Guest Seneschal: Thank you for the correction. I was going from memory at that point. I am still curious as to how, if the Egyptians were writing the history, we know any different from their story.

Reading 1984 was a watershed in my young life. It terrified me on an intellectual level that is hard to imagine now. It presented an evil world that was stable. It showed pretty explicitly and convincingly how that world worked. It showed such utter control on the part of absolute government that history could be permanently changed, then changed again, in a word, political humanity would exist in a bubble with no true connection to the past, and no future beyond the present. And you could see elements from that book all around you, most particularly from Soviet Russia, Maoist China, and the erstwhile Nazi Germany. I still regard that book as a work of genius.

McG of H: Being brought up in the US, I learned American Revolutionary History in stages. The first stage, in the single digit years, has all Americans as persecuted heroes except for the traitorous Benedict Arnold. The second stage gets more into the history and logic of Empire that the British government was dealing with, and the third stage is to almost turn the thing on its head and look at it from some far removed vantage point which might have even been called revisionist. I settled somewhere in between stage two and stage three: About a third of American colonists were revolutionists, a third were loyal to the Crown, and a third were at heart not involved. A great deal of those in the second group lost their property and removed to Canada or England. This in turn provoked instability in Canada because at the time Canada was primarilly a French population with an English administration.

I understand Jimmy Carter has just put a book on the market set in Revolutionary times.

And I agree with the term 'in a real sense a civil war' although more properly it was a war for independence (After all, there were significant British forces brought in, and a French navy which saved our bacon). There was an American Revolution, but it came later with the failure of the Articles of Confederation, the Constitutional Convention, and the success and stability of the U S Constitution. Intellectually our core is Enlightenment Europe with that fearless English attitude of the times which didn't forbear from defying the forces of imperial Catholic Spain, putting a king on trial for tyranny, all the while spawning poets and playwrights and scientists with abandon.

When I was in the first stage of education about the American Revolution, there was a kid who talked funny in class. Turned out he was English. The teacher quite politely asked him what they taught him in England about the American Revolution. He replied they barely taught it at all, maybe a sentence or a paragraph. This was a powerful lesson to me that different peoples have different histories, or more properly different frames of references at which to look at history from. I later drew a parallel when Christians asked me how Jews look at the life of Jesus.