding bands) in the early middle ages and were given as a symbol to seal an engagement among Germanic peoples. The bride accepted the ring to signify that she had been properly 'bought' and engaged.
* Most people consider the tradition of birth stones to be rooted in history, maybe derived from Western astrology or Jewish mysticism (alluding to the 12-jeweled breastplate of Israelite priests). The tradition actually dates from a Tiffany & Co. pamphlet from 1870 to encourage the sale of more "obscure" gems.
* The name ''Art Deco'' for the 1920s and 1930s design movement was popularised in the 1960s. In the 1930s people usually called it the ''Moderne'' style.
* The name ''Gothic'' for the 12th-to-15th century style of architecture and art was coined ca. 1550 by Giorgio Vasari as a pejorative name -- he considered the "maniera de' Goti" barbaric. At the time Gothic cathedrals etc. were built, the style was called "opus francigenum" (French work/style) or "pointy-arched style".
* The Russian nesting doll, the ''matryoshka'', was invented in 1890. (The painting styles were based on much older paintings. The nesting doll idea is based on an older Japanese toy).
* Most chalk hill figures in England are post-Medieval and many were carved in the 20th century. One of the most famous, the Cerne Abbas giant, often associated with ancient pagan religion and magic, seems to have been carved sometime in the 17th century. It's been suggested it was originally a caricature of Oliver Cromwell.
* Chauvet Cave, one of the pinnacles of Paleolithic art in Europe, was discovered on December 18, 1994. That's 54 years after Lascaux and 115 years after Altamira.
* Howard Chandler Christy's famous painting [[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9d/Scene_at_the_Signing_of_the_Constitution_of_the_United_States.jpg "Scene at the Signing of the Constitution of the United States"]] was created in 1940, 153 years after the event it depicts. Similarly, Jean Leon Gerome Ferris’s painting of [[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Declaration_of_Independence#/media/File%3AWriting_the_Declaration_of_Independence_1776_cph.3g09904.jpg “Writing the Declaration of Independence”]] is from 1900, 124 years after the event it depicts.
* Art/TheMonaLisa is genuinely pretty old, but it wasn't claimed to be one of da Vinci's all-time masterworks until the 1860s, and it wasn't until 1911, when the painting was stolen, that those claims reached the general public (mainly by way of newspapers reprinting claims by Walter Pater that lionized it).
* The oft-parodied [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_of_Progress "March of Progress"]] image, showing the evolution of man from ape to human (see ParodyOfEvolution), was drawn in 1965 for the ''Early Man'' volume of Time/Life's ''Life Nature Library'' series by artist Rudolph Zallinger.
* [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alebrije Alebrije]] is not an ancient Mexican folk art tradition; it was invented whole-cloth by artist Pedro Linares in 1936.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Film and Television]]
* The first movie sequel to have the same name as the first [[NumberedSequels with a number added]] was ''[[Film/TheFrenchConnection French Connection II]]'' (1975). Adding "Part II" or "Part 3" is much older (e.g. Shakespeare's ''The Second Part of Theatre/HenryIV'' or ''Little Women, Part Second''; [=FC2=] was the first to add just a number. And the use of Arabic numerals for the purpose is even newer: Roman numerals were more common until the (late) 1980s.
** The "Kraut Western" ''Literature/{{Winnetou}} I'' (1963) was followed by ''Winnetou II'' (1964) and ''Winnetou III'' (1965), but all three movies were based on Karl May [[Literature/{{Winnetou}} novels of the same names]].
* ''Franchise/DisneyAnimatedCanon'':
** Princesses are among the most recognizable characters in the Creator/{{Disney}} studios' wheelhouse, but it hasn't always been that way. Of the [[Franchise/DisneyAnimatedCanon nineteen animated films]] that Creator/WaltDisney made during his lifetime, only three of them were "princess" films: ''WesternAnimation/SnowWhiteAndTheSevenDwarfs'' (1937), ''WesternAnimation/{{Cinderella}}'' (1950), and ''WesternAnimation/SleepingBeauty'' (1959). Walt felt that he had nothing else to contribute to the genre after ''Snow White'', and wanted to spend his time working with other genres. He only made ''Cinderella'' because ''Snow White'' was popular and his studio really needed the money, and he made ''Sleeping Beauty'' because he felt that he could bring something different to the table (mainly, an adaptation that focused more on its villain and side characters than its main characters). After the latter’s [[VindicatedByHistory then-]][[BoxOfficeBomb tanking]], the Disney studios would not release another "princess" film until ''WesternAnimation/{{The Little Mermaid|1989}}'' (1989) [[note]] an unconventional example in that the character filling the princess role wore hardly any clothes and in fact was not even human (and barely humanoid, at that) [[/note]], and the Franchise/DisneyPrincess franchise would not actually exist until 2000.
** Similarly, the concept of a [[Franchise/DisneyAnimatedCanon set lineup of Disney animated films]] didn't exist until 1985.
** {{Villain Song}}s are one of Disney's most beloved traditions today, but they didn't really become a staple of the Franchise/DisneyAnimatedCanon until ''WesternAnimation/TheGreatMouseDetective'' in 1986. Before Ratigan's "The World's Greatest Criminal Mind" set the standard, it simply wasn't common practice for the main antagonists of Disney films to wax lyrical about their {{evil plan}}s and their most unsympathetic qualities - simply because most early Disney films only had a handful of musical numbers apiece, and the writers generally didn't feel the need to give ''every'' major character their own song. Sure, there are a few early movies with songs sung by antagonistic characters, but they were either extremely fleeting (like "The Elegant Captain Hook" in ''WesternAnimation/PeterPan'', in which Captain Hook has barely 30 seconds of singing) or sung by minor characters (like "We Are Siamese If You Please" in ''WesternAnimation/LadyAndTheTramp'', which is sung by a pair of Siamese cats [[OneSceneWonder who come out of nowhere and are never seen again]]).
** Disney musicals as we know them started in the 1980s with ''Oliver & Company'' and especially ''The Little Mermaid''. Their earlier films sparingly featured songs. Many of the songs were short, and most were sung in-universe (rather than being artistic interpretations of dialogue like in future films).
* The popularized act of kissing the ring of a Mafia Don does not seem to have any basis in reality prior to the 1972 movie ''Film/TheGodfather''. It is said that it was barely practiced in RealLife even after that, except among posers. Kissing a bishop's ring or the Pope's Fisherman's Ring is a Catholic tradition called ''baciamano'' is (was) common among Catholics.
* Credits didn't usually come at the end of movies until the 1970s, with ''Film/TheGodfather'' generally seen as the first major movie to do so. Virtually all movies in the 1960s and earlier put most or all of their credits in the opening title sequence, which usually listed only the principal cast and the most prominent crew members (including the director, producer, and writer), though some also threw in a full cast list at the end. The modern practice of listing absolutely everyone involved with a movie's production only became standard in the 80s.
** For animated projects, it wasn't common to properly credit the voice actors with their respective characters until around the early 90s, and it wasn't standard until maybe 2000. Before, most projects [[NowWhichOneWasThatVoice only listed the actors in alphabetical order]]. In pre-1960s shorts, voice actors were rarely credited at all, unless they were Creator/MelBlanc.
** When the very first ''Franchise/StarWars'' film, ''Film/ANewHope'' was released in 1977, it was so controversial that the film didn't have opening credits. The Director's Guild of America let it slide for Creator/GeorgeLucas only because [[ItWillNeverCatchOn they thought it would tank in the box office]]. [[AndYouThoughtItWouldFail It obviously didn't]], but despite this, when Lucas did it again for ''Film/TheEmpireStrikesBack'' in 1980, he got a huge fine from the DGA, which he paid before he quit the guild altogether. Today, many filmmakers forgo traditional opening credits or even opening titles that now, it seems as though the DGA overreacted.
* The now-ubiquitous practice of wide releases was pretty much invented by ''Film/{{Jaws}}''. Before 1975, movies were treated more like road shows, released to a few theaters first, and gradually rolled out to the rest of the world for as long as they continued to be successful. This custom led to movies having much, much longer theatrical runs than they do today; a blockbuster like ''Film/TheSoundOfMusic'' or ''Film/TheExorcist'' could easily spend [[SleeperHit over a year on the big screen]], even before re-releases. ''Jaws'' bucked convention by instead releasing to thousands of theatres immediately; this strategy was so successful that the rest of the industry quickly followed suit.
* Prior to the mid-1960s, movie theatres didn't have showtimes, nor did people typically watch movies from start to finish in the way we're accustomed to. The standard experience was to simply "go to the movies", watch through all the reels shown that day--typically consisting of an A-movie, a B-movie, a few trailers, a cartoon, a newsreel, and a serial chapter or short subject (i.e. a documentary)--and then leave once it looped back around to where you came in (this is where the quip, "This is where I came in" originated). It was normal practice to walk in during the middle of a movie, watch to the end, and then back to the middle. Creator/AlfredHitchcock's ''Film/{{Psycho}}'', released in 1960, is generally credited as the movie that changed this practice, with Hitchcock requesting that no viewers be admitted to the movie after it had begun, so that the HalfwayPlotSwitch could be a surprise.
* MerchandiseDriven shows were practically unheard of before the 1980s, due to FTC regulations against advertising to children, which were mostly repealed in the early 80s as part of Reagan-era deregulation initiatives. Before then, cartoons almost never had corresponding toylines and vice versa. ''WesternAnimation/HeManAndTheMastersOfTheUniverse'', which debuted in 1983, is generally considered the first half-hour toy commercial.
