History is written by the winners, as the old saying goes. But that's not exactly true -- sometimes history is written by wishful thinking. When the real event isn't quite inspirational or romantic enough, we just make up a prettier version and call it history.

5 Live Aid

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It was the beginning of the modern era of celebrity activism. Bono would not be out there doing what he's doing without Live Aid.

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Which would be a shame.

How History Remembers It:

It was 1985, and the music world got together to raise money for starving children in Ethiopia via an intercontinental 16-hour music festival known as Live Aid. With record sales, merchandise and video sales, it was estimated that Live Aid had raised a massive 150 to 170 million pounds, or $250 million. You can feed a lot of damned children with that kind of cash. Probably more than once.

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No question, it was one of the feel-good events of the decade, and was called "the greatest concert of all time." The event played to 77,000 attendees in England, and 100,000 more attended in the U.S. It was beamed to TV sets worldwide to an audience of 1.5 billion people. Organizer Bob Geldof was given an honorary knighthood in 1986, and to this day, the event is heralded as "the standard by which other all-hands-on-deck rock and charity events are known."

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"Have fun, but not too much because of the children."

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The Reality:

Here is where we learn about the sad, unintended consequences of African humanitarian aid efforts. As is often the case in Africa, the famine they were trying to fix in Ethiopia wasn't just a result of not growing enough food -- it was because people were A) being displaced by war and B) under the thumb of a bullshit government.