Well Said: Editing History to Popular Taste

As a construct, history is too often revised to match contemporary views. It has been said that each generation must rewrite history in order to understand it. The opposite is true. Moderns revise history to make it palatable, not to understand it. Those who edit "history" to popular taste each decade will never understand the past—neither the horrors nor the glories of which the human race is equally capable—and for that reason, they will fail to understand themselves.

T.R. Fehrenbach,

Lone Star: A History of Texas and Texans