* Elmo of ''Series/SesameStreet'' was a mere background character with no personality or voice, simply being an "extra red puppet" to fill out scenes when needed, until Kevin Clash first performed him in 1984.
* Many younger ''Series/DoctorWho'' fans are surprised to discover that the ''Doctor Who'' ChristmasEpisode is only a 21st-century revival phenomenon. (There was one before in 1965, but at that time British TV didn't usually do "event" television at Christmas and broadcast whatever shows were normally scheduled with a Christmassy twist.)
** There ''were'' Christmas broadcasts of the original ''Doctor Who'', but they were neither Christmas-themed nor specially made; they were simply all six/four episodes of an existing story broadcast all together.
* When making fun of ''Franchise/StarTrek'''s famously devoted fanbase, it's now pretty much [[ObligatoryJoke obligatory]] to make a crack about nerdy Trekkies being [[NerdsSpeakKlingon fluent in Klingon]]. It might surprise some people to learn that [[EarlyInstallmentWeirdness the Klingons didn't even have a language in the original series]] (although it was alluded to in the 1967 episode "The Trouble With Tribbles"), as the first words of Klingon weren't spoken on-screen until ''Film/StarTrekTheMotionPicture'' in 1979 (thirteen years after the [[Series/StarTrekTheOriginalSeries original series]] first aired). A full language wasn't created until ''Film/StarTrekIIITheSearchForSpock''. It wouldn't have been possible for fans to learn Klingon until 1985 (''nineteen'' years after the original series), when Dr. Marc Okrand published ''The Klingon Dictionary''.
** The quadrant designations of the galaxy (Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta) wasn't standardized till ''Series/StarTrekTheNextGeneration'', over 20 years after ''Star Trek'' started. Prior to that, "quadrant" was used alternately with "sector" or "system", which makes Kirk's line in ''Film/StarTrekIITheWrathOfKhan'' that [[TheOnlyOne the]] ''[[TheOnlyOne Enterprise]]'' [[TheOnlyOne was the only ship in the quadrant available to stop Khan]] sound [[SciFiWritersHaveNoSenseOfScale extremely strange today]].
** Section 31, the Federation SecretPolice, were introduced in 1998 on ''Series/StarTrekDeepSpaceNine''. Prior to this, covert ops were usually depicted as being handled directly by Starfleet with clear oversight by the Admiralty (see "The Enterprise Incident" on TOS or "Chain of Command" on TNG), but their subsequent appearances in the ''Series/StarTrekEnterprise''-era (predating the Federation itself) and then in ''Film/StarTrekIntoDarkness'' and ''Series/StarTrekDiscovery'' (showing that they were active in Kirk's time despite TOS and its movies making absolutely no mention of them[[note]]Their absence from ''Film/StarTrekVITheUndiscoveredCountry'', a movie focusing on a treasonous conspiracy between rogue Federation and Klingon agents, is particularly glaring[[/note]]), makes it ''seem'' like they've been around forever.
** The stereotypical Trekkie as typified by Comic Book Guy on ''WesternAnimation/TheSimpsons'' took a while to forment. During the show's original run, most ''Star Trek'' fans (going by convention statistics, anyway) were women, and more entrenched sci-fi fandoms looked down on it as dumbed-down faff.
* ''Franchise/StarWars'' is famous today for its extremely dedicated fan community, but it didn't really ''have'' a fandom until at least a decade after [[Film/ANewHope the original movie]] hit theaters. For most of the franchise's early history, it was just a highly successful series of Summer blockbusters that nearly '''everyone''' in America had seen, and even its most diehard fans couldn't claim to know more about the mythos than the average moviegoer--because there was no information about the mythos outside of the films themselves. This didn't really change until the late 1980s at the earliest, when the RPG sourcebooks from West End Games started to flesh out the universe with more details about the alien species and minor characters. And the fandom didn't ''really'' take off until the early 1990s, when Bantam published the first of their ''Star Wars'' novels (Creator/TimothyZahn's ''[[Literature/TheThrawnTrilogy Thrawn Trilogy]]'') that actually continued the saga, creating a clear division between "casual fans" and "serious fans".
** As Justin B. Rye [[http://jbr.me.uk/canon.html points out]], very little of what that the franchise is famous for actually originated in ''Film/ANewHope'', pretty much limited to the main cast (save [[IconicSequelCharacter Yoda, Lando and even Palpatine]]), the Death Star, the concept of Jedi and the Force, and the name (but not the spelling) of the planet Alderaan. ''Nothing'' else was set in stone in 1977.
* [[http://www.impawards.com/1939/posters/gone_with_the_wind_ver1.jpg This dramatic, instantly recognizable poster]] for ''Film/GoneWithTheWind'' is among the most iconic in Hollywood history, used as cover art for the film's soundtrack, several of its home video releases, and other merchandise, but it wasn't actually created until the film's otherwise notorious 1967 re-release (which was crudely altered for widescreen and stereo presentation) nearly 30 years after its original premiere. In fact, the poster's artist, Tom Jung, wasn't even born when the film first came out.
* Game shows revolving around [[CookingDuel cooking contests]] seem like they've been around forever, but the first one, ''Series/IronChef'', came out in 1993 and didn't make it to the states until several years later.
** The UK's ''Masterchef'' started in 1990, slightly pre-dating ''Iron Chef'' but still later than you'd think.
* When most people think of [[Franchise/FridayThe13th Jason Voorhees]], they think of a man in a hockey mask going killing people with a machete. While it has slowly become common knowledge that he doesn't actually do any of the killing in [[Film/FridayThe13th1980 the original film]] (thanks largely to ''Film/{{Scream|1996}}''), many people are still surprised to learn that he doesn't actually gain the hockey mask until [[Film/FridayThe13thPartIII Part 3]]. Even more surprising is the fact that the actor most associated with the role, Creator/KaneHodder, didn't actually play him until 1988, by which point there had already been 6 installments in the series.
* The now-ubiquitous practice of music specifically composed for television newscasts was started by Al Ham's ''Move Closer to Your World''. Until then, newscasts had to rely on film soundtracks, library music or previously recorded popular or classical music (mostly instrumental) for their presentations. Case in point: arguably the most famous newscast theme of all time was [[https://youtu.be/q0Jw02yOEr0?t=128 originally]] part of the soundtrack for ''Film/CoolHandLuke''.
* While the term "FilmNoir" was first used by a French film critic in 1946, the genre and its associated tropes remained largely {{unbuilt|Trope}} in Hollywood movies for a decade after that, and the term itself was virtually unknown in English until the 1970s. In particular, the now-stereotypical jazz soundtrack was unheard of in 1940s movies, and seems to have been only codified with the 1958 release of ''Film/ElevatorToTheGallows'' (a French film, by the way).
* ''[[Film/TheWolfMan1941 The Wolf Man]]'' is generally seen as one of the "classic" Franchise/UniversalHorror films, but it was actually one of the franchise's later efforts; it wasn't produced until 1941--a full decade after Creator/BorisKarloff's turn in ''Film/{{Frankenstein|1931}}'' and Creator/BelaLugosi's turn in ''Film/{{Dracula|1931}}''. It's also one of Creator/UniversalPictures' few "classic" monster movies that wasn't based on a novel; while legends about [[OurWerewolvesAreDifferent werewolves]] date back to Ancient Rome, Lawrence Talbot ('''''[[TropeCodifier the]]''''' werewolf) didn't exist until 1941. Notably, though, the film's central concept is also OlderThanTheyThink. Contrary to popular belief, it wasn't Universal's first movie about werewolves; that was ''The Werewolf'' released in 1913, a now lost film.
** Similarly, the ''Film/CreatureFromTheBlackLagoon'' is often thought of as one of the classic Universal Horror monsters, and yet its first movie wasn't released until 1954, well after the franchise's heyday.
* Although Marvel Comics adaptations go far back, Marvel co-creator Creator/StanLee hadn't started making [[TheCameo/StanLee cameo appearances]] in any adaptations till 1989's ''The Trial Of The Incredible Hulk'' (a TV movie sequel to the 1970s series ''Series/{{The Incredible Hulk|1977}}''), and he didn't have his first speaking appearance in a live-action adaptation till 2003's ''Film/{{Hulk}}''.
* Many shows that are remembered as having defined the decade in which they were produced came along very late in that decade, and often ran much longer into the subsequent decade:
** ''Series/LeaveItToBeaver'', remembered alongside ''Series/ILoveLucy'' and ''Series/TheHoneymooners'' as iconic and emblematic of [[TheFifties '50s]] television, didn't begin its run until 1957 - it premiered on the very day Sputnik launched. In fact, ''I Love Lucy'' had already ended its run earlier that year (and ''The Honeymooners'' the year before). The Korean War, ''Brown v. Board of Education'', the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the opening of Disneyland, and the breakthroughs of Music/ElvisPresley and Music/LittleRichard were all things of the past before ''Leave it to Beaver'' came on the air. The show continued to run until 1963, lasting longer in TheSixties than it had in the '50s.
** ''Series/SavedByTheBell'' is considered almost quintessentially [[TheEighties '80s]], and it did ''technically'' premiere in 1989, but it continued to run until 1993, making it far more representative of the early years of that decade. Still, the show's garish set design, makeup, and costuming, the TotallyRadical dialogue, and the deliberately simplistic, cliched characterization and plots helped the show feel more "old-fashioned" especially in contrast to two ''other'' titans of pop culture which ''also'' premiered in 1989 but are definitively considered works of TheNineties: ''Series/{{Seinfeld}}'' and ''WesternAnimation/TheSimpsons''.
