Just an obvious point, how is it that the author thinks "professional" historians are above injecting their own cultural and social ideas into hisotry?

There are certainly facts on the ground that can be cited, but once you seek to put those facts into a narative of history, you are going to see the coloration of the writer of that history, even among professionals.

So much of our modern professional historians have made their bones deconstructing and reimagining the work of previous professionals. Whether the intetion was to elevate nonwhites and nonmales into prominance in historical terms, or take a perspective of the defeated instead of the victor, countless professional historians have done the leg work, and dug up new and interesting views of history that other historians are busly working to debunk in favor of their view of history.

History is by it's nature a subjective field. There's just not a real way to confirm things that require broad cultural assent to occur. Certainly you can say that, white wedding gowns were first popularized when Queen so and so wore one at her Royal wedding, but that tells you little about a) why she wore it, or b) why everyone else started to.

When the cultural ascent required is greater than just those getting married, and includes all those who willingly die for a cause, the issues get muddier and muddier.

And since professors hate to tell the class, "I have no idea why all the nations of Europe suddenly decided that a long mechanized trench war was a good idea" they create theories based upon their own assumptions and presumptions about the people and events of the time.

It's easy to say that the problem is the amature historian, but one should realize that the professionals have added to the canon of fancy as much if not more than the dabbler.

Umm...exactly which stories of the Holocaust have been debunked?

Just curious, the broadstrokes of the Holocauset have been based on the maticulous records kept of the event by the German Government at the time. If these records are in error, there are a lot of proud dead german soldiers whose accounting work you are calling into question.

If there is some annecdotal story that you claim has no basis in fact, I guess that's certainly possible. The feeding of prisoners other prisoners for example, is something I had heard from my parents from a survivor, so perhaps that kind of story is more hyperbole than fact. But among the facts of the holocaust, which have been debunked?

I'm not saying they should be tortured, but it astounds me that so many people buy into the "religious persecution" argument when it comes to cults. Go to 10th & Arch in Philly. Most days there will be some old ladies there handing out newspapers printed by F.G. with lots of anti-commmunist articles. Or go to NYC and turn on the TV. Every night for a few hours they purchased airtime on one of the channels (25, 73, or something like that), and part of it is spent on, you guessed it, anti-communist "news"/commentary. Not to mention a couple of years ago they surrounded ZhongNanHai, the Chinese equivalent of the White House and Capitol Hill rolled into one. This is in Beijing, China.

Americans need to face up to the fact that there are lots of lying religions out there. The enemy of our enemy is not necessarily our friend.

Napoleon once said "History is a set of lies agreed upon." I would amend that to say history is an account of past events interpreted through the political perspective of the historian.

History is interpretation, not facts. Facts is - well - facts.

It isn't clear why the focus here is solely on history dominated by politics. Politics (as opposed to what used to be called "civics") is a wretchedly biased exercise in "real time"; why should we expect it to be otherwise when pickled and canned?

I've added this book to my reading list. The most obvious response to the review, though, is simply to list some of the other books read in the last year or two. Anything by Simon Winchester: "The Map that Changed the World", "The Meaning of Everything", "Krakatoa", "A Crack in the Edge of the World". Eric Larsen's "Devil in the White City" and "Thunderstruck". "A Thread across the Ocean" by John Steele Gordon. Russell Shorto's "Island at the Center of the World". Jared Diamond's books. For the truly long view read Richard Dawkins' "Ancestor's Tale". (Do yourself a favor with that last one even if you don't like Dawkins' politics; he keeps it out of this lovely book.)

Dava Sobel (start with "Longitude"). Ken Follett's Cathedral books. Henry Petroski's "Pencil" and "Toothpick" - these are explorations of the infrastructure of our society, not amuse-bouche. You can't understand the "point" of Thoreau without knowing that his family made pencils. A professor used the battle of Borodino from "War and Peace" as an example of systems engineering. There was a life of Lavoisier, a book on the "fallout" from Sputnik, and some (rather uneven) books of contrafactual essays. Alan Weisman's "World without us" is an excellent exercise in contrafactual future history.

What books (history or otherwise) are others reading? This is the best response to any assertion that the hoi polloi might not be paying appropriate attention to history. Personally I'm very unlikely to read much academic history. My best history course in college was a history of economic theory. The most unusual was a couple of semesters of the history of astronomy. History is an attempt to tell our shared human story. The last thing it should be is cut-and-dried.

Any search for broad trends in human history (if any) and to dig for truth in human motivations will require a very personal investment of time - some seekers (as demonstrated in a few of the other letters :-) will get very lost on the way. A good start is to read widely - and especially not to read only writers vetted by those we consider our peers. Read historical fiction, as well - it's much easier to pick out any artistic license. As Ursula Le Guin said:

"The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words."

Establishment history is simply Hirsch's stale Cultural Literacy repackaged for a particular political goal. Bleh!