Liam,

Don't know how you were educated in the school system across the pond but in high school my history classes were always tainted with ideological messages of a propagandistic nature. When I got to college, I learned that history could have many different perspectives. There were Marxist historians that weren't Marxist themselves.

I think that folk music give us more a feeling for the time than the facts of the time. History is often a "Rashomon" subject to the au current interpretations of the age. Take old Chris Columbus who is supposed to have discovered America and missed by landing on San Salvador in the Bahamas and Santa Domingo (The Domenican Republic). He has been taught in the US school system as some kind of hero where in fact he was responsible for the death and anhilation of the Arawak indians in the islands off the coast of mainland America. Myths get built up just as in folk ballads and the only significant thing about history in my view is the spin that one chooses to put on it. This is the so-called "lesson" that history teaches us. It's possible to base information on documented records found in various bureaus of health, death, birth or parishes but even these have sometimes been distorted by clerical errors or other reasons. History seems to be taught by consensus in the same way folk ballads are received and furthured.

Frank Hamilton