Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History by Margaret MacMillan Page A

some thousand men, women, and children held out on the hilltop fortress of Masada. When it became clear that the garrison was doomed, its leader, Elazar Ben-Yair, convinced the men that it was better to die than submit to Rome. The men killed their women and children and then themselves. The story was recorded but did not assume importancefor Jews until the modern age. Masada has been taken up as a symbol not of submission to an inevitable fate but of the determination of the Jewish people to die if necessary in their struggle for freedom. In independent Israel, it became an inspiration and a site of pilgrimage for the Israeli military as well as for civilians. As a popular poem has it, “Never again shall Masada fall!” In recent years, as pessimism has grown in Israel over the prospects for peace with its neighbors, another collective memory about Masada has been taking shape: that it is a warning that Jews always face persecution at the hands of their enemies.
    While collective memory is usually grounded in fact, it need not be. If you go to China, you will more than likely be told the story of the park in the foreign concession area of Shanghai which had on its gate a sign that read, “Dogs and Chinese Not Admitted.” While it is true that the park was reserved for foreigners, insulting enough in itself, the real insult for most Chinese was their pairing with dogs. The only trouble is that there is no evidence the sign ever existed. When young Chinese historians expressed some doubts about the story in 1994, the official press reacted with anger. “Some people,” a well-known journalist wrote, “do not understand the humiliations of old China’s history or else they harbor skeptical attitudes and even go so far as to write off serious historical humiliation lightly; this is very dangerous.”
    It can be dangerous to question the stories people tell about themselves because so much of our identity is both shaped by and bound up with our history. That is why dealing with the past, in deciding on which version we want, or on what we want to remember and to forget, can become so politically charged.

We argue over history in part because it can have real significance in the present. We use it in a variety of ways: to mobilize ourselves to achieve goals in the future, to make claims—for land, for example—and, sadly, to attack and belittle others. Examining the past can be a sort of therapy as we uncover knowledge about our own societies that has been overlooked or repressed. For those who do not have power or who feel that they do not have enough, history can be a way of protesting against their marginalization, or against trends or ideas they do not like, such as globalization. Histories that show past injustices or crimes can be used to argue for redress in the present. For all of us, the powerful and weak alike, history helps to define and validate us.
    Who am I? is one question we ask ourselves, but equally important is, who are we? We obtain much of our identity from the communities into which we are born or to which we choose to belong. Gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, age, class, nationality, religion, family, clan, geography, occupation, and, of course, history can go into the ways that we define our identity. As newways of defining ourselves appear, so do new communities. The idea of the teenager, for example, scarcely existed before 1900. People were either adults or children. In the twentieth century, in developed countries, children were staying in school much longer and hence were more dependent on their parents. The adolescent years became a long bridge between childhood and full adulthood. The market spotted an opportunity, and so we got special teenage clothes, music, magazines, books, and television and radio shows.
    We see ourselves as individuals but equally as parts of groups. Sometimes our group is small, an extended family perhaps, sometimes vast. Benedict Anderson has coined the