The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Is History Accurate?

Episode Date: October 25, 2021

One of the great debates these days revolves around truth -- what is it, and are we being told the truth about the events that are happening right in our time? Take that to its logical extension and you can ask, is history accurate? And that's what we do today with one of my favourite historians -- Dan Snow.  Dan lives here in the United Kingdom but his Canadian roots run deep and as you will see roots he's very proud of.

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You are just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge. Today's topic, history. Is it accurate? That's right. Is history accurate? Coming up. Our podcast is brought to you by Questrade, Canada's fastest growing and award-winning online broker. Tired of getting dinged with fees every time you buy or sell U.S. stocks? Well, good news. With Questrade, you don't have time you buy or sell U.S. stocks? Well, good news. With Questrade, you don't have to. You can hold U.S. dollars in your trading account and avoid expensive, forced conversion fees every time you trade U.S. stocks. Switch today and get up to $50 worth of free trades. Visit Questrade.com to open an account and use promo code quest conditions apply all right peter mansbridge here once again

in scotland this is going to be fun this topic is going to be fun At a time when there's so much discussion and debate, controversy surrounding the telling of history, present day history, you know, the whole what is truth issue, we're going to look a little deeper, a little, we're going to go back. We're going to talk history in other ways. And we're going to do it with somebody who's very, very special in terms of the telling of history, in terms of the United Kingdom, in terms of Canada. I'll tell you who it is in a minute. But first of all, these last couple of days

in the UK have been special as they are every year around October 21st, 22nd, 23rd. It's the anniversary of one of the greatest naval battles in history, certainly in the history of the Royal Navy. And that's the Battle of Trafalgar. If you've ever been to London, if you've ever traveled to England, been in London, walked around downtown, you've almost certainly been to Trafalgar Square. And there's a big memorial tower in the middle of Trafalgar Square, and it's the Nelson Column, named after Lord Nelson,

who was the commander of the British forces, the Royal Navy, at the Battle of Trafalgar. Perhaps Britain's most famous naval hero, as a result of Britain's most famous naval battle. I mean, I'm not going to go through it all, but it took place in 1805, so this was the 216th anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar. And why was it so special? Well, Britain was up against both France and Spain,

and they were outnumbered on the seas. Trafalgar is off the coast of Spain. There were 27 ships of the British fleet, 33 French and Spanish vessels. So they were outnumbered. But when everything was over, 22 of the French and Spanish ships were at the bottom of the sea or were so damaged that they were inactive, given they were still floating, but they were inactive.

They'd lost. The cost of victory, though, was awfully high. 1,700 British sailors were killed or wounded, 6,000 enemy casualties, nearly 20,000 prisoners. So it was a big deal. And the stories about Trafalgar are still told. It was on the deck of Nelson's ship where he was shot and died. And there are great portraits of that moment. Are they accurate? Probably not.

What is accurate is that Nelson died at Trafalgar. How exactly how? We don't really know. But this is kind of the story of history, right? How accurate is history? Well, I wanted to have that discussion today, and I couldn't think of anybody better to have it with than somebody who I've known for, I don't know, a couple of decades, ever since he was at university here in Britain.

Dan Snow. Dan has a very successful podcast, and he has a very successful streaming service, History Hit, where you can watch all kinds of documentaries, documentaries of historic moments. Some of them he did directly, others he purchased to get on his streaming service. But if you love history, man, you won't get bored.

Because there are lots of dogs on there. Now, Dan has a Canadian connection. He's this son If you're a TV news watcher in Canada Over the last 30-40 years This name will be familiar to you

Anne McMillan She was a CTV correspondent for a time Then she was the CBC correspondent Out of London, always out of London She was married to Peter Snow A famous BBC broadcaster out of London, always out of London. She was married to Peter Snow, a famous BBC broadcaster. And sister is Margaret Macmillan,

University of Toronto. Incredible author and historian. So Dan comes from, well, he comes from great roots. And he has become a historian of record himself. He has a classic way of storytelling. He's very energetic. He's funny. He's all the things that get you watching, get you listening.

And that's what we're going to do today. Because as I said, I couldn't think of anybody better than Dan Snow to have this conversation with. So we'll take a quick break. When we come back, Dan Snow on whether or not history is accurate. This is The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge. So, Dan, history. How accurate is history? Wow.

We're straight into it. Well, of course. No fooling around. Get right to it. No fooling around, man. Straight shooting. I think you're probably, in a way, more expert than I am. But let's put it this way. I find it so fascinating.

Let's talk about the deep past. The Battle of Hastings, 1066, right? We have no idea, really, what went on. We've got a tapestry source, a pictorial source, done by the winners. It's probably a sort of celebratory thing. We've got a song written pretty soon after. It's called the Carmen of the Proelio Hastings. So there's a song written pretty soon after. It's called the Carmen of the Proelio Hastings guy.

