What is History?

One way to illustrate the answer to this question is to take a look at local history books, created by families in a community for posterity.

Reading this material, you will get a sense of what happened where, when and why. Who is related to who, etc.

That's about all. Anything controversial that happened at the time

is conveniently left out. And you would be hard put to find any 'saucy' stories.

Official histories are not very different, as we are finding out here in Canada in regards to how Indigenous peoples were treated by the colonizers. And I know the same to be true in Australia.

Another example is the Soviet version of battles fought against enemies in times past: Allied records of battles between Russians and Germans were simply not recorded in Soviet history if the Russians were the losers.

So, to find out what really happened in the past, official histories only provide a biased skeletal version of events and you have to dig a lot deeper to even approach the truth.