* One reason the 1983 ''Series/{{MASH}}'' finale is the highest-rated program in American history is that until then it wasn't common for TV shows, even long-running popular ones, to end with a GrandFinale. One exception was the 1967 finale of ''Series/TheFugitive'', which is also one of the highest-rated series finales ever.
* The word [[{{Anime}} "anime"]] is first attested in English in 1985, and it didn't become the dominant term for Japanese animation until the late 1990s, before which it competed with other terms such as "Japanimation".
* Several moments from ''WesternAnimation/TheSimpsons'' are newer than most people think.
** The series only had 1 episode from 1989, the rest are 1990 or newer.
** The scene with Bart sleeping with Ms. Hoover in bed, seen on several "Didn't Understand As Kids" video was from SEASON 25.
** Several Smithers Gay jokes on said "Didn't Understand As Kids" lists have similar fates, with some clearly being from HD episodes.
* Television infomercials became a thing in 1984, when the FTC repealed its long-standing regulations prohibitng program-length advertisements; they remain mostly an American phenomenon.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Music]]
* "The Star-Spangled Banner" did not officially become the US national anthem until 1931. It might not have become the national anthem at all but for a letter-writing campaign launched by Robert Ripley, of ''Ripley's Believe it or Not!'' fame. (However, it was being sung at baseball games as early as 1918, and it was used as a StandardSnippet even before then.) The unofficial national anthem to that point was what is [[DemotedToExtra now the vice president's song]] "Hail Columbia". The piece of music to which "The Star-Spangled Banner" is set, though, is OlderThanTheyThink, being the tune to a drinking song, already comparatively obscure in Key's time, "To Anachreon in Heaven".
* Although there are a ''very'' few Christmas carols still sung today that come from the (later) Middle Ages, the overwhelming majority of most people's repertoires is modern. Even the genuinely old carols are invariably old ''melodies'' with modern lyrics, which make them sound much older than they really are. The list of "traditional Christmas carols that are actually younger than ''Literature/AChristmasCarol''" includes "O Holy Night" (1847, with English lyrics written in 1855). "It Came Upon the Midnight Clear" (1849), "Good King Wenceslas" (1853, though written to a 13th century melody), "Masters in this Hall" (1860), "O Little Town of Bethlehem" (1868), "In the Bleak Midwinter" (lyrics written in 1872) and "Away in a Manger" (1882).
** 20th century Christmas tunes that might be assumed to be older than they are include "Ding Dong Merrily on High" (1924), "White Christmas" (1940), "The Little Drummer Boy" (1941, popularized in 1957), "The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire)" (1944, with a melody by Mel Tormé), "Ring, Christmas Bells" (1947, based on the Ukrainian "Carol of the Bells", which itself only dates from 1916), "Caroling, Caroling" (1954), and "Do You Hear What I Hear?"(1962). "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" was created in 1939 as part of a marketing campaign for Montgomery Ward, and was first recorded in song ten years later by Music/GeneAutry.
** [[http://xkcd.com/988/ This XKCD]] provides the timeline of many "traditional" Christmas songs.
** "The Twelve Days of Christmas" has a medieval feel, with the lords a-leaping and the pipers piping, but the earliest-known publication of the lyrics was in 1780 (so, four years after the Declaration of Independence), the familiar melody was only added to the song in 1909, and it really didn't gain widespread popularity until TheForties.
** And then there's "Over the River and Through the Woods" and "Jingle Bells", both of which were originally about ''Thanksgiving'', not Christmas. Respectively written as an 1844 poem and 1857 song, they only became associated with Christmas after the mid-19th century Little Ice Age ended and sleigh-ride-worthy snow in November became a rarity even in New England.
* Also, secular Western music itself. Most music passed off as "medieval" is much younger. Some of the oldest tunes we know about can't be dated earlier than the 12th or 13th centuries; even Literature/ChildBallads usually can't be definitively traced back before the 16th or 17th centuries.
** The verse/chorus structure of modern musical lyrics is also a relative latecomer; it developed in Moorish Spain.
** The major/minor key structure is no older than the late 17th century- and orchestras in their modern form- certainly of more than about 6 musicians playing at once- were barely viable before that (because of the difficulty of pitching all the instruments to one another in the earlier model scale).
* There are several reggae songs recorded between the mid-1980s and the 1990s that were [[MisattributedSong misattributed to]] Music/BobMarley throughout Website/YouTube, when he actually died in 1981.
* Irish "traditional" song about the Potato Famine "The Fields of Athenry" seems ancient, but was only written in the 1970s by Pete St. John.
** Related: The traditional highland lament "Ashokan Farewell", featured heavily on the soundtrack of Ken Burns' documentary on the American Civil War, was written by Jay Ungar all the way back in the 1980s, in the highlands of New York.
** The Skye Boat Song was written in 1884, 138 years after the events it commemorates and long after Jacobitism had ceased to have any status as an active movement.
** Similarly, ''The Scotsman'' only dates back to 1976, when North Carolina-based singer-songwriter [[http://mikecross.com/default.asp Mike Cross]] first wrote and recorded it, although the joke it's based off of is older.
** "The Witch of the West-Mer-Lands" dates to 1968.
** "Galway Girl" was written by Music/SteveEarle (who's an ''American'' no less) in 2000.
* Nearly everyone who hears Herman's Hermits' "Mrs. Brown, You've Got a Lovely Daughter" assumes it to be a cover of an old British music hall tune. In fact, it was written in 1963, a mere two years before the Hermits recorded it. ("I'm Henry the VIII, I Am", on the other hand, ''was'' actually a cover of an old British music hall tune.)
* The lyrics to "Havah Nagilah" were written in 1918. The melody is older, but probably only by about a century or so (and it originated in Ukraine, not the Middle East).
** The [[UsefulNotes/JewishHolidays Hanukkah]] standard "I Have a Little Dreidel" ("dreidel, dreidel, dreidel") was written in 1927 in New York. It only became famous in TheFifties, after its composer Samuel Goldfarb became the music director of a Seattle synagogue and taught it to the congregation's children.
* Similarly, "Katyusha", widely regarded as the quintessential Russian folk song, was actually written in 1938. Then, a rocket artillery truck got named after the song in [=WW2=].
* The song "Edelweiss" from ''Theatre/TheSoundOfMusic'' was written, in English, for that musical. It was later translated into German, and seems so natural in that language, many people have actually claimed to have heard it before the musical was written, and complimented Rodgers and Hammerstein on the faithfulness of their "adaptation". In fact, according to Wiki/TheOtherWiki, some folks even assume it to be the national anthem of Austria! In style it's close enough to Austria's actual anthem ("Land der Berge, Land am Strome") that it's a forgivable misconception.
** Furthermore, the "Edelweiss" popular at the time the movie was set in was a Nazi marching song.
* The ''VideoGame/BeatmaniaIIDX'' songs "A," "AA," and "Kid A", despite sounding classical, were composed specifically for ''IIDX''. "Piano Concerto No. 1 'Anti-Ares'," also from ''IIDX'', takes this trope further, with a full eight-minute version that can be found on the ''IIDX RED'' soundtrack, and [[http://vjarmy.com/wiki/index.php/Piano_Concerto_No_1_ANTI_ARES#Music_Production_Info a biography]] about its fictitious composer, Virkato Wakhmaninov, who allegedly lived from 1893 to 1974. The last paragraph of his biography mentions that Virkato performed the song on a "great keyboard and disc" (did this setup really exist in the early 20th century?) and that he spoke about an "arrangement for a [[DoesThisRemindYouOfAnything keyboard of seven keys]]." Virkato is, in reality, an alias of Jun Wakita, one of Konami's in-house composers, and he composed this song in 2004.
** The pseudonym should have been a hint of the song's true age; it's a pun on the name of Russian composer Sergei ''Rach''maninoff.
*** And "Piano Concerto No. 1 'Anti-Ares'" is itself a pastiche of Rachmaninov's piano concertos.
* The famous Adagio in G minor by Tommaso Albinoni (1674-1745) is practically an original composition by 20th-century "arranger" Remo Giazotto, who published the piece in 1958.
* The "Ave Maria" attributed to Baroque Italian composer Guilio Caccini (1551-1618) was actually written by Russian lutenist Vladimir Vavilov in 1972.
** This is ''not'' the same "Ave Maria" as the one you're probably thinking of right now, which was either the one created by Gounod in the 19th century using a 17th century melody by Bach or the one by Schubert which was used in ''WesternAnimation/{{Fantasia}}''.
*** And neither of THOSE were written as "Ave Maria" either. Gounod's was originally an instrumental ("Medidtation"), and Schubert's was a song called "Ellens Gesang III" (which started with the words "Ave Maria" but was a different text entirely). Incidentally, Vavilov's original was attributed to "Anonymous" and it was a student of his who perpetuated the hoax that it was by Caccini. Just one of the many musical hoaxes throughout the centuries.
* The Music/CarminaBurana are a collection of ''poems'' from the XII-XIII centuries. The music most commonly associated with them was written by German composer Carl Orff... in 1937.
* ''Barrett's Privateers'' sounds like an old sea shanty, but it was actually written by Stan Rogers in the 1970s.
