New Substack post from me on the memory culture into which I (and large numbers of other Americans) was socialized in the late 20th century. Why did I learn nothing about the history of American fascism and the resistance to it?
https://sethcotlar.substack.com/p/some-thoughts-on-the-messed-up-memory

The comments people have left so far are really interesting (this is one of those rare cases in which you absolutely MUST read the comments!). The way we are taught to think about the past is ALWAYS political, there is no such thing as an "objective" or "neutral" way of writing about the past.

That said, accounts of the past can be more or less **accurate** and more or less authentically grounded in **archival evidence,** and more or less conversant with the state of existing knowledge about the past. Those things matter and enable us to distinguish between better or worse histories.

But ultimately, history is a story with protagonists and antagonists, with storylines with moral power that trace triumphal, tragic, or ironic arcs. Who and what we choose to remember from our past will always be selective, we can never just keep "everything that happened" in our mind at one time.

So saying to schools "stop being political with how you teach history and just teach kids what happened" is an incredibly ignorant thing to say. No one who actually understood what history is could ever say those words with a straight face. It is itself a radically ideological vision of history.