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

memorable phrase “imagined communities” for the groups, like nations or religions, that are so big that we can never know all the other members yet which still draw our loyalties. Groups mark out their identities by symbols, whether flags, colored shirts, or special songs. In that process of definition, history usually plays a key role. Army regiments have long understood the importance of history in creating a sense of cohesiveness. That is why they have regimental histories and battle honors from past campaigns. Not surprisingly, the stories from the past that are celebrated are often one-sided or simplistic.
    Most Americans know the story of Paul Revere’s ride: the brave patriot galloping alone through that night in 1775 to warn his fellow revolutionaries that the British redcoats were about to attack. Eight decades later Henry Wadsworth Longfellow helped to fix the ride in American memories with his epic poem. To the regret of historians, he got some of the key details wrong. Revere did not, for example, put the lanterns to signal the movements of the British (“one if by land, and two if by sea”) in the steeple of the Old North Church. Rather, they were a signal to him. Most important, perhaps, he acted not on his own but as part of a well-planned,well-coordinated strategy. Several riders went out that night, in different directions. David Hackett Fischer, who has written what is the definitive study on the ride, finds this truer version preferable to the Longfellow one. “The more we learn about these messengers, the more interesting Paul Revere’s part becomes—not merely as a solitary courier, but as an organizer and promoter of a common effort in the cause of freedom.”
    Historians have also been examining the myth of the American West. Hundreds of Western movies and thousands of novels by writers such as Zane Grey (who only went west on his honeymoon) and Karl May (who never went there at all) have helped to create a picture of a wild world where bold cowboys and determined settlers braved savage Indian hordes. The myth casts a powerful spell. From President Teddy Roosevelt to President George W. Bush, American political elites have liked to portray themselves as bold cowboys. Even Henry Kissinger, improbable as the image may seem, once fell under the spell. “Americans like the cowboy who leads the wagon train by riding ahead alone on his horse,” he told the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci. “He acts, that’s all, by being in the right place at the right time.” Yet the “real” old West, the time of the wagon trains moving through the ever-open and lawless frontier, lasted for a surprisingly short time, roughly from the 1840s, when settlers in increasing numbers moved west of the Missouri River, to the opening of the first transcontinental railway in 1869. Moreover, many of the familiar stereotypes dissolve into something more complex and even disturbing. The cowboys were often teenage gunslingers who today might well be in urban gangs or in jail. Billy the Kid was a charming and cold-blooded killer. Miss Kitty Russell, the warm and attractive saloon owner in the television series Gunsmoke , would have looked quite different in the real old West. Women of her sort on the frontier were miserable low-paid prostitutes, frequentlydrunk and riddled with diseases. Many of them killed themselves.
    Within the United States, the national organizing myths have been challenged by strong regional ones, particularly in the case of the South. Whites in the American South developed their own distinctive history after the Civil War. Not surprisingly, the old prewar South took on a golden glow, where men were gentlemen and women ladies, where gentility and courtesy marked relations among people, even between slave owners and their slaves. The Yankee victory brought an end to a civilization, and Reconstruction caused only loss and degradation. The United Daughters of the Confederacy, set up in 1894, were