* The song "New York, New York" popularized by Music/FrankSinatra (the one that starts "Start spreadin' the news...") was written for the 1977 Creator/MartinScorsese musical ''Film/NewYorkNewYork''; since the film was based in the Tin Pan Alley era, the song [[{{Retraux}} sounded like a tune from that era]]. Sinatra recorded his version in 1979 and it became the final hit single in his long musical career.
** In the same vein, the musical ''{{Theatre/Chicago}}'' was composed in the mid-1970s, but set in [[RoaringTwenties 1920s]] UsefulNotes/{{Chicago}}, with the music clearly evoking the era.
* "Who Do You Think You are Kidding, Mister Hitler" was not composed during the War, but was written especially for the 1960s/70s TV Series ''Series/DadsArmy'' and sung by wartime entertainer Bud Flanagan. Most of the incidental music in the series are clips from genuine wartime songs, however.
* The Hokey Pokey, a.k.a. the Hokey Cokey, sounds like something that dates back at least a century -- but it only originated in the 1940s.
* "Since I Don't Have You" sounds like it could be a classic Depression-era Tin Pan Alley ballad, and many people assume that it is, but it was written by the members of The Skyliners, who recorded the original hit version in 1958.
* [[{{Bluegrass}} Bluegrass music]] is a prime example of this trope. Although it has roots in traditional Southern string band music, it only developed as a separate genre in the 1940s. To put it another way, bluegrass is only about a decade older than RockAndRoll. Which, of course, means that many seemingly older-than-the-hills bluegrass standards are shockingly young. "Rocky Top", which sounds like it was passed down from generation to generation up in the Smoky Mountains, was written in 1967 (the same year ''Music/AreYouExperienced'' was recorded) in Nashville. "Fox on the Run" was originally a Music/ManfredMann song from 1969.
* "Greensleeves" cannot have been written by Henry VIII as urban myth commonly supposes, as it was written in a style which didn't arrive in England until after Henry VIII's death. Though the words and music do appear to have originated separately, it is unlikely Henry VIII had a hand in either. Though in this case, it's only ''slightly'' newer than they think: Henry VIII died in 1547, and the song had already been written by 1580 at the latest. By the time of Creator/WilliamShakespeare, it was already considered an old standard.
* Greek song "Misirlou", popularly known from the Music/DickDale guitar version, sounds ancient but its first public performance of note was in 1927. It is probable that it was an earlier composition. It is equally probable that it was not ''much'' earlier.
* Pachelbel's "[[Music/PachelbelsCanon Canon and Gigue in D major]]" was written prior to 1700. But it was first published in the 1920s, first recorded in 1940, and did not [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdxkVQy7QLM become popular]] until the late 1970s.
* "Tomorrow Belongs to Me" from ''Theatre/{{Cabaret}}'' has been mistaken for an actual (presumably translated) Nazi anthem, even by [[MisaimedFandom white power music groups]], but it was written specifically for the musical.
* "Highland Cathedral", which you'd be forgiven for thinking was a traditional Scottish song, was written in the 80s by two German musicians for a Highland games held in Germany. Ditto "Flower of Scotland", passed down amongst patriotic Scots over the centuries since it was written in 1965, and "Scotland the Brave", which is probably no older than the early twentieth century and whose most usual lyrics were written in 1950.
* Despite its current popularity in folk music, widespread use of the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodhr%C3%A1n#History bodhrán]] as a musical instrument may be no older than the 1960s.
* Ever wonder why you don't see people sing "Happy Birthday" in TV or movies that often? It's because it was still under copyright until the 2010s.
* Many revered hymns that people assume must be hundreds of years old were products of the 20th century. "The Old Rugged Cross" and "In the Garden" were both written in 1912. "Just a Closer Walk With Thee" was first published in 1940. "How Great Thou Art" was written in 1953 (it's set to an old Swedish melody, though).
* The Swedish song "En Kungens Man", which tells the story of a medieval woman who almost gets raped by a knight, was written in 1974 by Björn Afzelius, although many think it's an old folk song.
** Similarly, the folk song "[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxDBeHY1Y7A Visa i midsommartid]]", which many assume to be ancient (what with its references to witchcraft and paganism), was written in 1941.
* Music/BrianMay and Roger Taylor (of Music/{{Queen}}) frequently remark about how young fans are unaware that "We Will Rock You" hasn't been around since the dawn of time, or as Taylor puts it, "They think it's always just been there, written in stone." It was written (both words and music, the famous Stomp-Stomp-Clap) in 1977 for Queen's album ''Music/NewsOfTheWorld'' and despite being a hit pretty much immediately, it was only released as a B-side to "We Are the Champions" in nearly every country. The only exception was a US radio promo 12" single which paired the two songs on one side in the familiar order of "Rock You" followed by "Champions," which is how they're often still played on rock radio to this day; you will almost never hear one song played without the other on American radio.
** To clarify, the sequence of "Rock You" and then "Champions" also appears in that order on the album, but both songs were already hits via the single coming out months before.
* HeavyMetal, at least in its most literal sense. While self-identification in the lyrics has always been a part of punk, rap, and the earliest rock and roll itself, the same was not true of heavy metal. The term "metal" was first coined by the music media in 1970, but it was quite a while before any of the groups to which the genre tag was applied began using it to describe themselves; many even resented the fact that their music was being categorized. Music/JudasPriest, with their 1980 song "Metal Gods", were the first metal group to prominently use the term, and of course Music/{{Metallica}} were the first to incorporate it into the name of the band itself. Although for some, HeavyMetal might be OlderThanTheyThink because some assume that the genre didn't exist before the 80s or late 70s.
* While bagpipes of different kinds have been around since the MiddleAges, the Great Highland Bagpipe (if you don't know the difference, it's what you picture when you think "bagpipe") didn't exist until around 1800.
* Many believe that Music/DropkickMurphys' "Tessie" is a direct cover of the turn-of-the-century fight song of the Boston Red Sox fan club The Royal Rooters. It is, in fact, a brand new song set to the melody of the original fight song and featuring lyrics about the Royal Rooters and their antics. Only ''sections'' of the chorus actually appeared in the original song.
* The steelpan, also known as the steel drum, associated with traditional Caribbean music, first appeared in 1937.
* Many people tend to think Music/FountainsOfWayne's [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZLfasMPOU4&ob=av2e "Stacy's Mom"]] sounds like a song from the '80s or '90s, especially with that guitar hook that seems reminiscent of similar songs from the '80s (and the fact that the name "Stacy" peaked for babies born in the '70s, so if a song features a tweenage girl named "Stacy", it has no business being from anything other than the '80s). It's from 2003 (however, 2003 was still culturally part of the late 90s, so it's not THAT much newer than they think).
** Likewise, you'd be excused from thinking the Silversun Pickups were a '90s alt-rock band thanks to their similar style, but they only formed in 2002, releasing their first album in 2006 and seeing "Lazy Eye" chart in 2007.
* Lots of people are shocked to learn that "Long Black Veil" isn't a traditional ballad, but was written in 1959 by Nashville songwriters Marijohn Wilkin and Danny Dill, and was originally a hit for CountryMusic stalwart Lefty Frizzell. Dill himself called it "an instant folk song."
* "O Canada" has been used as [[CanadaEh Canada]]'s national anthem since 1939, but was not officially adopted until 1980.
* New Zealand only adopted "God Defend New Zealand" as an official national anthem in November 1977, despite having been written in the 1870s and having been used since 1940 as a de facto national song. The Māori version, "Aotearoa", was written in 1878, but only came into common usage alongside the English version around 2000.
* Likewise, Australia didn't adopt "Advance Australia Fair" as its official national anthem until 1984. Both New Zealand and Australia previously used "God Save the Queen", which would have been interesting at the Olympic Games if Great Britain, Australia and New Zealand were on the podium together...
** Until ''"Advance Australia Fair"'', ''"Waltzing Matilda"'' was a popular de facto anthem in Australia. The same goes for ''"Pokarekareana"'' in New Zealand.
* "I'm a Little Teapot" is often assumed to be a traditional Mother Goose nursery rhyme from at least the mid-19th century if not older, but it was not written until 1939 or recorded until the early 1950s!
* The first mention of [[TorosYFlamenco Flamenco]] is from 1774. The Romani, who are commonly associated with it, didn't arrive to Spain until the late 15th century and were not considered citizens until (coincidentally) the 18th.
* Post-punk and synthpop were referred to as "New Wave" interchangeably in the 1980s (with "New music" also being commonly used). The differentiation of the two genres was not common until the 90s, after both genres had gone out of style. In the UK, New Wave originally applied to the power pop artists like Elvis Costello who came around the time of punk but did not have its energy or anger, whereas in the US, it applied to punk-influenced bands who had synths (Blondie, The B-52's and Devo being notable ones). Most people tend to associate it with synthpop these days because that is the predominant genre associated with the 80s.
** The distinction between thrash and death metal is fairly recent too. For instance the band Kreator would have been considered death metal if they came around today, but were thrash in the 80s.
* The "sirtaki" Greek dance popularised by ''Film/ZorbaTheGreek'' was choreographed specifically for that film, although it is influenced by a genuine Greek dance called the "hasapiko".
* The notion of sitting quietly in your seat during classical music dates from the mid-19th century. Wiki/TheOtherWiki says that sneezes and coughs should be held until a loud section of music is reached (!), but talking and eating during performance was once commonplace.
** Haydn's "Surprise" and "Joke" Symphonies were written, because of his annoyance at this, to startle or confuse his audiences.