So the song of the Battle of Hastings is kind of poetry. Then we've got a couple of sources written by people that are probably alive at the time. But they're all very political. It's like saying, it's a thousand years.

Like, you're a journalist. Every night, you were trying to get to the truth and often say, like, why did Tony Blair or the Canadian government back george w bush with that iraq invasion 2003 and you were there you were talking to the key players you probably interviewed george bush and you probably don't exactly know why so so the answer is we have got

it's very very difficult to know what happened uh in in the deep historical past let alone 15 20 years ago right there is a there is as we are talking there is a a house committee in the deep historical past, let alone 15, 20 years ago, right? As we are talking, there is a House committee in the U.S. on the Capitol trying to work out what happened on January 6, 2021. During that insurrection, what was it organized? Was it non-organized, spontaneous? How violent was it? And we all watched the thing on TV.

So if we have to go to these efforts to try and work out what's happening today, then working out what happened 100 years ago, 500 years ago, 1,000 years ago, it is non-impossible. So history is our best guess at any time. And the exciting thing is that new sources become available, new interpretations, new science. You know, archaeologists are like, hey, we can now look at the guy's teeth and work out where he grew up with the isotopes.

So we're adding little bits all the time. But, yeah, we are piecing together. There's a crime scene, and we've got limited evidence. Before all the Canadians go crazy, while Tony Blair did support George Bush on Iraq, Canada didn't. Sorry, of course. I'm pretty proud of that fact. Yeah, you guys and the French.

That's exactly right. I'm so sorry. But it's also, but the same goes for that. Exactly why they didn't, you know, what they were looking at, what the evidence was, opposed to the spin around the leaders just having an instinct not to go. You know, that's all part of it too. But you said earlier how history is so

often written by the victors right and so you have that issue to deal with you have you know personal reflections versus you know relevant facts um get in the way as well so there i mean there are a number of obstacles to knowing exactly what happened on whatever the event may be. That's right. And if we're trying to work out what was motivating Jean Chrétien, he comes out after the events and he writes his memoirs. He's like, I'm pretty smart. I knew it would be a disaster.

Well, did you know it would be a disaster? It's very difficult. And political memoirs, he's like, I'm pretty smart. I knew it would be a disaster. Well, you know, did you know it would be a disaster? It's very difficult. And political memoirs, wow, as you know, like those are documents you've got to take with a pinch of salt. But no, I think there is a history written by the winners, obviously, is usually true. There are great examples of you hear the voices of the defeated. There's some interesting work being done in the Aztecs at the moment

and piecing together their history during and before the Spanish invasion of what is now Mexico. The siege of Constantinople, weirdly, in 1453, I think, is the one where, oddly, most of the sources we have are all from the defeated side. So that's a weird little counter example. It's always fun. But no, so there's all of these problems there's all of these um and you look back at your own life i mean again i

always ask people to look just to ask these simple questions themselves like i've i have a big period in my life between the uh photographs that we printed out down at the drugstore um or blacks was it blacks in canada remember that's all we used to go to and get yeah that's right yeah and then and then the age of my iphone backing pictures up to the cloud when i had a series of like weird digital cameras and throw away things and blackberries and i have no photographs from that period of my life at all none gone everything i wish i had pictures but i don't particularly because i was at my kind of youngest best looking and most fun in that exact period so that's annoying that i have no

pictures i've got pictures of me as a kid i got pictures of me as a graying middle-aged guy and um and so that's like a that's like a dark that's my own little personal dark ages right because because by quirk of technology and fate, I just don't have the source material for that period of my life anymore. Now everything's backed up in triplicate. You can throw your phone, your laptop in the sea, and you still have all your detailed documents and everything. So that is what we get in history as well. We get these huge... So tragically, Queen Victoria's Diary, there are all these amazing documents that we once knew existed that we now know were destroyed.

Queen Victoria's diary was gone through by her daughter and her daughter erased with a black marker, basically, the sexiest bits of her diary, the raciest bits of her diary, which, of course, in retrospect, the most interesting bits of the diary, right? We know that we know that uh certain you know amazing people that their their husbands or their wives after they died they just destroyed their all their papers they just destroyed them all they didn't they don't want and you know so so we the people we tend to know most about and admire and think all these people are important they're

people who are very very careful about leaving their archive. They left it when they died. Researchers rent a house. There it is. Nice box, all carefully indexed. Hey, this guy's great. So someone like Shackleton, the Shackleton adventure, we all loved that adventure.

He was very careful in the traces. He left everything nice and as he wanted it to be left, what he wanted to be found. Captain Scott, who died in Antarctica, didn't have the chance to do that. So we get him and we're like,

yeah, that guy was kind of messy. He was like, his planning was all over the place. Well, of course it was because I'm sure Shackleton's like that, but he managed to, he cleansed his archive very effectively.

