The appropriation of history
Throughout the world - from Brazil to China, Turkey to Poland, North Korea to the Vatican - governments are using history to support and advance their agendas.
Shaping the past to project a particular national image has gone on for millennia; but recently, the way that history is taught, what is studied, and the way people of all ages are told to think about the past has become more closely controlled than ever before.
Richard Cohen has written about the battle between history and national mythmaking in his critically acclaimed book ‘Making History’. Now he extends his analysis to the way history is being treated in Russia, Japan, and the United States, and examines what is happening to the way these countries view the past, and what can be done to protect and promote the study of history in its fullest and least biased way.
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