** Don't forget that what we call "classical" music was, in its time, current ''popular'' music. Thus, opera audiences were often more boisterous than in the modern day, yelling at characters on stage, or singing along to favorite choruses. A particularly novel new piece of music that broke expected conventions might well be booed and hissed in the middle of the performance. And a magnetic solo virtuoso like a Paganini or a Liszt would have the ladies swooning in their seats like an early 60s Beatles concert.
*** Possibly (though what was going on in music halls and salons had more to do with the general pop scene of the 20th century- there wasn't really a ''direct'' equivalent out there before recorded music became possible and affordable)... however, the word 'classical' as it's now popularly used -- anything where you shelve the record by who wrote the music rather than who performed it, basically -- is not how it would have been used in 1850 or thereabouts. The 'Classical' era, strictly speaking, began around the end of the 17th century and finished in the early 19th. Puccini, Elgar, Schumann etc., technically didn't write 'classical' music, even when they wrote for orchestras.
** The 'tradition' of silence during a concert originated by ''mistake'' with -- like so much else -- a request by Music/RichardWagner (mid-19th century) for the audience not to applaud between some key dramatic points of one of his operas; and even he was alarmed when it was interpreted as an instruction to be silent throughout.
** Wagner also invented the practice of darkening the auditorium for his operas -- now almost universal practice in conventional Western theaters. Before this, the opera and theatre were yet another social occasion -- the room would be well-lit because the audience would be in their most spectacular clothes and were there to be seen. The opera was more of a cabaret affair, with only the diehard musos in the audience giving it their full attention. This is partly why early operas have characters repeat their important lyrics over and over again!
** In theatre, not only was it was usual for audience members to talk (and heckle) freely during performances, they could also move freely around the auditorium, into backstage areas, the wings and even onto the stage itself. It was only in the latter half of the 18th century that David Garrick, in his capacity as manager of Drury Lane Theatre, began making the first moves to curtail this.
*** Some horrifyingly deadly fires (generally in the lower-culture, very crowded music halls) caused changes in the law that also mostly put an end to the open, cabaret-style auditorium with tables and loose seats, at least in such large venues. 19th-century 'lime-lights' (yes, a real thing, made by heating insanely caustic quicklime to extreme temperature with what essentially amounts to an oxyacetylene cutter) had a regrettable tendency to start fires very quickly, and such auditoriums were impossible to evacuate fast enough.
* "Franchise/{{Godzilla}}'s Theme" is a ''very'' iconic and recognizable piece of music that transcends the films in which it originated in a way. One could easily assume it's been around as long as the series has (since 1954, that is), but the theme didn't appear in its current, familiar form until ''1991''. While the theme is in fact a medley of two tracks which date back to the first three films, you won't find the exact combination you've likely heard anywhere in the first ''17'' films.
* The song "O'Death" is often thought to be centuries old and maybe even from Medieval times, when in reality it is an American folk song from the 1920s.
* The opening ensemble that introduces the setting and all major characters and establishes the tone of the show figures prominently in classifications of the song types Broadway musicals usually have. However, this type of big opening number wasn't common until the 1960s; "Comedy Tonight" from ''Theatre/AFunnyThingHappenedOnTheWayToTheForum'', though deliberately styled as a GenreThrowback incorporating a lot of old shticks, is actually one of the earliest (and also one of the longest) of its kind.
* "Love Is a Rose" is not a hundred-year-old folk song. It was written by Music/NeilYoung in the early 1970s. Likewise, the melody to "Slip Away" sounds like an antique ballad, but was written by Young.
* "Bolero" must have been around since at least the 19th century, right? Wrong, it was composed by Maurice Ravel in 1928.
* "Sabre Dance", composed by Aram Khachaturian in 1941, is widely believed to be a piece from the turn of the 20th century, due to its similarities to the 1900 piece "Flight of the Bumblebee".
* Since the folk band Patrick Street covered Music/PenguinCafeOrchestra's "Music For A Found Harmonium" in 1990, the piece has become so accepted as an Irish reel that many versions credit it as "Traditional". It was first recorded in 1984, and composer Simon Jeffes died in 1997, so it will be in copyright for quite a while to come.
* "Yo Soy Boricua, Pa'que tu lo sepas" is a famous patriotic chant used by Puerto Ricans. Many don't know it comes from an actual song. A song by Taino that's from ''1995'' at that.
* The Czech, Moravian-Wallachian band Fleret, especially in their long collaboration with the folklore singer Jarmila Šuláková, have pulled off their folk-rock blend so successfully that many people aren't aware that the song "Ovečky zaběhnuté" isn't a genuine folk song. Jarmila Šuláková's experienced singing, and the fact it was released on an album that was half genuine folk songs, definitely helps to sell it. But the album was only released in 1995.
* "Baby, It's Cold Outside" owes most of its current status as one of the classic ChristmasSongs to its RevivalByCommercialization in the 2003 ''Film/{{Elf}}''. Before then, it was just a plain old Great American Songbook standard, associated more with composer Frank Loesser and its UsefulNotes/AcademyAwardForBestOriginalSong than with the season (though a few singers had included it on holiday-themed albums). In Europe, it became a popular Christmas song only slightly earlier, thanks to Music/TomJones and Cerys Matthews' 1999 recording (prior to which it was obscure enough that many people were unaware it was a cover version).
** The first known takedown of the song for its problematic lyrics occurred in a 2004 ''National Post'' [[https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/first-writers-call-baby-cold-203213420.html article]]. It can also be OlderThanTheyThink.
* When Music/SimonAndGarfunkel recorded "El Cóndor Pasa (If I Could)", they assumed that the melody was an ancient Peruvian folk song. It was in fact written in 1913, and the songwriter's son successfully sued Paul Simon.
* "Spooky Scary Skeletons" is usually associated with the viral video where it plays over footage from the 1929 Disney short ''The Skeleton Dance''. So one might be forgiven for thinking the song itself is of a similar vintage, or even that the cartoon and the song were always one and the same. The song, by Andrew Gold, is actually from 1996. The video combining the two was ripped from a 1998 ''Disney Sing Along Songs'' tape called "Happy Haunting Party at Disneyland".
* "V Oktabrye", the Soviet sailor song that appears at the beginning of ''Film/TheHuntForRedOctober'' is an old Red Navy song, right? Wrong. it was written for the film, by American Music/BasilPoledouris, in 1990, the year before the Soviet Union fell. Not that that stopped the Russian Navy from proudly adopting it.
* Similarly, the ''Luftwaffe March'' featured in ''Film/BattleOfBritain'' was not an authentic World War 2 march, but was written in 1970 specifically for the film. It simply sounds so much like the real thing people assume it is. Also, like the above, it was cheerfully adopted by both the East and West German airforces.
* The phrase "Dance like nobody's watching" originated in the CountryMusic song "Come from the Heart", written by Richard Leigh and Susanna Clark, first recorded by Music/DonWilliams in 1987 and more famously by Music/KathyMattea in 1989.
* The sea shanty [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drunken_Sailor "What Shall We Do With a Drunken Sailor?"]] is usually associated with the era of WoodenShipsAndIronMen, but the earliest record of it dates to 1839, by which point steamships already existed. Furthermore, it appears to have been highly obscure until the 20th century, as it does not appear in any of the major 19th-century sea shanty collections; earlier versions were also much shorter, with the more colorful lyrics ("Put him in bed with the captain's daughter", etc.) being modern inventions.
* "Always Look On The Bright Side" was written for ''Film/LifeOfBrian'' in 1979; because of its stiff-upper-lip message people have reported their grandparents remembering it from the Depression or WWII.
* The ukelele was first introduced to Hawaii in 1879 by a group of Portuguese immigrants, who also became Hawaii's first ukelele-makers.
* The English folk song [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bastard_King_of_England "The Bastard King of England"]] dates only to 1927.
* The ubiquitous [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4KhZeVosMM "Charge" fanfare]] in American sports, which can be heard at virtually any baseball game (usually played on an organ), was [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charge_(fanfare) written in 1946]] by University of Southern California undergraduate student Tommy Walker.
* While the term "[[AlternativeRock Alternative music]]" dates back to 1979, it wasn't a ubiquitous umbrella genre term until around 1991, when [[Music/JanesAddiction Perry Farrell]] used it to describe the varied, but largely guitar-oriented, bands on his Lollapalooza touring festival, and [[UsefulNotes/GrammyAward The Grammys]] began to award a Best Alternative Music Album trophy. During the '80s, when alternative bands like Music/{{REM}} were beginning to break through to the mainstream, a variety of terms were used to describe the style, including "post-modern music", "college rock", "modern rock" (which ''Billboard'' and radio prefered) and "techno rock" (this one specifically referring to post-new wave rock bands that used synthisizers, like Music/TheCure and Music/DepecheMode).
* [[Music/PyotrIlyichTchaikovsky Tchaikovsky's]] [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9Dct0l2uVM 1812 Overture]] was written in 1880; in fact, Tchaikovsky wasn't even born until 1840.
** The Overture's use of [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4K1q9Ntcr5g "La Marseillaise"]] also brings up another example; while the song was introduced as France's national anthem in 1795, [[UsefulNotes/NapoleonBonaparte Napoleon]] banned it in 1805, and it didn't become the national anthem again until 1879, just one year before the 1812 Overture was written.
* The ballad [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scarborough_Fair_(ballad) "Scarborough Fair"]], made [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BakWVXHSug famous]] by Music/SimonAndGarfunkel, is often assumed to be a centuries-old, or even medieval piece. In reality, its melody was first transcribed in 1947, just 18 years before S&G recorded their version. Furthermore, the duo set the song in counterpoint with "Canticle", which Simon himself had written only 2 years before in 1963.
