It is well understood that the victors write the history.
It is overlooked, I think, that, in fact, it is the victors’ historians who write the history. For historians, ideas, culture, and writing are pretty damn important. It should, therefore, come as no surprise that ideas, culture, and writing figure so prominently in our histories, even if they don’t seem so relevant in our daily lives.
As our culture splinters, more and more histories are being written by more and more historians. Arguably, many histories have always been composed, but now very many histories can be distributed as well.
Who is writing your history? What does it say about him or her, as opposed to you?
“As our culture splinters, more and more histories are being written by more and more historians.”
You are absolutely right. I’ve tried to make this point to many of my friends (well educated people) and they act dumbfounded when I talk about it. Thanks for the blog.
Thanks for reading and your comment, Rob — always appreciated it.
I encountered a nice distinction the other day: @patricecloutier tweeted that’s it’s no longer a question of message control but instead it’s a question of message competition. It’s as true of history, as it is of, say, advertising or public policy.
People tend to forget that not all they read is correct. In the process of doing research for accuracy, I’ve found that one event can have as many as five different dates attributed to it.
People don’t care about getting the facts down right. They weren’t there so they think its OK to get most of it right. After all, the event happened 100 years ago. Who’s around still to gainsay them?
This entire attitude is wrong. History repeats itself all the time and if we record it wrong we will be unaware of the lessons we could have learned in order to avoid a occurrence. It’s not right. It’s not fair. And it costs everyone of us something whether we know about it or not. History is where we came from and we can’t afford to overlook it.
Hi Grace!
Thanks for your reading and your great response.
I wonder if it seems like history repeats itself only because we like to write our often inaccurate histories that way.