历史不只是过去的记录，它也是人们理解彼此和公共生活的共同语言
Modern societies often assume that conflict over the past is unavoidable, even healthy. To a degree, that is true. A national history should be revised as new voices and new evidence enter public discussion. Yet revision is different from collapse. When a society loses even a minimally shared narrative about where it has come from, disagreement stops being a debate within one civic language and becomes a contest between incompatible realities.
History matters politically because it explains what citizens owe one another. It tells them whether their institutions are reformable, what ideals remain worth defending, and which failures demand correction rather than denial. If schools, media systems, and political movements all teach radically different moral stories about the same country, that common interpretive ground begins to disappear.
Inspired by The Atlantic reporting · Rewritten by Vocabsavvy · Vocabsavvy Original (inspired-by attribution)