* People tend to think of disco music as being sold on 12" singles, and a small number of singles were released on that format from 1976 onwards, but mostly as a promotional tool for DJs. It was only in 1979 - the last year that disco was huge - that it became a commonplace retail format. Before that, the vast majority of disco singles were released only on 7", with extended versions kept for the album.
* [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mVW8tgGY_w "Für Elise"]], one of Music/LudwigVanBeethoven's most famous pieces, wasn't published until 40 years after his death, in 1867.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Settings]]
* The Irish pub owes its existence to early 19th-century licensing laws. Although inns existed in cities and large towns, most social drinking took place as "hostings" in a person's home, with music, dance, song and storytelling. This is borne out by the fact that the Irish language lacks proper terms for pub beyond ''teach oil'' ("house of drink") or ''tabhairne'' (tavern).
** English doesn't really have a proper term for a pub, either; "pub" is short for "public house". (And historically, the term was used to mean "inn" or possibly "guesthouse." The term Shakespeare used for "a place where you go and buy drinks" was "tavern," which isn't used nowadays except as a cutesy element in the names of places like "Tavern on the Green.")
** Taverns/pubs in general are thought not to really exist until the early modern age, when mass industrialisation and urbanisation took place; most places for drinking and/or lodging would in fact be private residences. In a society primarily based around rural subsistence farming, there wouldn't be enough people to justify a separate business.
** The word "pub" is a recent addition to ''American'' English. Its popularity probably dates no earlier than the late 1970s, when the last restraints on American home-brewing lingering on after Prohibition (yes, which technically makes Prohibition fit this trope as well) were repealed and beer began to break out of its working-class social ghetto. The less glamorous terms "bar" and "tavern" were more common earlier.
* Some TV shows set in the mid-20th century (like ''Series/QuantumLeap'') have had a problem recognizing that the World Trade Center towers were only built in the 1970s.
* Thanks to the {{Mayincatec}} trope, the popular notion is that the European discovery of the Americas led to the downfall of the ancient, millenary Aztec and Inca empires. But neither empire had been around very long. They both just happened to be the most recent victors in the long series of power struggles in their regions. The Aztecs arrived in central Mexico and founded Tenochtitlan in 1325. To put that into context, [[https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/oxford-university-is-older-than-the-aztecs-1529607/ Oxford University was already over]] three centuries old at that time. The Aztecs only won their independence from Azcapotzalco and joined the Triple Alliance in 1430 -- that is, less than a century before Cortés showed up. Around the same time, the relatively obscure Andes city-state of Cusco embarked on a expansionist campaign, and were still conquering territory around the time Columbus was planning his voyages. Meaning that the empire Pizarro encountered in the 1520s was only about 30 years old. In both cases, the empires fell in part because the fighting had been so recent that the groups defeated by the Aztec and Inca armies still wanted revenge and were persuaded to join the Spanish to fight them.
* The ''entire continent of Antarctica'' wasn't discovered until 1820. The idea of a vast Southern continent dates back to antiquity, but increasingly extreme expeditions South still turned up nothing but ice floes. James Cook's two 1770s expeditions into the Antarctic Circle seemed to confirm this, as they made it further South than ever, before turning back from the relentless ice a mere 75 miles from the still undiscovered continent, finding nothing. Popular scientific opinion ultimately accepted that it was all a myth for several more decades, and the longheld speculative name ''Terra Australis''(Southern land) was eventually given to Australia in the 1810s, as it was deemed unlikely that we'd find a significant landmass any further South than there.... and then three separate expeditions over the course of 1820 suddenly confirmed the [[MysteriousAntarctica mysterious Europe-sized continent]] had existed all along. Which just goes to show.
* The Campanile in St. Mark's Square in Venice dates from 1912. The city fathers didn't have much choice in the matter -- the original, dating from 1514, collapsed in 1902.
** Older paintings do show the original Campanile to be identical to the present reconstruction, though. So at least fictional depictions of the pre-20th century square are correct about the campanile.
* UsefulNotes/LasVegas was founded in 1905. It didn't have legal gambling before 1931, and didn't become a major resort until after UsefulNotes/WorldWarII.
* Chicago was only incorporated in 1833, by which time places like New York and Philadelphia were already two centuries old.
* How many bridges were there on the Thames tideway when Sir Christopher Wren (1632-1723) was alive and busy rebuilding London after the Great Fire of 1666 (and the river was tidal as far inland as Staines)? Just four: London Bridge (originally Roman), Kingston Bridge (originally Saxon, 21 miles upstream), Chertsey Bridge (12 miles further upstream, late medieval), and Staines Bridge (4 miles further upstream, Roman again). Apart from those, the only way across was by boat or by taking one's chances trying to ford at low tide. Then, in 1729, Putney Bridge was opened, followed by Westminster Bridge (1750), Walton Bridge (1750), Hampton Court Bridge (1753), Kew Bridge (1759), Blackfriars Bridge (1769), Battersea Bridge (1771), Richmond Bridge (1777), Vauxhall Bridge (1816), Waterloo Bridge (1817), Southwark Bridge (1819), Hammersmith Bridge (1827), Hungerford (railway) Bridge (1845), Richmond Railway Bridge (1846), Barnes Railway Bridge (1849), Staines Railway Bridge (1856), Chelsea Bridge (1857), Grosvenor (railway) Bridge, Battersea (1858), Lambeth Bridge (1862), Battersea Railway Bridge (1863), Kingston Railway Bridge (1863), Blackfriars Railway Bridge (1864), Cannon Street Railway Bridge (1866), Kew Railway Bridge (1869), Albert Bridge (1873), Wandsworth Bridge (1873), Fulham Railway Bridge (1889), Teddington Lock Footbridge (1889), Tower Bridge (1894), Richmond Lock Footbridge (1894), Chiswick Bridge (1933), Twickenham Bridge (1933), the M3 motorway bridge (1971), Queen Elizabeth II Bridge, Dartford (1991) and the Millennium (foot) Bridge (2002). Note that these are the years when a bridge first came into use on these sites -- the current London ''Bridge'' dates back to 1973.
** Neither of the current Hungerford Footbridges are the original, though the remains of the original (alongside the railway bridge, still in use) can be seen from the northernmost one.
** There were no bridges across the Liffey in UsefulNotes/{{Dublin}} until 1816 even though it was one of the largest cities in Europe at the time (bigger than Lisbon, Berlin and Rome and not far off Vienna).
* UsefulNotes/LosAngeles was incorporated as a city in 1850, but was little more than a village until a few decades later when the railroads spurred a population boom. The urban area grew steadily after that, particularly after the 1906 UsefulNotes/SanFrancisco earthquake, but it wasn't until the mid-20th century that it became one of the largest in the United States.
** Most likely San Diego, which is currently California's #2 and as the oldest European settlement in California (1769) is OlderThanTheyThink.
* Neither Germany nor Italy were unified entities until the 1870s. Before then, they consisted of various smaller states that happened to share closely related languages[[note]] the idea that all Italians or all Germans speak (or ought to speak) a single language with minor differences in dialect is itself a product of nationalist propaganda[[/note]] but were often different culturally, and would often war against each other. "Germany" and "Italy" were used in the same way as "Arabia" is sometimes used to refer to the Arab region today. You'd say something like "The recent events in Bavaria will have a huge impact on the rest of the Germanies. Prussia and Austria will likely get involved" etc. When the first world war started in 1914, Germany was only 43 years old, having been founded in 1871.
** This was, however, slightly stronger for Italy (despite the modern united Italy pre-dating the modern united Germany by enough years to make it the 1860s), what with Germany having spent several centuries ostensibly united into a Holy Roman Empire ''of the German Nation'', and, even before that, the Kingdom of Germany as one of the constituent kingdoms of the Holy Roman Empire; Italy was another constituent kingdom, but is easier to make a counterpoint to the counterpoint to the two nations being NewerThanTheyThink, what with only ''North'' Italy being, in name, part of said kingdom.
*** Between 1815 and 1866 there was the German Confederation (''Deutscher Bund''), which had central deliberating bodies (the ''Bundestag'' and ''Bundesrat'') and a common military organisation (including some fortresses that were garrisoned and administrated jointly) that would have come into force had it been attacked from the outside.
* Same for Greece. Before 1822, there were either Greek settlements scattered all over modern Greece (and, later, the entire Mediterranean), united by a common language, but never having more than a temporary alliance against common threats, or a single unit designated by foreign conquerors for the sake of more convenient ruling and taxing.
* The construction of Neuschwanstein Castle began in 1869. Although it is fairly well-known that Neuschwanstein Castle was built for (and left unfinished by) King Ludwig II of Bavaria, what is less well-known is that a large number of other castles, e.g. on the Rhine, were heavily reconstructed or even built anew in the 19th century.
* Cologne Cathedral, the biggest Gothic cathedral in Europe, was only finished in 1880. Before that it had been left unfinished for about 300 years until building was restarted in 1842.
** Many other famous churches were restored in the 19th century, often receiving noticeable alterations. A number of churches had much lower towers until the 19th century, most notably Ulm Minster, which now has the highest church tower. Many of the gargoyles seen most often on postcards of Notre Dame de Paris were made completely new in the 19th century according to designs by Viollet-Le Duc.
** St Vitus Cathedral in Prague Castle was founded in the 14th century, but it wasn't until the beginning of the 20th century that it was finished in its current form.
