There is nothing new in the attempt to make history that reflects well on the writer. No one is immune to the attraction of being able to look better to others and feel better oneself at the 'cost' of a little ink.

I have heard it said that the Egyptians solved the problem caused by a military loss to the Hittites by simply writing down how victorious they were. In those days the lies were inscribed in stone for the ages. (The part I fail to understand about this story is if it is true, how do we know?)

I read a history of the Chinese Dynasties which implied that when a new Dynasty arose, one of their first projects was to (re)write the history of all the preceding Dynasties.

The past master of the concept was George Orwell who made the re-writing of history the main job function of Winston Smith, through whose eyes we experience the world of 1984. Orwell went on to provide a brilliant afterword where he explains how thoughts are controlled through regimentation of speech and vocabulary.

But technology, which provided the Hittites with steel against the Egyptians bronze swords, has now provided the means to fabricate perfect 'genuine' fakes. In the present it is already possible to provide photographs and movies which depict imaginary scenes.

Never has it been more important to transmit through the media to the public, and through the teacher to the student, the concept of epistemology, which is how we know what we know. A metaphor for this would be the notion of 'provenance' the papertrail that accompanies a masterwork of art to verify that it is genuine and legally owned.

Cautionary Tale Number One: The Shroud of Turin. We don't know the entire story with all our technology. A case for humility and the awareness of differing opinions among the most disinterested of us.

Cautionary Tale Number Two: The Mark Hoffman Case wherein a brilliant forger 'discovered' primary sources of American history, which he had faked, and was planning to 'discover' lost Mormon texts which he was also going to fake. When he was a young man he had forged a valuable coin by depositing a mint mark thereon, and had come to the conclusion that if the fake was accepted as genuine, then genuine it was. Conclusively documenting his depradations on historic texts took cutting edge technology of the 1980's.

Cautionary Tale Number Three: I don't remember the name of the miscreant, but in Tony Hillerman's anthology "Best Of The West" is the true story of a man who went into libraries and public annals of documentation in order to alter primary materials and fake a Spanish land grant so as to 'inherit' a vast quantity of land from the US Government. His marriage was a part of the giant fraud.
Orwell captured this point to