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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dr. Strangemonkey" data-source="post: 1159821" data-attributes="member: 6533">Bravo!  Though I am always happy to read more.I'm not really certain that history comes from his story.  That would be way too simple.The winner doesn't always write the history.  Certainly the winner will write a history, but it is more likely that the winner will write several conflicting histories and stopping a looser from writing a history is near impossible.  Sometimes loosers don't sometimes they do.  If the loosers can't write it becomes easier, but all too often the winners can't either.The second history in the Western tradition, the originator of the tight prose narrative, and the first case of prose dialogue is Thucydides' History of the Pellopenesian War.   A document that is very much written from the loosers' point of view but openly critical of both sides.The writer goes into a great deal of detail on his methods and his expectations of the text.  He even gives as a goal the idea that he wants not to record the time as it happened, which he believes to be impossible, but to summon the spirit of the time so that people can understand it and remember it more strongly.That idea has haunted everything I have ever read since then, this notion that you can summon thing though you do not understand it and that is both important and enough.  That's an important thing for my ideas of history and the other is a literary convention.  That is everyone in literature criticisizes the cannon of books everyone should read but noone wants to do away with it.  We all recognize that it is 'offical,' blind, and often shallow or short, but it's also a good basis to work from.In many cases that is the ideal that offical history should work from.  A textbook is going to do a horrible job going into detail, but even if your textbook can't or won't tell you about shady American dealings in South American politics it can, at the very least, give you an idea of the climate and events that surrounded those dealings.  What's vital and necessary is that textbooks be handed out and used by people who know how to deal in detail, know how to deal with text, and know how to direct questioning around and through that initial official basis.</blockquote>

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