: Phil Mason
: One in the Eye for Harold Why everything you thought you knew about history is wrong
: Biteback Publishing
: 9781849542401
: 1
: CHF 8.00
:
: Comic, Cartoon, Humor, Satire
: English
: 272
: Wasserzeichen
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
The problem with history is that much of what you learn in school simply isn't true! For instance, King Harold was NOT shot in the eye with an arrow at the Battle of Hastings, Neanderthals were not as dumb as you'd think, Britain had an Indian curry restaurant years before it had fish-and-chip shops and the American 'Wild West' really wasn't that wild. In many ways the history we casually accept as truth is full of mistakes. One in the Eye for Harold is a riotous romp through the centuries with revelations about the untruth of large swathes of history. It shows us how fictions have coloured our views of religion, politics, war and society - and shows us how some of our most solidly held beliefs are entirely false. In One in the Eye for Harold Phil Mason - author of Napoleon's Haemorrhoids - catalogues how myth and error have shaped our view of the past, and how the history our teachers handed down is often far from the mark. It is full of remarkable insights that entertain gloriously as they challenge the conventional view of history.

Phil Mason is the author of Napoleon's Haemorrhoids and What Needled Cleopatra.

The problem with understanding the past is not what we don’t know; it’s what we ‘know’ that isn’t actually so.

Most of us don’t think about it, but we live our daily lives through our past. The past shapes the environment that we, the current edition of humanity, temporarily occupy. It does so through historic buildings, statues of great heroes, places sanctified with historical significance. The past is all around us. It frames our view wherever we look. But the past also colours the way we think about ourselves, about our fellow countryfolk, and about other countries’ folk. The past gives structure to our minds.

How often do we find society collectively defining the ‘us’ living in the here and now in terms of a commonly held stereotype of the past? We self-satisfyingly declare how progressive we are, being more liberated than those prudish Victorians. We express secret and silent gratitude at not having been born at the time of the First World War, and not to have been one of that ‘lost generation’ who evaporated in the mud of Flanders before they could fulfil themselves. We piously please ourselves that we today do not need to gain our wealth by the callous exploitation that our predecessors resorted to when they created the British Empire.

But what if all these perceptions of the past are wrong? How secure would we feel about ourselves if much of what we have been led to believe about our past is actually not true?

Each of the above views of the past is wrong.

And there are more. Lots more. In fact, swathes of commonly held views of our past turn out to be wrong.

What you are about to read will turn the foundations of the history you know upside down.

One in the Eye for Harold shows just how much of the history that generations have absorbed from their history books, teachers and the power of collective belief, is actually wrong. Some of the most familiar tales that we have grown up with from childhood are in fact myths.

So for starters: the Victorians were not, in fact, prudes (nor, for that matter, were they unduly pious, or crime-ridden, attributes they are also often saddled with). The First World War did not create a ‘lost generation’ in Britain – in fact 86 per cent of military-aged men returned (and most soldiers were at the front for only four days in every month: their strongest memories were of boredom, not fighting). And the Empire, long pilloried for being a mercenary operation of grandplunder, did not, in fact, generate as much wealth and prosperity for Britain as the modern, politically correct, guilt trip makes out (indeed, one line of argument suggests it may even have hindered Britain’s development).

Many of the long-cherished building blocks of our culture, encoded into our core beliefs from our schooldays, turn out to be false:

  • Harold was not shot in the eye by an arrow at the Battle of Hastings.
  • Our traditional view of the origins of the British – Angles, Saxons and Jutes invading from Europe and pushing the ancient Britons to the hills to become Scots and Welsh – is now shown by DNA evidence to be wrong. We all turn out to be from the same genetic stock.
  • The Great Depression of the 1930s was not a period of overall economic decline as commonly presented: living standards in Britain actually rose.
  • The much-touted Normandy