Read Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History for Free Online Page A

compelling story, bolstered by the polemics of men such as John Maynard Keynes, but it overlooked a few considerations. Germany had lost the war, and its treatment was never as severe as many Germans claimed and many Britishand Americans came to believe. Reparations were a burden but never as great as they seemed. Germany paid a fraction of the bill, and when Hitler came to power, he canceled it outright. If Germany in the 1920s had financial problems, it was largely due to the fiscal policies of the German government, which wanted to neither raise taxes nor default on the war bonds that so many of its own middle class held. What is more, things were getting better in the 1920s, not worse. Europe and the world were recovering economically, and Germany and even Soviet Russia were being brought into the international system. Without the Great Depression, which put fearful strains on even the strongest democracies, and without a whole series of bad decisions, including those by respectable German statesmen and generals who thought they could use Hitler once they got him into power, the slide into aggression and then war might not have occurred. Bad history ignores such nuances in favor of tales that belong to morality plays but do not help us to consider the past in all its complexity. The lessons such history teaches are too simple or simply wrong. That is why we need to learn how to evaluate it properly and to treat the claims made in its name with skepticism.
    Professional historians ought not to surrender their territory so easily. We must do our best to raise the public awareness of the past in all its richness and complexity. We must 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. Furthermore, historians must not abandon political history entirely for sociology or cultural studies. Like it or not, politics matters to our societies and to our lives. We need only ask ourselves how different the world would have been if Hitler and the Nazis had not seized control of one of Europe’s most powerfulstates. Or what could have happened to American capitalism and the American people if Franklin Delano Roosevelt had not been able, as president, to implement the New Deal.
    While it is instructive, informative, and indeed fun to study such subjects as the carnivals in the French Revolution, the image of the Virgin Mary in the Middle Ages, the role of the doughnut in the Canadian psyche (Canadians apparently eat more per capita than anyone else in the world), or the hamburger in American life, we ought not to forget the aspect of history that the great nineteenth-century German historian Leopold von Ranke summed up as “what really happened.”
    Every generation has its own preoccupations and concerns and therefore looks for new things in the past and asks different questions. When I was an undergraduate, our standard texts dealt with political and economic history. There was little social history and certainly no gender history. The first wave of feminism in the late 1960s produced an interest in women’s history. The growth of the gay rights movement brought a corresponding growth in gay and lesbian history. The preoccupations of the baby boom generation with, for example, remaining young and attractive have given rise to such specialized subjects as the history of the body. The disappearance of the European empires and the rise of Asia in economic and political power have produced global history less centered on Europe and North America. That process of researching and writing about the new questions we ask of the past is what makes history change and develop.
    Nevertheless, there is an irreducible core to the story of the past, and that is, what happened and in what order? Causality and sequence are crucial to understanding the past. We cannot argue that Napoleon