"History is written by the winners." That's certainly true for the USSR and similar victorious, absolutist regimes. Of course, in North Korea history is written by the losers.

Real history (not the grade-school kind) is written by professionals with varied biases and points of view.They generally agree about what happened, but not always about why.

If history were written cynically "by the winners" in the Western democracies, there'd be no mention of the Indian Wars, slavery, racism, antisemitism, colonialism, imperialism, Nazism, Marxism, you name it.

In fact, if it were true, few of the "discoveries" people use to "prove" the saying would ever have come to light.

I think the popularity of the "written by the winners" view comes from the unfortunate fact that most people's historical knowledge begins and ends with what they picked up in high school and from Hollywood, which is even worse.

A relevant example is black troops in the Civil War. Historians and people who read about history have always known about black troops on both sides (and Indian and Irish and German, etc.). The Navaho codetalkers haven't been a secret since the project was declassified decades ago. Yet most people woulkd never have heard of them if not for "Glory" and "Windtalkers."

There are plenty of people whose knowledge of the JFK assassination comes mainly from "JFK." That's history written personally by Oliver Stone, who says he's not really interested in what happened.

Anybody who doubts that professional historians don't usually follow a party line should visit the history section of any university library. What, there's none near you? Your local library mainly stocks bestsellers and kids' books? Your local high school library has nothing "controversial"? Well, that *is* a real problem, but don't blame the historians.