I read that the kilts were first adopted by the Royal Blackwatch after the last Scottish Uprising and were later adopted by the Royal Highlander Regiments later. The kilts themselves are recent but the tartan colors were based on the patterns of the lowland clans that sided with England.

"Dangerous Games" calls for "professional historians" (by which I think MacMillan means "academics") to "contest the one-sided, even false, histories that are out there in the public domain. If we do not, we allow our leaders and opinion makers to use history to bolster false claims and justify bad and foolish policies." In recent years, she complains, academic historians have become either unduly "self-referential" or preoccupied with "fun" but ultimately insignificant fluff like culture studies.

Thank the good Lord. The problem of history buffs warping the study began with popular histories and now has begun to affect the honesty of the field itself. No, Dr. MacMillan does not mean 'academic' when she uses the word professional - professional historians are found in the academy, in government, in public institutions, libraries and independent centres. It's their professionalism which is the distinction - and the buffs have been doing more damage, for a longer period, than has been recognised. Every Man Cannot Be His Own Historian - however much s/he might want to be.

/GWPDA, PhD

, After all, George W. Bush reportedly spent most of his presidency reading one historical work after another without gaining much in the way of political wisdom. Instead, he scoured the books in search of validation for his own preset ideas.

This is meant to be tongue in cheek, right? Right? Please don't tell me that you actually believe George W. Bush has ever read a book in his life, let alone "scoured" one (unless he decided to clean the cover of one of Laura's selections with a Brillo pad).

George W. Bush "reading". Heh heh..that's a good one.

C'mon, "What Holocaust?" There that wasn't so hard, I gave you your jumping off point.

Wedding dresses are white in Western countries, but eastern cultures are totally different.

One of my favorite fallacies is "Hell". Upon converting to Judaism from Christianity my sister told me I would go to "Hell" for abandoning Jesus.

"Ha" I retorted, "Hell is totally fictitious, and doesn't exist in the Old Testament, which is the Jewish bible, so guess I won't be going there."

Totally perturbed she called her minister who also couldn't find Hell in the Old Testament.

Triumphantly, my sister's husbant crowed, "The Devil (or Satan) is mentioned in the Old Testament, and he lives in Hell!"

Clearly any piece of history can be twisted to suit one's point of view.

Whenever anyone tells you something, immedeatly ask "Why are you telling me this?"

No one gives you information unless they want you to send that information further.

No one wants you to push their information further unless they have an interst in seeing that information move further.

This doesn't necessarily mean the movement of that information is either intended for ill use, or machiavellian on the part of the information pusher. It is simply an aknoweldgement that people put forward their ideas, even ones like "The Treaty of Versailles wasn't nearly as bad as you think" for a reason.

It's an interesting question when you go back and look at history, since all historical reconing is relative and laden with perspective, it is really impossible to make a value judgement about something like the Treaty of Versailles. Perhaps it was purely reasonable, perhaps it was just unreasonable enough, in the end, what it was, was a poor bulwark against WWII, which in it's grandest imagninings it might have been conceived to be.

At the end of the day, any treaty signed at the point of sword, be it a apomatix or versailles is only as good as its acceptance or its enforcement.

If you take a very short view of history, as being or not being about single events, you will likely be wrong. Each single event piles on each other single event to create history, removal of any one of those events might change history subtly or dramaticly, and you can never know which is which.

One can imagine WWI begining without the death of Arch Duke Ferdinand, but would it's motivations been as great, would it's sale have been so easy. WWII might have begun without the Treaty of Versailles, or it might have been squelched had Chamberlin not appeased Hitler, or efforts were made to keep Italy and Germany at odds as they traditionally were.

The lessons we take from history, are invariably the lessons we wish to be true in the future. Even if you think you are being as rational and clear minded as possible, it's just you who think that, and everyone who disagrees with you think they are equally clear in their analysis.

I would say that you're a real sicko and that I hope you don't have access to weapons of any kind, but having read your previous screeds I now suspect you might be a paid agent of the Saudi/Wahhabi lobby, a 9/11 "Truther" or a member of the Taliban. Maybe you should fully disclose who you're fronting for and who's paying you to post these letters.

Ms. Miller,

Some good points are raised in this article, though for me it's the implied back story, the undercurrent, that is important. By that I mean the deliberate manipulation, distortion, or avoidance of facts to manufacture a particular version of the past.

An earlier posting in Salon regarding our views-- our "conventional wisdom" regarding communism-- touched on the same issues. And as with that article, it's obvious the job of the historian is to perform two vital and contingent services.

First, the historian must use all available resources-- contemporary accounts, media references, memoirs, diaries, academic analysis-- from as many sources as possible in order to rough out the boundaries, the outer edges, of the inter-related events being studied. Historical "events", after all, are never singular, insulated, or isolated. We select a moment in a process and pronounce it crucial, pivotal. That event may be key from our perspective, and it's just that: our perspective. Without context and an awareness of contributing factors, the derived value of the event will ultimately prove useless.

Second, the historian must play the role of coroner as well as detective. One must ask, "Who benefits?" by a particular version of history. As shown in this article, democratization of education has had the effect of encouraging "stories", (rewritten or inaccurate accounts), to suit the desires of a particular group, as well as the passions of the moment. And in this role of coroner, one must ask, "Who killed the truth?". The historian is therefore duty-bound to winnow out the truth, and the motives behind those who avoid or distort it.

Like education, politics in 20th Century America became more democratized. Debates were driven less and less by an individual citizen's initiative, and more and more by PR efforts on behalf of a candidate or group. Flag-burning is a recent example of a totally manufactured crises, a straw man used to portray a candidate as undeserving or dangerous. Ronald Reagan's fraudulent allusions to a wholesome small-town America was targeted to an uneasy white electorate. John Kerry's presidential aspirations were sunk by a small, well-funded group who rewrote his war record.

As the 21st Century unfolds, the historian's job has become far tougher. With so many competing groups, (and with so much access granted so easily), arriving at a consensus-driven, accurate version of past events has become a monumental task.