Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History (21 page)

I was very lucky to have found in Jonathan Weier an outstanding research assistant who in the end became more of a collaborator. I am also grateful, as always, to those friends and family members who discussed my ideas with me and who read my drafts with such patience. They make a long list, but I should single out for special mention my brothers, Tom and David; my sister, Ann; my brother-in-law, Peter Snow; and my nephews, Dan and Alex; as well as my agent, Caroline Dawnay, and her Canadian counterpart, Michael Levine. My mother, Eluned, as usual was an excellent critic and proofreader. Bob Bothwell has taught me so much about history over the years that it is difficult to thank him adequately. Yet again, he was kind enough to read my manuscript and give me his advice. I have also benefited greatly from being at Oxford University and talking to my many new colleagues who are interested in the ways in which history is used. I owe particular thanks to Anne Deighton, Rosemary Foot, Yuen Foong Khong, Kalypso Nicholaïdis, and Avi Shlaim and to the students at St. Antony’s who have patiently listened to me talk and sent me much valuable information. Finally, but not last, are those at Random House who brought this book into being: Kate Medina, Frankie Jones, and Steve Messina. Thank you all.

F
URTHER
R
EADING

There is a large and growing literature on the uses and abuses of both history and memory. The following is a list of some of the works I found most useful.

Abu El-Haj, Nadia.
Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.

Appleby, R. Scott. “History in the Fundamentalist Imagination.”
Journal of American History
89, no. 2 (2002).

Arnold, John H.
History: A Very Short Introduction.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Bacevich, Andrew J. “The Real World War IV.”
Wilson Quarterly
29, no. 1 (Winter 2005).

Bell, Duncan, ed.
Memory, Trauma, and World Politics: Reflections on the Relationship Between Past and Present.
Basingstoke, U.K: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

Black, Jeremy.
The Curse of History.
London: Social Affairs Unit, 2008.

Brundage, W. Fitzhugh.
The Southern Past.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005.

Cannadine, David, ed.
What Is History Now?
Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.

Carr, E. H.
What Is History?
London: Macmillan, 1961.

Collingwood, R. G.
The Idea of History.
Rev. ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.

Delisle, Esther.
Myths, Memory, and Lies: Quebec’s Intelligentsia and the Fascist Temptation, 1939–1960.
Westmount, Q.C.: Robert Davies, 1998.

Evans, Richard.
In Defence of History.
London: Granta, 2000.

Fischer, David Hackett.
Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought.
New York: Harper and Row, 1970.

Gardner, Lloyd C, and Marilyn B. Young.
Iraq and the Lessons of Vietnam; or, How Not to Learn from the Past.
New York: New Press, 2007.

Geary, Patrick J.
The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe.
Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 2002.

Gillis, John R., ed.
Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity.
Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1994.

Halberstam, David. “The History Boys.”
Vanity Fair
, Aug. 2007.

History & Memory
(journal).

Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger.
The Invention of Tradition.
Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

Howard, Michael.
Captain Professor: The Memoirs of Sir Michael Howard.
London: Continuum, 2006.

______. “The Use and Abuse of Military History.”
RUSI Journal
107 (Feb. 1962).

Judah, Tim.
The Serbs: History, Myth, and the Destruction of Yugoslavia.
New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997.

Karlsson, Klas-Göran, and Ulf Zander, eds.
Echoes of the Holocaust: Historical Cultures in Contemporary Europe.
Lund, Sweden: Nordic Academic Press, 2003.

Khong, Yuen Foong.
Analogies at War: Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu, and the Vietnam Decisions of 1965.
Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1992.

Lebow, Richard Ned, Wulf Kansteiner, and Claudio Fogu, eds.
The Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe.
Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006.

Lefkowitz, Mary.
History Lesson: A Race Odyssey.
New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008.

Linenthal, Edward T., and Tom Engelhardt.
History Wars: The Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past.
New York: Henry Holt, 1996.

Lowenthal, David.
The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History.
Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

May, Ernest R.
“Lessons” of the Past: The Use and Misuse of History in American Foreign Policy.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1973.

Murray, Williamson, and Richard Hart Sinnreich.
The Past as Prologue: The Importance of History to the Military Profession.
Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Neustadt, Richard E., and Ernest R. May.
Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision Makers.
New York: Free Press, 1986.

Nobles, Melissa.
The Politics of Official Apologies.
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Novick, Peter.
The Holocaust in American Life.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000.

Pappé, Ilan.
The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.
London: Oneworld, 2006.

Record, Jeffrey. “The Use and Abuse of History: Munich, Vietnam, and Iraq.”
Survival
49, no. 1 (Spring 2007).

Winter, Jay.
Remembering War: The Great War Between Memory and History in the Twentieth Century.
New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006.

Winter, Jay, and Antoine Prost.
The Great War in History: Debates and Controversies, 1914 to the Present.
Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Yoshida, Takashi.
The Making of the “Rape of Nanking”: History and Memory in Japan, China, and the United States.
New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

A
BOUT THE
A
UTHOR

MARGARET MACMILLAN is the author of
Paris 1919, Nixon and Mao
, and
Women of the Raj. Paris 1919
won the Duff Cooper Prize, the Samuel Johnson Prize for nonfiction, the Hessell-Tiltman Prize for History, a Silver Medal for the Arthur Ross Book Award of the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Governor-General’s prize for nonfiction, and it was selected by the editors of
The New York Times
as one of the best books of the year. A past provost of Trinity College at the University of Toronto, MacMillan is the warden of St. Antony’s College at Oxford University.

T
HE
M
ODERN
L
IBRARY
E
DITORIAL
B
OARD

Maya Angelou
•
A. S. Byatt
•
Caleb Carr
•
Christopher Cerf
•
Harold Evans
•
Charles Frazier
•
Vartan Gregorian
•
Jessica Hagedorn
•
Richard Howard
•
Charles Johnson
•
Jon Krakauer
•
Edmund Morris
•
Azar Nafisi
•
Joyce Carol Oates
•
Elaine Pagels
•
John Richardson
•
Salman Rushdie
•
Oliver Sacks
•
Carolyn See
•
Gore Vidal

2009 Modern Library Edition

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Published in the United States by Modern Library, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

MODERN LIBRARY and the TORCHBEARER

Originally published in Canada by Viking Canada, a member of Penguin Group (Canada), Toronto, in 2008 as
The Uses and Abuses of History.

eISBN: 978-1-58836-768-6

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