The book delves into the life of Domenico Scandella, known as Menocchio, a miller from 16th-century Italy. Menocchio's unique religious beliefs and cosmogony, which included the idea that the universe began as chaos and formed like cheese with worms emerging as angels, led to his trials and eventual execution by the Roman Inquisition. Ginzburg's work uses Menocchio's case to explore broader cultural shifts, literacy, and resistance among the peasant class during this period. The book is a significant example of microhistory, shedding light on the intersections of written and oral culture in shaping peasant thought[1][2][3].
The Histories by Herodotus is a foundational work in Western historical literature. It chronicles the Greco-Persian Wars (499–479 BCE) and provides a comprehensive background on the rise and organization of the Persian Empire. The work is divided into nine books, each named after one of the Muses. Herodotus describes the conflicts between the Greeks and Persians, including key battles such as Marathon, Thermopylae, Salamis, Plataea, and Mycale. He also delves into the cultural, ethnographical, geographical, and historiographical aspects of the civilizations involved, offering a rich tapestry of historical and mythological narratives. Despite some criticisms for including legendary accounts, much of Herodotus's work has been validated by modern historians and archaeologists[1][2][3].
“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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History Unplugged Podcast 