*** The ruins of St. Nicolai church in Hamburg look like those of a gothic church made of stone, but that church was actually only after its predecessor -- a brick building with a baroque tower -- was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1842.
* Both popular culture and PopularHistory often lead present-day Americans to believe that the idea of families living in the suburbs took off rapidly after World War II, with all white Americans suburbanized by about 1960. In fact, suburbanization proceeded at different speeds depending on the location. Downtown Detroit, for example, remained largely white well into the 1960s. In fact, the majority of whites didn't even make it to the suburbs until the late 1980s.
* People tend to assume that the existence of the Vatican City State as the world's smallest country (with its largest church as guidebooks like to point out) goes back centuries. It makes sense, since Rome's ancient and so is the Vatican. Actually though, the Lateran Treaty establishing the Vatican's present borders was signed by Mussolini in 1929. The Pope ''was'' the temporal ruler of a (much larger) territory from the 8th century to its capture by the Kingdom of Italy in 1870, generally referred to as the "Papal State" or (on older maps) the "States of the Church"; the core territory stretched across the middle of Italy, covering roughly the regions of Lazio, Umbria and Marche. During the 59-year interim, five successive Popes holed themselves up in the Vatican and refused to recognize the Kingdom of Italy. Mussolini came to a deal with Pope Pius XI in hopes of securing support for his fascist regime by the still-powerful and influential Catholic Church, a legacy which remains controversial.[[note]]In 1870, the Italian conquerors had offered to allow then-Pope Pius IX to remain sovereign over the Leonine City - a territory roughly double the size of the modern-day Vatican - but he refused.[[/note]]
* The idea of the dungeon as a prison was actually developed in the seventeenth or eighteenth century. Before, the dungeon was a cellar, or, even earlier, the lord's tower (Latin, ''dominium'').
* Although the UrExample of the shopping mall is widely disputed, it is generally agreed upon that its current form began in the 1950s and 1960s. However, food courts didn't exist until 1974, and they were still very sporadic until TheNineties.
* The entire concept of going out to dinner is a 19th century invention (sometimes attributed to Del Monico's, New York, though this may only apply in the US). Before this period (by which time urban living was taking off and most people had disposable income they could never have dreamed of a century earlier), there were obviously places that sold food to be eaten outside of the home, but such places were regarded more as a necessity (for people in transit, or single people with no facility to cook) than a luxury (you certainly wouldn't be taking a date to one, not that dates were something the well-off did in this period anyway: going out alone with a man would be unthinkable for a respectable girl!). Any really good cooking was done by cooks employed in private homes. Social spaces like the tavern would be centered around booze (or, in some finer establishments, coffee). Some people attribute the idea to the results of UsefulNotes/TheFrenchRevolution, which left a lot of cooks without employers, and an urban population that provided a big market.
* If you think two centuries of US presidents have sat in the Oval Office, think again. The Oval Office is part of the West Wing, which was built in a 1902 renovation. Prior to that, the President's office was usually located in either the Yellow Oval Room or the Lincoln Bedroom (in fact, the Lincoln Bedroom gets its name from having been UsefulNotes/{{Abraham Lincoln}}'s office). Furthermore, the Oval Office was first built in 1909, but destroyed in a fire a couple decades later. The current Oval Office was built in the 1930s, with a different design and location than the 1909 version.
** Although the Resolute Desk was given to President Rutherford B. Hayes by UsefulNotes/QueenVictoria in 1880, it wasn't used by a president in the Oval Office until UsefulNotes/JohnFKennedy in 1961. It has only regularly been used as the presidential desk since UsefulNotes/BillClinton, as Presidents Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Bush (41) opted to use other desks.
* Among government agencies, the CIA only goes back as far as the late 1940s (the OSS only started up in 1942). UsefulNotes/ThePentagon opened in 1942, and was originally intended as a temporary structure. However, since the Potomac River is navigable, they decided to fortify it against naval artillery. This decision almost certainly saved some lives 59 years later.
* The current home of the US Supreme Court was also built in the 1930s, and in a {{Retraux}} style so that it would fit with government buildings built in the 1790s.
* While UsefulNotes/{{India}} is seen as an ancient civilization, a great part of its landscape, country and history is more recent than you would believe:
** Despite being widely seen as one of the Seven Wonders of the World, the Taj Mahal actually wasn't completed until 1653. For perspective, the Jamestown Colony had already been standing for over 20 years when construction on the Taj Mahal started, and the palace was barely 200 years old when India became a British colony. That makes it a contemporary of the Palais de Versailles of UsefulNotes/LouisXIV.
** UsefulNotes/{{Buddhism}} and Jainism are products of [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axial_Age the Axial Age]] and as Creator/GoreVidal noted in his novel Literature/{{Creation}} were rough contemporaries of Creator/{{Confucius}} and Creator/{{Socrates}}. The first major Indian Empire, the Mauryas, followed the invasion of Alexander. Delhi, India's oldest active city, is a "mere" thousand years old (far younger than Rome, Istanbul, Damascus, Alexandria, Athens, London and Paris). The three other major cities (UsefulNotes/{{Mumbai}}, Kolkata, Chennai) are colonial settlements raised to cities, and are essentially the same age as New World cities.
** For most of its history, UsefulNotes/{{Hinduism}} was not called that by its theologians and adherents. They would simply call it dharma (i.e. beliefs or religious duty). Indeed the conception of Hinduism as a separate religion only emerged upon contact with Muslim and British conquerors. The word Hinduism in its contemporary usage comes from circa 1800. Similarly a major number of Indian festivals practised across India come from the 19th Century as part of nationalism, derived in part from previous such events but now dated on the Gregorian Calendar and more specifically organized to unite a broad part of the community.
** India's two oldest epics, Literature/TheMahabharata and Literature/TheRamayana, were first written down in the 4th Century CE during the Gupta Empire. The oral tradition and its influence on sculpture and temples dates it even further back in time, but its shelf-life as a written epic is far younger than that of Creator/{{Homer}}'s epics (which existed in written form in the 5th and 4th Century BCE).
* UsefulNotes/{{Russia}} is the largest and most populous of all European nations but it is also the youngest.
** Unlike other nations in West, South, Central and even Eastern Europe, Russia had little contact with Graeco-Roman civilization and its entrance to European history came from Vikings from the West, who as mercenaries/vassals for the UsefulNotes/ByzantineEmpire and its vassal states like Bulgaria made Russia part of the Eastern Roman Empire's sphere of influence (and led to Russia's belated conversion to Christianity, specifically the Greek Orthodox faith).
** The Cyrillic Alphabet used for the Russian language was invented by the Orthodox Bishop Saint Cyril of the Bulgarian Empire, making the Russian alphabet younger than the Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Old English, Norse leave alone the Chinese, Sanskrit, Persian and Mayan scripts and the Greek and Latin Alphabet from which the Romance languages derived.
*** As a minor example, what we ''call'' the Cyrillic script wasn't invented by Cyril but by a student of his at the earliest. What Cyril invented was the script currently known as Glagolitic - at least, that seems to be the general consensus since the 1850s.
** Russian Literature is a good deal younger than other literary traditions of European nations. Indeed, modern Russian letters (its great poets, novelists, dramatists, short-story writers) are in fact contemporaries of American literature (who often feel that they are too young to have a literary tradition as great as Europe's. Creator/AleksandrPushkin who is considered the founder of Russian literature was a contemporary of Creator/JaneAusten, Creator/LordByron (a Pushkin favorite and influence), and Creator/JamesFenimoreCooper:
--->''"The unusual thing about Russia is that it reached cultural maturity in the nineteenth century. Russia didn’t have the Middle Ages of Dante and Chaucer, the Renaissance of the Italians, or the Elizabethan age of the British. They weren’t even sure what language to write in. Pushkin more or less created the Russian literary language, and Pushkin was born in 1799. They were doing for the first time what other cultures had been doing for hundreds of years."''
--->-- '''Richard Pevear'''
** Russian nationalists may like to claim Novgorod, Vladimir and Kiev as predecessors (to the horror of Ukrainian nationalists, in the latter case), but the modern Russian state is really an evolution of the Grand Duchy of Muscovy which became independent of Vladimir-Suzdal in the 13th century. Russia's expansion and the start of its influence on European affairs are largely the child of Ivan IV, who reigned between 1530 and 1584. Even then, Russia would not extend to the Pacific Ocean until 1639, would not displace Poland as the most powerful state in eastern Europe until the 18th century, and would not control some parts of Siberia until the 19th.
** Kaliningrad, a little Russian exclave located between Lithuania and Poland, only became a part of Russia after World War II. Before then, it was ruled by neither Russia, Lithuania, nor Poland, but by ''Germany''. In fact, it had been a mostly German-speaking region since TheHighMiddleAges. If you look at a map of pre-WWII Germany, you will see it had this peculiar exclave adjoining the Baltic Sea and barely cut off from the rest of the country by Poland. That exclave is Kaliningrad (or rather, East UsefulNotes/{{Prussia}}). Before World War I, it was not an exclave and was connected to the rest of UsefulNotes/ImperialGermany, since Poland did not exist at the time. After WWII, the Soviets plucked the territory from the Nazis and expelled all ethnic Germans from the area, repopulating them mainly with Russians but also Ukrainians and Belarusians.
