Whose History? Essays in Perception

Whose History? Essays in Perception. Edited by Caroline Ellwood Woodbridge: John Catt Educational Ltd (2016), 214pp ISBN: 9781909717718'And the rest, as they say, is history.'I wonder how many times we have used that comforting mantra to bring our lives up to date. History: our shared understanding of the past. History: the enduring evidence that enables us to connect the past to our present.Unfortunately it is not that simple, as the chapters of this book make very plain. Much of our understanding of historical events is not shared, it is contested by individuals, groups and nations who want to stamp their own interpretation on the evidence. And much of the evidence is not enduring; it changes as new discoveries are made and our ability to interrogate them becomes more sophisticated.So: whose history? This is hardly a new question, as we are reminded by observations quoted throughout the book, for example from Winston Churchill:For my part I consider that it will be found much better by all Parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history....from the novelist L.P. Hartley in the famous opening to his novel The Go-Between:The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there....and from George Orwell's novel 1984:Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.A provocative example was provided recently by the military historian Peter Barton who presented a BBC television series entitled The Somme 1916: From both sides of the wire based on his study of previously unknown documents in the German archives. These shone a new and uncomfortable light on the slaughter of that terrible morning of 1 July 1916. The documents made it very clear that the allied plans were known in advance to the enemy. And why were they known? Partly because captured allied soldiers had spilled the beans. Small wonder we are selective when new evidence turns an action of heroic sacrifice into a story of careless betrayal.The challenge of teaching history is not new either. H.G. Wells, for example, writing in 1920 and reflecting on the causes of the First World War, came to the conclusion that men and women...found they had been taught history in nationalist blinkers, ignoring every country but their own, and now they were turned out into a blaze.Wells's own book The Outline of History was used at the International School of Geneva by its legendary head teacher, Marie-Therese Maurette. She had uncompromising views on the teaching of history in an international school and, indeed, refused to allow it before secondary school age, arguing that for younger children it consisted of a selection of anecdotes, usually with an exaggerated national bias, based on the lives, good or bad, of selected historical personalities. At the age of twelve students started a course of universal history built around Wells's book but a later history teacher at the school, Robert Leach (who would play a key role in the creation of the International Baccalaureate Diploma) was not impressed by her attempts...to form her own chronologies century by century in order to grasp some sort of global viewpoint...it was considered satisfactory for the Americans to get a smattering of Europe plus their own mythology.So we have indeed been here before; not even the historians can agree about the way their subject should be taught.Is there anything new in Whose History? I believe there is: the wideranging scope of the 15 chapters supports the conviction that, whatever our subject specialism, we are all concerned with the teaching of history and we all have a responsibility to address (in the words of Siva Kumari's excellent Preface) "the stunning silence of those who are not represented".It is no surprise, therefore, that two of the chapters are concerned with language. Our language determines our perception of historical events. …