NF Worst errors in a book – can you top these?

Non-Fiction
Stephen Ambrose once made a comment about Thomas Jefferson sitting in the Oval Office.

The actual quote was about Meriwether Lewis returning from the great expedition and meeting with Jefferson: "Unfortunately, we have no record of their first meeting. Neither Lewis nor Jefferson ever wrote about it. We do know they got down on their hands and knees with Clark's map in the Oval Office. Oh, what a moment that must have been for Jefferson, bittersweet." (http://www.pbs.org/lewisandclark/archive/ambrose.html)
Ambrose's reputation has pretty well been trashed over the years although I thoroughly enjoyed Undaunted Courage.
 
It did not. The casualty rate was quite similar I think.
Regarding errors, in Michael Jones' Stalingrad: How the Red Army Triumphed I read, for example, about the lack of ammunition for RPGs, which was hilarious. I think it was a confused translator's mistake, though. I want to believe so. ;]

I just finished reading the 1962 Pulitzer Prize-winning The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman which is a wonderful book about the first month of WW I; unfortunately this much more recent edition is chock-full of stupid typographical errors that make it appear that it was transcribed using spell-check with no one supervising, resulting in all sort of malapropisms that I doubt were present in the original edition!
 
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I have a habit of reading the introductory of a book and was looking forward to reading one about Robert E. Lee I had purchased at a thrift store. In the intro, the author stated that Lee took command of the Confederate Army in Virginia after Joseph Johnston had been killed at Seven Pines. :unsure: With a sigh of disappointment I closed the book and didn't bother to continue to chapter one.

That reminds me of my reaction on seeing THIS:

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Jeff Davis's book on the Confederacy that's when a lot of offices decided to rewrite history and people today are still believing that the Civil War was about right not slavery.
 
My favorite error is in a book that unfortunately I don't own on the history of knitting written by a Canadian professor of textile studies at at US university. At one point, she mentions that in November, 1963, people crowded around television sets in appliance and furniture store windows to watch President Kennedy be assassinated. This is when I realized that books are put out now without any editors involved.
She may have mis-remembered people watching us land on the moon a few years later. All they could watch at home or in store windows on Nov 22, 1963, would be the news coverage of the aftermath. That would depend on how soon the networks got there--mostly after dark.
 
"Showdown," the 2015 book about Thurgood Marshall's appointment to the Supreme Court, written by Wil Haygood (who honest to God should know better!!) contains this gem: "...in the minds of Negroes, Thurgood could do no wrong. He had saved black men from the electric chair, and he had done it time and again. Negroes had gone to see that movie back in 1962, 'To Kill a Mockingbird,' about a white lawyer, Atticus Finch, who defends a Negro accused of rape. He gets the Negro acquitted, but, alas, the town mob murders the Negro...."

Published by Knopf, no less.

ETA: So, ok, it's not actually history that Haygood got wrong, but literary history. I found it very disappointing, in any case.
 
I was disappointed to find a minor error in Stephen Sears' To the Gates of Richmond, and I am far from an expert on anything concerning the Civil War. The error is not very consequential, but it makes you wonder how thoroughly the author checked his work...
 
Farnwell, 1992, Stonewall said Jackson never hauled B&O Railroad locomotives down the highway to the South. Robertson, 1997, Stonewall Jackson: the Man, the Soldier, the Legend said the haul was a myth and never happened. Tucker, 2003, Brigadier General James D. Imboden says that everything that we know about the haul came from Imboden's articles in Battles & Leaders and that he was a liar.

All three men are totally wrong. I have over 300 period documents proving the haul took place, just like so many other authors said it did. These proofs are from the B&O RR annual reports, the ORs, several diaries, many US and CS newspaper articles and hundreds of documents in the National Archives.
I felt so strongly that this error should be rectified that I wrote and published a book on the subject of the Haul of the locomotives and the man who did the job, my avatar, Capt. Thomas R. Sharp. Please check out my Locomotives Up the Turnpike, available from me or Amazon.
 
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