People are deeply divided about the meaning of this country, its history, and how it should be governed. These divisions, calling to mind the disagreements between the colonists and King George and those between the Union and the Confederacy in the Civil War, amount to a dispute over not only the history but also the present and future of our country.

For some, history is merely another tool in today’s politics. They do not study the past in order to understand the past, but to deploy it in current battles. At best, this is history backward: Counterfactual “historians,” with only a casual relationship to the truth of history, look for pieces of the past that fit their political narrative. This is not history but ideology, and it is tearing our nation apart.