"A lie is a lie. Just because they dress it up and call it history doesn't make it the truth."

The title of this post is a very very good example of poor thinking -- in this case, the person in question was either denying the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, the Colfax Massacre, United States v. Cruikshank, as well as the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, or he was simply denying that they had any historical validity, especially in the question of government power.

The person in question was an anarcho-capitalist sort of Libertarian, one that believes that there should be very little to no government power -- which I've always had as a problem with this sort of thinking.  To get this out of the way, one of my biggest problems with anarcho-capitalist grade Libertarianism is that they suggest that a body of people making a government is innately more evil and harmful than a body of people making a corporation -- and they suggest that self interest and greed, in the true Ayn Randian way, does far more good than a social construct that supports its own citizens. Oh, they also promote "freedom", but want to strip any ability to enforce that freedom.

But getting past all that, the categorical rejection of history that does not support your idea is naturally something to be worried about.  However, it's also a common meme -- "History is written by the winners, not the losers"... hence, History is always subject to propaganda, which is true.

However, you have to be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

There's good history, and there's bad history.

Generally, historians have a few things to work on. Unlike archaeologists, who work almost entirely on artifacts, images, architecture, and (if they're lucky) inscriptions they can read, a historian has a vast amount more documents, recorded speeches, as well as all the rest -- inscriptions, architecture, images, art style (art history plays a big part in historical understanding, etc.). Linguistics and language are also tools, just as good as tracking the movements of people as material possessions. Now, both Archaeology and History need some interpretation; but the problem is, with the history of archaeology, it's more about analyzing the items and *then* coming to a conclusion (and then constantly adding to it as new data and artifacts become uncovered, so in, say, Mesoamerica, it's a constantly changing field), and History has an unfortunate history (heh) of being used for propaganda and to push ideals.


There's a big difference between going off these sources, and being told what to believe about these sources. This is why history generally is vastly dumbed down in high school, especially as they remove all the nasty parts of history that you'll have to learn in college.


In this way, there's a big problem with many history *teachers*, as they basically teach a dumbed-down version. The worst of it is history that's meant to make you feel patriotic -- that teaches you, for instance, that America won WWII entirely (and fails to mention its many allies), as a very basic example. I've heard the case in some Slavic countries where they teach that their own cultural group (Czech, Polish, Russian, whatever) were the "leading figures" of their time period that outshone all the other groups near them... while not understanding, for instance, that their cultural groups inter-mixed ideas and culture quite a bit (The Polish Hussar, for instance, was actually from Hungarian influence originally).


You can generally tell a good source vs. a bad source by how they cite their sources, as well as going to the original sources they're using and deciding based on that.


A big example here, actually, is how the Nazi party took a document called "Germania", by Tacitus. Now, the proper way to view such a document is by putting it in its historical context. It was a document written about the "German" peoples in the second century AD by a Roman that never even lived near it, who was using the "Germans" as a way to explore what it meant to be Roman.


Medieval historians picked up on this, and later the people that would make up the Nazi party. Both of these read into the source what they wanted to -- they didn't put the writer in the context of his time, and they used it to justify their own ideas of what "Germania" was all about -- medieval scholars in wanting to define the Holy Roman Empire (whose many fractured states stand, more or less, where Germany and some outlying countries stand today), and by the Nazis to justify a racial ideal, of the "brave, honest, noble" German. Both of these groups read what they want into the source, and when you understand more about Tacitus and the state of the Roman Empire at the time, you start to understand why and where the problems occur.


A good historian would take Tacitus, medieval historians, and the Nazi party in their own time periods, and analyze them in their own framework. To teach bad history, you ignore all that and basically teach a hashed down pseudo-analysis that takes your own assumptions, promotes a personal viewpoint, and then moves on.


(I just want to add that the previous example is actually given because I'm currently reading "A Most Dangerous Book", exploring this very issue -- http://www.amazon.com/Most-Dangerous-Book-Tacituss-Germania/dp/0393062651)


Overall, what I'm saying here, is that you can tell the good from the bad in those who can SHOW you where they got their information. A scientist can have you run an experiment yourself, or at least show you the data and how they came about it, whereas a historian can show you the first-hand sources, or let you analyze the first-hand and second-hand sources... but they often give you the "big picture" for levity, but can come up with examples with original sources as examples, or when asked where they got their data.


This is why, say, holocaust deniers are so ludicrous. There's few other conflicts with so many documents from so many sources than in WWII. There's no way you can legitimately deny the holocaust happened -- we have the documents from almost any faction involved, we have the concentration camps, we have images of the bodies, we can trace who a lot of those killed are. Holocaust deniers will assert you something and then show you a very very limited view of the data -- but very quick searches in very public archives (easily found on google, no less) can paint a very different picture.

Ultimately, you can't avoid having multiple people with multiple interpretations using more or less the same data... but generally, good historians will agree on many of the basics and disagree on more of the fiddly bits than have entirely radically different ideas of the past.  Exceptions generally involve what sources they're using, or how much they dug through said sources... or if they're pushing a particular propaganda.