1066 and All That

It took me awhile to come up with a title for this blog. I wanted it to have multiple meanings, but more importantly, I wanted it to sound cool. I have a slightly unhealthy obsession with alliteration so I spent a few minutes looking through my dictionary for words that started with "H" that would sound good (and make sense) with the word "history". I made it to "hobgoblin" when I gave up and turned to the other books on my bookshelf. I passed over "Where's Mom Now That I Need Her?" and "A Child's History of the World" and picked up "1066 and All That" by Walter Carruthers Sellar and Robert Julian Yeatman, which was originally published in 1930.

The authors describe the novel as, "A Memorable History of England, comprising all the parts you can remember, including 103 Good Things, 5 Bad Kings and 2 Genuine Dates". It begins with the Romans invading England and concludes with the First World War. In this satirical history of England names, dates, and events have been, in a sense, rewritten, encouraging you to question your knowledge of the past.

It is from the "Compulsory Preface" that I got my title. "History is not what you thought. It is what you can remember. All other history defeats itself." Originally history was transmitted orally, it took awhile before people began to write things down. Even then, usually it was only the biased history of the upper classes that was recorded. It is impossible to determine what information has been lost, or changed when a story is told from one person, to another, to another, and so on. With the advent of computers and the internet, history has been easier to record, allowing a greater extent of people from various backgrounds to do it and share it with the world, enabling us to remember more.