The philosopher George Santayana famously wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” but also, less famously, “History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren’t there.”
I was thinking of both quotes as I read a recent paper comparing the wildly different causes given for the Great Depression between college American history and economics textbooks (Jeremy Horpedahl, Phillip Magness, and Marcus Witcher, “Teaching the Causes of Great Depression to College Students: Evidence from History, Economics, and Economic History Textbooks,” Journal of Economics and Finance Education).