Margaret MacMillan: The uses and abuses of history

[@rosesandsongs21]

I am passionate about history and thanks to the internet, I can now easily find most what I am looking for in seconds but I am of the few who met the right motivator. At about twelve I had a teacher, a religious man, greasy hair, cigar smell, thick glasses... he had not much going, socially anyway but the man was so passionate about learning, history, teaching, everyone got caught up in his passion and my need for learning still goes strong to this day, I am 57 now. I wish everyone could be as lucky as I was but unfortunately so much has changed, we now all live in or near the United - States of Amnesia (Gore Vidal) don't we?

[@rosesandsongs21]

You are sooo right, thank you for that wonderful reply and take good care of yourself. Rose.

[@alvin8391]

@@rosesandsongs21 I don't think that any country where there is supposedly universal education does a worse job of teaching history than is done in the USA. Our people are the most ignorant of the past of any developed nation's.

[@AlbertSchram]

3:53 Lecture starts. She is wrong that nobody had heard about the tensions and conflicts in the areas of dissolution of the Russian, Ottoman or Austro-Hungarian Empire. In fact, in most NATO military training the dissolution of Yugoslavia, for example, was extensively simulated. For most of the male population in Europe there was compulsory military service until 1990 at least.

[@aletheiai]

You time-point to the beginning of her speech. Where *exactly* does she make the universal statement that "*nobody* had heard about the tensions and conflicts in the areas of dissolution of the Russian, Ottoman or Austro-Hungarian Empire"?

[@AlbertSchram]

@@aletheiai [09:46] See transcript . We knew about tensions between Serbs and Croats and knew very well they had not gone away. The rhetorical questions "... who had ever heard...". is misleading. I had heard about it, and so had many others. We knew they had not gone away.

[@aletheiai]

9:50 Thanks for the helpful timestamp. "... which we had, most of us, thought had gone away". "Most of us" is NOT a universal statement, and she is describing mistaken analysis of tensions of which historians/public policy makers (I assume) must have been aware. I asked only because she's too careful an academic to make faulty universal statements. As to awareness ... even I, as a child in Australia, was aware of continuing inter-European tensions. How? Fights between Serbs and Croats regularly broke out in the waiting lines for school buses. Since those boys were living in a peaceful nation, distant from the struggles, it struck me as bizarre. However, it was a lesson in the fact that remembering history can cause more problems than forgetting the lessons.

[@swamivardana9911]

Saddam did invade Kuwait. He was a mini Hitler.