When I refer here to the history of the world, I mean human history or recorded history.

For humans documented their days, and this record is about all we have to go on.

An issue arises, however, than we humans always bring to the table our particular worldviews and confirmation bias.

So who knows the difference between what actually took place and how it was recorded?

For instance, would my parents have a different view of my grandfather? Would my cousins? My grandmother?

How limited was my perspective of him? And how can a thousand words really capture a life?

Expanding this idea, what can any book, or books, truly convey from someone’s experience at war? What do we actually know about Alexander The Great?

This all falls back to the cliche that: History is written by the winners.

More than that, history was written – and that’s the issue.

Simply stated, the past is what is real and true, while history is merely what someone recorded. If you don’t think there is a difference, experience an event in person and then read about it in the newspaper the next day, after witnesses have been interviewed. It might be shocking for many of us to realize that what we know as “history” can actually be a total fabrication, created from the imagination of someone with an ax to grind. Or perhaps, and it certainly happened in the Middle Ages, history was simply recorded by the man with the sharpest ax.

-Andy Andrews, How Do You Kill 11 Million People?