1956, Magadan Oblast, Kolyma, USSR.
Gold panning machines in the lager mine
Photo: unknown, courtesy of Weronika Tur, KARTA Centre collections
The changing face of history
History is always changing its shape and that is why it is endlessly fascinating – declares Margaret Macmillan professor of history at the University of Oxford. Same facts can be looked at in a variety of ways.
History is all about facts and their interpretation. Facts do not change but their interpretation – of course. Same facts can be looked at through a variety of lenses - liberal, conservative, radical, religious, feminist, Marxist, etc. Our visions of history, our perceptions of it change all the time as we ourselves do.
Margaret Macmillan is a professor of history at the University of Oxford and author of “Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History”, which is – as reviewer David M. Kennedy writes in “NYT” – a frequently mordant and consistently provocative indictment of the myriad ways in which history as a way of understanding the world is too often distorted, politicized and badly mishandled.
Here Prof. Macmillan proposes to look at recent 400 years of history of the British Empire and to see how historians might tell the story in different ways without getting the facts wrong. Was it an empire whose manufactures flooded the world, whose money built railways and ports across the globe, and brought peace and prosperity to millions of Asians and Africans or was it an empire based on male-dominated ruthless exploitation of working classes and overseas colonies? Read the full article at BBC News Magazine.
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