"Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?!"
Many readers from my generation probably remember the hilarious riposte by Bluto, a character in the movie Animal House: "Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?!" One could not ask for a funnier example of a historical howler than that, and John Belushi's performance made it even more hilarious. 
But historical howlers are not always funny. Consider, for example, the factual errors strewn throughout Dan Brown's runaway bestseller, The Da Vinci Code. The howlers and other factual errors in the middle chapters of that book are almost too numerous to count (on p. 234, there are sixteen errors in the space of just three small paragraphs!), and they are so absurd that debunking the book's virtual history has been compared to shooting fish in a barrel. Unfortunately, probably only a fraction of that novel's readers are any the wiser, and that is why these howlers are ultimately not funny. They will be even less funny when the movie comes out.[1]
As I use the term, I do not refer to every factual error as a "howler." When one of Brown's characters (on p. 234) says that the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in the 1950's, or refers to the writings discovered at Nag Hammadi in 1945 as "scro
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