In "Lies My teacher Told Me" James Loewen examines the dynamics of history. He notes that generally the longer it has been since an event the more coverage it gets in high school history books. So the Revolution gets 20x more coverage than Vietnam or Iraq. He also notes that second only to sex ed, history is the most common reason that parents request an opt out.
Until recently history was treated as a branch of literature, eg of fiction. It was nice stories about "great men" driven by the magic of fate to do great things. We are moving toward a more forensic and fact-based discipline with a new and healthy emphasis on primary source documents.
I don't know if history will "be kind" but likely it will ignore many of the things that we currently view as existential threats. Nothing ever seems as bad in hindsight because we know how it turned out; we know we survived it and that deflates the threat.
"The present is a a bully, always making us think the molten moment we inhabit is the most alarming ever, while the past seems to slip into that specious category of "simpler times". The 1950s now basks in the sunshine of false memory: sock hops, genial Ike, two-car garages, Elvis and a victorious America, her manufacturing plants unshaken by a single Axis bomb in the war, bestriding the industrial world.
Few saw the decade like that as they were making their way through it. In 1947 H.W. Auden published a book-length poem in which four characters in a New York City bar discuss the cosmos. It won the Pulitzer in 1948 but reading it could be heavy going. Nevertheless, it at once became universally known because of its title: The Age of Anxiety. That's what millions of Americans thought they were living in.
And with reason. The war had ended with the thunderclap of two doomsday weapons over Japanese cities, and just four years later Soviet Russia, recently an ally, now a threat, possessed those weapons too. "
- "Disney's Land" Richard Snow, 2019
Few people today would name Woodrow Wilson, Truman or Andrew Jackson as the worst president(s) ever but serious historians regularly do. Wilson segregated the government, praised the Klan and "Birth of a Nation", embraced eugenics, entered WW1 for no good reason and was credited with "winning the peace" for the Confederate South, eg. "they lost the war but won the peace." Wilson oversaw changes to the US dime coin that put the symbol of fascism into the pockets of millions of Americans until 1945. The damage he did reverberates to the present day.
Harry Truman incinerated 200,000 people and killed another 200,000 more slowly. Practiced law with no license or college education. Entered the Korean War. Started the NSA / CIA. Embraced and expanded authoritarianism. Set the stage for endless middle east conflicts.
Andrew Jackson committed genocide to expand slavery, "owned" hundreds of enslaved people, censored anti-slavery materials out of the US mail service, committed war crimes, executed POWs, embraced ethnic cleansing, fostered the 7-year economic collapse of 1837 and was studied, emulated and praised by Adolf Hitler.
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