Dangerous Games
The Uses and Abuses of History

This is an interesting collection of lectures that discuss the way in which the knowledge of history--or the lack of it--may affect our ways of acting in the present. I particularly liked McMillan's explanation of why eyewitnesses have no particular advantage--let alone a precedence--in historical i......more

Well, 170 pages full of good examples of the fact that history is very FRAUGHT - you can't say a thing without someone being mortally offended. Just like most family get-togethers! MM says that "professional historians have largely been abandoning the field to amateurs" - that's a bold thing to say.......more

Humility is one of the most useful lessons that the past can provide the present. As John Carey, the distinguished British man of letters, puts it, “One of history’s most useful tasks is to bring home to us how keenly, honestly and painfully, past generations pursued aims that now seem to us wrong or......more

Reading this book was like sipping a cup of tepid cocoa. I picked it up with high expectations – MacMillan is the much-heralded author of Paris 1919 – and was almost immediately disappointed by a style crafted to offend and interest no one. In the spiky sub-genre of the "uses and abuses of history,"......more

This book is especially timely given the proposed changes to history textbooks by the Texas Commission on Education that would increase the visibility of Newt Gingrinch and Phyllis Schlafly at the expense of Thurgood Marshall. (This problem is not new. Frances Fitzgerald wrote a terrific book severa......more