Knowing History, Maybe

 EVERYONE WHO CAN REMEMBER their first grade teacher is, in a sense, an historian.m we are all, in a sense, historians, autobiographers. Problems arise when we begin trying to document, understand and convey the history of other people, or large groups of people. That's when our personal biases and axes to grind kick in, and we distort history, and begin, consciously or otherwise, to reshape historical fact to suit ourselves and our personal agendas. We begin to think of ourselves as better historians than we really are. Good professional historians try to avoid all that, but they do not always succeed. It is amazing how people embroiled in a heated political argument, people who slept through their high school history classes, suddenly become knowledgeable historians when argument needs supporting evidence. Humans by nature think they know more, about everything, than they actually do. We all do, except for the very wise, who know enough to know that they know nothing. Historical is valuable at making arguments, and can be twisted into any shape desired, through interpretation of facts and events. Misconceptions about history abound. People often say that history repeats itself, a clever, smug belief, when in fact it does not, cannot. It only rhymes, as Mark Twain truthfully stated. It could only repeat if space and time could flow back and forth, repeating themselves. We are afforded but one eighteenth birthday, so we had better enjoy it. People like to say that history is written by the winners. Indeed it is, and it is also written by the losers. Anybody with a pen can and does write history. What actually happens is that the winning version is more widely dispersed and taught. Many histories of the American civil War have been written by southern sympathizers. The false idea that the war was fought over "states's rights" came from southern historians, trying to write revisionist history, trying to deny that the great lost cause was a cause to defend and perpetuate slavery. It just sounds better, more noble, more honorable, to assert that the confederacy was defending their basic rights as states, than to tell the truth, that they were defending their enslaved economic goldmine. Many German historians in the twentieth century wrote histories of both world wars. For the most part, they told the truth about Germany's responsibility for the wars, except for the NAZI sympathizers, a twisted bunch. Losers write history too, and they should. Everybody should.