[wespad]

Usually we think of history as what happened, but it's really more historiography, the story we tell about what happened. In college we would read 4 different academic sources about an event, and try to determine why they were so different. We'd start with the author's bio, see what university they teach out and try to determine their influences and models of interpretation.

[magicsmoke]

I've found that the stories different societies tell about their own history that are far more interesting than the objective facts of what happened, because those stories reflect quite a bit about what those societies think about themselves and their place in the world.

[WalterBright]

Accounts of the American Founding Fathers alternate between casting them as heroes and as goats. Currently they're goats (read an article recently that said America was founded on slavery and genocide).