Margaret macmillan autobiography sample

Interview

Margaret MacMillan discusses Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History, reviewing important themes such as the importance of history in our culture and lives, and how leaders use - and abuse - history to further their own agendas.

In your book, you make a compelling case for the importance of history in our daily lives. When did you realize that people made use of history as a tool?

There was no one Aha! Moment, but I really started to think about it in the s when I was teaching a course on identities&#;what goes into making them&#;and it was clear that history was a key factor. Individuals and groups told themselves stories about where they and their ancestors had come from, including, for example, the great moments in their past and their progress toward the present. The stories were not always wrong, but they often included myths or chose facts very selectively. One of the main things we looked at was nationalism and the ways in which historians had helped to create the sense of a nation that was much bigger than its individual members, which predated them and which would endure long after they were dead. At the time, we had a terrifying example of the abuse of history right in front of us in the Balkans, where Yugoslavia was falling apart and all sides were using the past to stir up their own people against the others.

Dangerous Games draws much attention to the politicians, governments, and other entities that misuse history to bolster

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Books by this Author

Books by Margaret MacMillan at BookBrowse