How Do We Really Know What Happened in the Past When Many Historians Were Propagandists and AI is Fabricating Everything Else?

History Unplugged Podcast

History Unplugged

Society & Culture, History

4.2 • 3.7K Ratings

🗓️ 17 July 2025

⏱️ 49 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

“History is written by the winners.” This aphorism is catchy and it makes an important point that a lot of what we know about history was written with an agenda, not for the purposes of informing us. Unfortunately, it isn’t true. There are many times that the so-called “losers” wrote the histories remembered today. After the American Civil War, Southern historians like Edward Pollard crafted "Lost Cause" narratives, romanticizing the Confederacy despite their defeat. Similarly, Chinese and Persian accounts of the Mongol invasions, such as those by Zhao Hong and Ata-Malik Juvayni, detailed Mongol brutality and cultural impacts from the perspective of the subjugated, challenging the victors' dominance.

But this statement still gets to a fundament question: What if the history you learned was deliberately shaped by people with their own agendas?

This question drives today’s guest, Richard Cohen, in his book “Making History: The Storytellers Who Shaped The Past.” We explore how historians and storytellers, from ancient Greece to the modern era, shape our understanding of history through their biases and agendas, featuring figures like Herodotus, who blended fact and fable, Edward Gibbon, whose Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire reflected his personal perspective, and William Randolph Hearst, whose yellow journalism distorted historical narratives.

No history is truly objective, as personal, cultural, and political influences inevitably color the accounts of chroniclers like Thucydides, Tacitus, Voltaire, but we can still construct an understanding of the past that brings us closer to the truth.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Scott here with another episode of the History Unplugged podcast.
0:07.6	History is written by the winners.
0:09.5	This aphorism is catchy, and it makes an important point that a lot of what we know about
0:12.7	the past was written with an agenda not for the purposes of informing us.
0:16.8	Unfortunately, this phrase isn't true.
0:18.3	There are many times where history wasn't written by the so-called winners.
0:21.5	The major histories of the Civil War were written by Confederate generals or politicians like Jefferson Davis.
0:26.2	After the Crusades failed in the Middle East, famous chronicles and crusader accounts circulated throughout Europe.
0:31.2	While Muslim historians barely wrote about it, mostly ignored it till the 19th century.
0:35.3	The histories of the Mongol wars were written by the Chinese and Persians, very little input by the Mongols themselves, mostly because of that time they had very little of the literacy culture. But the soul goes back to the point that before you know a history, you have to know the historian. Why are they writing it? Are they being funded by somebody to have a specific agenda? Were they deliberately twisting reality to glorify themselves or their
0:54.1	nations. In today's episode, I'm speaking to Richard Cohen, author of Making History, the storytellers
0:58.9	who shaped the past, and he argues that everyone who has ever recorded history was, whether
1:03.5	intentionally or not, influenced by their own personal views and objectives, whether it's Herodotus
1:08.0	writing about gold-dicking ants a size of dogs in India or flying snakes in Arabia,
1:12.4	or William Randolph-Hirskis' yellow journalism. This episode, we're going to look at ancient histories of herodotists and Thucydides, religious accounts, and how even those who don't believe in a holy book of, say, Islam or Christianity, can still get a lot of historical fact from those religious texts, and how despite all the biases, we can develop a good BS detector for when something is good, despite all of its faults, like Edward
1:31.4	Gibbons the decline of fall of the Roman Empire, or completely fabricated, which is becoming
1:35.1	a bigger and bigger problem in the age of AI. Hope we enjoy this discussion with Richard Cohen.
1:41.9	And one more thing before we get started with this episode, a quick break for a word from our sponsors.
1:50.5	The most famous work of history that some have heard of, but even if they haven't heard of,
1:56.1	has colored their opinion of the Roman Empire. Whether they realize it or not is Edward Gibbons
2:01.8	decline and follow the Roman Empire. It was written in the 18th century as Britain is reaching
2:10.3	the apex of its power. But in your book, you have a really colorful depiction or in a
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