Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History

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Women of the Raj:
The Mothers, Wives, and Daughters of the British Empire in India

Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World

Nixon and Mao: The Week That Changed the World

C
ONTENTS

Introduction

1.
T
HE
H
ISTORY
C
RAZE

2.
H
ISTORY FOR
C
OMFORT

3.
W
HO
O
WNS THE
P
AST
?

4.
H
ISTORY AND
I
DENTITY

5.
H
ISTORY AND
N
ATIONALISM

6.
P
RESENTING
H
ISTORY’S
B
ILL

7.
H
ISTORY
W
ARS

8.
H
ISTORY AS A
G
UIDE

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Further Reading

I
NTRODUCTION

History is something we all do, even if, like the man who discovered he was writing prose, we do not always realize it. We want to make sense of our own lives, and often we wonder about our place in our own societies and how we got to be here. So we tell ourselves stories, not always true ones, and we ask questions about ourselves. Such stories and questions inevitably lead us to the past. How did I grow up to be the person I am? Who were my parents? My grandparents? As individuals, we are all, at least in part, products of our own histories, which include our geographical place, our times, our social classes, and our family backgrounds. I am a Canadian who has grown up in Canada, and so I have enjoyed an extraordinary period, unusual in much of the world’s history, of peace, stability, and prosperity. That has surely shaped the ways in which I look at the world, perhaps with more optimism about things getting better than I might have if I had grown up in Afghanistan or Somalia. And I am also a product of my parents’ and grandparents’ history. I grew up with some knowledge, incomplete and fragmentary, to be sure, of World War II, which my father fought in, and of World War I, which drew in both my grandfathers.

We use history to understand ourselves, and we ought to use it to understand others. If we find out that an acquaintance has suffered a catastrophe, that knowledge helps us to avoid causing him pain. (If we find that he has enjoyed great good luck, that may affect how we treat him in another way!) We can never assume that we are all the same, and that is as true in business and politics as it is in personal relations. How can we Canadians understand the often passionate feelings of French nationalists in Quebec if we do not know something about the past that has shaped and continues to shape them, the memories of the conquest by the British in 1759 and the sense that French speakers had become second-class citizens? Or the mixture of resentment and pride that so many Scots feel toward England now that Scotland has struck oil? If we know nothing of what the loss of the Civil War and Reconstruction meant to Southern whites, how can we understand their resentment toward Yankees that has lingered into the present day? Without knowing the history of slavery and the discrimination and frequent violence that blacks suffered even after emancipation, we cannot begin to grasp the complexities of the relationship between the races in the United States. In international affairs, how can we understand the deep hostility between Palestinians and Israelis without knowing something of their tragic conflicts?