* Egypt is [[UsefulNotes/AncientEgyptianHistory one of humanity's oldest civilizations]], so old that it was [[TimeAbyss ancient to the ancients]]. However, the modern capital of Egypt, the city of UsefulNotes/{{Cairo}}, was only established as such in 970 CE. It included a number of other settlements directly adjoining each other (including the cities/royal compounds of al-Fustat and al-Askar, which date from 641 and 750 CE, respectively), but the oldest of them, the former Roman fortress/village of Babylon, only dated from the 1st century BCE ''at the earliest''. It's true that a number of Ancient Egyptian cities were built around what is now Cairo (most famously Memphis, the first capital of a united Egypt, dating from the 31st or 32nd century BCE), but all the pre-Roman settlements were long abandoned by the time that Babylon was built -- let alone Cairo proper.
* The ''{{Film/Frankenstein|1931}}'' movie with Creator/BorisKarloff (and other movies made in 1931 with and without Karloff) is older than the country of UsefulNotes/SaudiArabia.
* Although UsefulNotes/{{Walmart}} was founded in 1962, it was not truly a national chain until 1995, when they opened their first location in Vermont. Even as late as 1990, they barely covered half the country and were still predominantly a Southern chain. Likewise, they didn't start building "supercenters" (i.e., larger stores with complete grocery sections) until 1988, and did not really push to make all their stores supercenters until the TurnOfTheMillennium. Before then, most of their stores were only half to one-quarter the size they are now (although in some rural parts of the South, this is still the case due to GrandfatherClause) due to the lack of groceries, pharmacies, automotive, and other departments codified by the "supercenter" format. Also, any stores that had a restaurant in them likely had a cafeteria called Radio Grill or a scaled down [=McDonald's=] that only sold a handful of lunch items, not the Subway franchises with full menus that are nearly omnipresent in Walmarts today (the affiliation started in 2004). While the "supercenter" concept is now so commonplace with Walmart that the name is no longer used by the chain, the ''overall'' concept of a "supercenter" is OlderThanTheyThink, having been started back in ''1931'' by UsefulNotes/{{Portland}} grocer Fred Meyer (which later expanded throughout the Western U.S. and is now a division of Kroger). Another company, UsefulNotes/{{Michigan}} chain Meijer, added general merchandise to its original grocery business in 1962 (the same year that both Walmart and UsefulNotes/{{Kmart}} were founded); Meijer locations still outnumber Walmarts by a fair margin in that state. Also, Walmart didn't expand outside the United States until 1995, when the first Canadian stores opened[[note]]the first few Canadian stores were taken over from Woolco, a division of also now defunct five-and-dime chain F. W. Woolworth; the U.S. Woolco stores closed in 1983, but the name was still used in Canada until 1995. Coincidentally, Walmart took over a few Woolco stores in the South and Lower Midwest as well[[/note]].
* Speaking of Walmart, sister chain Sam's Club and its main rival, Costco, were not founded until 1983.
* Considering how long some hotel brands such as Holiday Inn, Hilton, Marriott, Howard Johnson's, etc. have been around, one would think that most other hotel chains are of similar vintage, but this is not the case. For instance: Baymont Inn (1973 as Budgetel; renamed in 1999), Drury Inn (1973), Super 8 (1974, but still largely limited to the Upper Midwest until TheNineties), Hampton Inn (1984), [=AmericInn=] (1984), and Microtel (1989). Newer still are America's Best Value (1999) and Magnuson (2003), both of which grew almost entirely by rebranding other properties.
** Also, Holiday Inn did not introduce Holiday Inn Express until 1991 (although they previously tried the same concept in the early 70s as "Holiday Inn Jr."). Quality Inn similarly did not introduce its more upscale brands Comfort Inn and Clarion[[note]]originally Comfort Royale[[/note]] until 1982, nor its lower-end Sleep Inn[[note]]had the WorkingTitle of [=McSleep=], but UsefulNotes/McDonalds threatened litigation[[/note]] brand until 1989. Finally, Marriott didn't introduce Fairfield Inn until 1987.
* Shops as we think of them, where you walk around and look at goods displayed on various shelves, are a very recent innovation. Before the 20th century, virtually all goods were kept behind the shop counter and the customer had to request them from the shopkeeper. In 1916, Memphis store owner Clarence Saunders, convinced that letting customers fetch their own groceries would be more efficient than having the clerks do it for them one at a time, came up with the radical idea of displaying all the goods in a large shop area, through which customers could browse freely.
* A building didn't exist on the present site of Buckingham Palace until 1703 and then it was, appropriately enough, the home of the Duke of Buckingham. In 1761, George III purchased it as a private residence for his wife, Queen Charlotte. Under George IV, the building was converted into a palace. It wasn't until the ascension of Queen Victoria in 1837 that Buckingham Palace became the official residence of the British monarch -- that's thirty-seven years ''after'' the White House became the official residence of the U.S. president. The façade of Buckingham Palace, including the famous balcony from which the royals wave at crowds, was first built in the 1840s and remodeled in 1913.
* Macy's was largely exclusive to the East Coast for most of its history (barring a few scattered stores in the South and California, plus failed entries into Toledo and Kansas City) until TheNineties, when it began acquiring a myriad of other department store chains in its merger with Federated Department Stores. It didn't become truly national until 2006, when it acquired the entire line of department stores from the May Company.
* Although UsefulNotes/{{Poland}} has existed as an independent country at various times throughout European history, the Poland of 1939 had only enjoyed about twenty years of independence before it was invaded by the Nazis.
** When Hitler and Stalin divided up Poland, they were restoring a pre-World War I ''status quo'' which had stood for over a century. Furthermore, the Finland invaded by Stalin in 1939 had never been an independent state prior to 1917, about twenty-two years earlier.[[note]]It had been part of Sweden until it was conquered by Russia in 1809.[[/note]] Incidentally, this helps to explain why Hitler and Stalin felt that they were entitled to territories from these nations -- they saw them as illegitimate boundaries.
** Polish territory itself greatly evolved throughout the centuries and the territories comprising the Kresy (the area of land the Soviets took over, and today comprising modern day Belarus and Ukraine) was historically land that had been ruled by a minority of Polish nobility (under the UsefulNotes/PolishLithuanianCommonwealth where only nobles comprised a nation). The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth is confusing for which parts of its makeup includes Poland, and which includes Lithuania, Ukraine, Latvia, and other neighbouring lands.
** Modern-day Poland's borders were drawn by the Soviet Union: its eastern territories were annexed away but, "to compensate" Poland and also to neuter UsefulNotes/{{Germany}} from another invasion of the East, the Soviets bestowed to the new nation territory from Germany's Eastern Provinces of Silesia and Pomerania. The native German population was expelled (as well as from Czechoslovakia and other nations which were given parts of Old German territory).
* While many clothing chains have been around for a very long time and evolved with the times, a few more are newer than one would expect:
** Old Navy was founded by parent company Gap in 1995. (It was known as "Gap Warehouse" early on.)
** [=H&M=] was founded in Sweden in 1947, but did not enter the United States until 2000.
*** The H&M Group's other brands are younger still - COS was established in 2007, H&M Home began in 2009, & Other Stories, Arket and Afound were established in 2013, 2017 and 2018 respectively. Also, Weekday (established 2002), Cheap Monday (2004-2019) and Monki (established 2006) were all only acquired by H&M in 2008.
** Forever 21 was founded in 1984, which already makes it young for a clothing chain, but it did not open stores outside California until the end of TheNineties.
** White House Black Market was founded in 1985.
** Torrid, a plus-size clothing chain owned by Hot Topic, was founded in 2001.
* And speaking of common mall stores, Bath & Body Works was founded in 1990.
* The Crimean Khanate, the last monarchy whose reigning dynasty claimed direct descent from Genghis Khan, was not dissolved until 1783, the same year Britain recognized the independence of the United States.
* Churches didn't have seats until the 16th century; pews were introduced during the Protestant Reformation as a way to easily see who was present or absent, and to increase social pressure on churchgoers to not leave in the middle of sermons. The iconic [[{{confessional}} Catholic confession booth]] was introduced during the following Counter-Reformation.
* Angel Falls, the tallest waterfall in the world, was completely unknown to all but the local natives in the Venezuelan jungle until US pilot Jimmie Angel flew over it in 1933.
* Despite being named after the ancient Belgae people, the word Belgium wasn't used before the [[FollowTheLeader French-inspired]] Brabant Revolution in 1789, and the modern kingdom was established in 1831. Prior to that, the area was known as the Southern, Austrian, or Spanish Netherlands.
* The resort city of Cancún, Mexico was established in 1974, at which time it had a population of 3 (as of 2019, it's now over 700,000).
* Not all major cities east of the Mississippi River were founded before UsefulNotes/TheAmericanCivilWar. Birmingham, Alabama wasn't established until 1871, and Miami, Florida didn't exist before the 1890s, with incorporation taking place in 1896. To put it another way, the medium of {{Film}} is older than Miami!
* The [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackhouse blackhouses]] of Ireland, Scotland, and the Hebrides are often assumed to be of the remotest antiquity, but in reality, all of the surviving examples still recognizable as houses were built no earlier than the 19th century, and many of them were still roofed as late as the 1970s.
* [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACDC_Lane ACDC Lane]] in Melbourne, Australia feels like it's been around since at least the late '80s, but it actually has only existed since 2004, when city officials chose to re-name the formerly-named Corporation Lane after [[Music/{{ACDC}} the famous band]].
* The Peruvian mountain city of [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machu_Picchu Macchu Picchu]] was founded c. 1450 and abandoned in 1572.
* Mt. Everest was formed 50 to 60 million years ago, meaning it didn't exist until after the dinosaurs went extinct.
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