Why People Get History So Wrong
“History is the biography of great men,” once said a very famous idiot.
It’s a terrible way to understand the past — academically, intellectually, and frankly, morally — and yet people still believe it. Loudly.
You can see it in the endless culture war skirmishes over symbols. The recent row about replacing Winston Churchill on the £5 note with a badger is a good example. Most of the people complaining didn’t seem to realise Churchill had only been on the note for a few years. Many of them probably hadn’t handled a £5 note in a decade.
But that didn’t matter.
Because the argument wasn’t really about banknotes. It was about identity.
The Fantasy of Greatness
At its core is a very deep, very human impulse: people don’t just believe history is the story of great men — they imagine that they belong in that story.
They don’t see themselves as:
- serfs
- labourers
- or the anonymous majority who actually made up most of the past
Instead, they imagine:
- knights in shining armour
- Viking chieftains
- crusaders and warlords
- Spitfire pilots in the Battle of Britain
Despite the rather obvious fact that if the Battle of Britain is recent enough for your ancestors to have fought in it, you would probably know.
I’ve looked into my own family tree. There are no great men lurking there. One unfortunate ancestor was hanged, drawn and quartered, which is about as close as we get to historical distinction.
And that’s fine.
The problem isn’t that people take pride in the past. The problem is when they start to misplace themselves inside it.
Why This Matters Now
This becomes politically significant when people use that imagined past to interpret the present.
As Marx famously put it, history repeats itself — first as tragedy, then as farce. More importantly, he argued that in moments of upheaval, people reach back into the past for metaphors and guidance.
We dress ourselves in the clothes of history to make sense of the present.
The trouble is: if your understanding of history is simplistic and heroic, the lessons you draw from it will be equally simplistic.
The Wrong Lessons
Take immigration.
Faced with small boats crossing the Channel, people could draw on a range of historical parallels:
- Britain taking in refugees from Nazi Europe
- Jewish families fleeing persecution
- long traditions of migration and settlement
Instead, the “great man” version of history reaches for something else entirely:
- Spitfire pilots shooting down enemies
- Saxon warbands forming shield walls
- heroic defence against invasion
It’s history as fantasy — and it produces a correspondingly distorted view of the present.
Protection vs Control
This taps into something deeper.
One of the most fundamental human instincts is to protect the group:
- family
- community
- tribe
For some people, that instinct expresses itself as:
- the welfare state
- the NHS
- helping at a food bank
- extending solidarity beyond immediate borders
For others, it takes a very different form.
“Protecting the group” becomes:
- protecting it from outsiders
- defining who belongs and who doesn’t
- drawing hard boundaries
And often, if you look closely, “protection” slides into something else entirely:
control
When people talk about protecting women and children from outsiders, what they often mean — whether consciously or not — is controlling them. Deciding how they should behave, who they should fear, and where they should belong.
The language is protective.
The instinct underneath is not always so benign.
The Education Problem
There’s another, more mundane reason people get history wrong.
Education.
I studied English at A-level. I was forced to read Jane Austen, which achieved little beyond giving me a lifelong dislike of her work — the insipid characters, the dubious romances, and the way the novels glide politely past the realities of empire and slavery.
(My view, I accept, is not universally shared.)
My son studied history. He was taught about Winston Churchill.
The result?
A deep and abiding dislike.
He wasn’t alone. Many of his classmates came away with a similar impression: Churchill as a flawed, sometimes unpleasant figure — a brilliant wartime leader perhaps, but also a petulant racist drunk.
And there’s probably some truth in that.
The point is not that education is wrong. It’s that if you force teenagers to study something, they often end up resenting it.
So you get a strange outcome:
- older generations defending simplified heroic figures
- younger generations reacting against them
Neither side ends up with a particularly nuanced view.
What Is There to Be Proud Of?
None of this is to say there is nothing to be proud of.
There is.
Being English — or British — means being part of a long and often remarkable cultural tradition:
- Blake
- Byron
- Shelley
- Ray Davies
But even here, the idea of something uniquely “pure” quickly falls apart.
Take Shakespeare.
His work is often treated as the pinnacle of English culture — and it is — but:
- his stories are set across Europe and beyond
- his characters include Jews, Moors, and outsiders
- his influences are deeply international
Strip away those influences and you are left with something much smaller.
The same is true of British culture more broadly.
Remove the foreign influences, the migrations, the exchanges — and what remains is not a proud, self-contained tradition.
It’s something thinner, narrower, and frankly less interesting.
The Real Problem
The real issue isn’t pride.
It’s the kind of history people use to justify that pride.
If your history is:
- simplified
- heroic
- centred on great men and noble struggles
then the present becomes a stage for reenacting those myths.
And that’s how you end up with:
- culture wars over banknotes
- fantasies of invasion
- and a politics built on imagined pasts rather than real ones
Conclusion
History isn’t the story of great men.
It’s the story of everyone — most of whom lived ordinary lives, struggled, adapted, and left very little trace behind.
The danger comes when people forget that.
Because when you start to imagine yourself as the hero of a historical epic, you stop seeing the present clearly.
And you start acting out a story that was never true in the first place.