So that's a big issue. Like we can only go on what we have. And so I always think about this is classical history, right? We've got Tastus what we have. I always think about this as classical history. We've got Tacitus. We think of these Roman emperors like Nero and Caligula. Oh my goodness, they were so wrong. They were terrible. They were immoral. They were sexually deviant. They were this Mercedes. We have one source basically for those guys. We've got Suetonius, a gossipy, funny guy writing a long time after.

Can you imagine if we had one source for like the Second World War or like, who knows what, who knows what angle the guy would have taken, right? But that, by weird quirk of fate, that's the one that survives to this day. And as a result, we have these gigantic reputations of people,

the most,oned like any nearly anyone if they didn't even know about history or they kind of know that nero and caligula were like crazy people so it is it is very you need to be and i saw the great winston churchill quote history will be kind to me for i intend to write it and that's what he did. He was no fool. He was a brilliant man, obviously, but he made sure that he spent the rest of his life writing beautifully detailed, crafted, gigantic histories of the Second World War, first of all, in which, surprise, surprise, he put himself very much at the heart of everything and on the right side of history. And historians only now are going, hang on a minute i'm not sure this is uh this is this interpretation and try and if you did if you pull that piece of string well sure enough it comes back from churchill's writings about himself

so fair play to the guy but you know it's it's um it's all about your chronicler if you're going to do something amazing listeners make sure someone's there to write it down we don't have and in a way people young people know this already, right? There is this weird sense that young people have now, which is if you're doing something awesome, there's no point doing it unless someone's there to take pictures of it or video, right? There's this weird thing.

Like if you didn't post it, it didn't happen. And curiously, and old people like me are like, these young people just live life for the sake of living it. But actually, they're very much in the spirit of the great men and women in the past because they knew that there's no point making a wonderful speech. There's no point leading an army.

There's no point making a brave decision unless your chronicler was there to actually capture that and burnish it and give it a nice polish for posterity. You know, I was watching the other day, re-watching one of your programs on History Hit, which was the Sam Mendes interview that you did shortly after 1917 came out. His brilliant movie, The First World War, one particular episode in the First World War. that captured my attention because it centered on this issue because he went to a great deal of trouble to ensure authenticity about a lot of that film. And he had a couple of, you know, senior military types with him going over every shot as they were taken and making sure everything looked right but he did say at one point he did venture to you at one point that look um you know

i i follow the recognized uh historical facts of uh of these events and yet i do write a script and at a certain point i will defend my script for its interest value over and above perhaps some historical fact and i thought that I thought that was an interesting concession because film, of course, you know, is part of the historical document these days, even if it's not classified as, you know, actual fact. It becomes history to a lot of people. That's exactly right.

And isn't that interesting when you said that? And I think that those people are artists, but they do, artists have always shaped the way that we see history. And people get angry at Hollywood history nowadays, kind of sometimes within the history community. But you go, well, what do you think Shakespeare was doing? You know, Henry V, Henry V is not great history, right?

It's one of the greatest plays, one of the greatest pieces of art ever created. It's not of the greatest plays, one of the greatest pieces of art ever created. It's not like history. Benjamin West's painting of Wolfe dying on the plains of Abraham is one of the great paintings of the 18th century. It's one of the great pieces of art. It's one of the most widely copied and engraved pieces of art ever, actually, at the time. But that's not how General Wolfe died. He didn't have a loving Aboriginal sort Aboriginal ally next to him holding his arm.

He wasn't surrounded by his obstacle. He was pretty unloved at the moment of his death. And it was a lonely, bloody, tawdry battlefield death, as battlefield deaths are. There's nothing glamorous about them. So that's the job of artists. It's the job of Sam M that's the job of artists it's the job of sam mendes the job of benjamin west it's a job of shakespeare to create wonderful art and it's a job of people like you and i who love history and and getting to the facts and

journalism and to sort of say hey enjoy the art but let's let's let's go let's dig a little deeper and create podcasts around it and chat and try and make sure that people are people are well it's you know that and that brings us to a wider point which is media literacy i think is what they call it in schools but it's whether you're presented with a piece of art like 1917 or you're presented with a piece of news that you found on a website or your crazy uncle has posted on facebook you know it's it's interrogating that right and that's when people say to me why do you history history is like oh henry the eighth's clothes and i say history isn't history or Facebook. It's interrogating that, right? And that's when people say to me, why do you history? History is like, oh, Henry VIII's clothes and blah, blah, blah. I say history isn't a history. It's a mindset. History is training the brain to be skeptical, to be questioning all the things that you've done in your career. Well, history is a great training

for that. And surprise, surprise, you love history because it's like, I'm being told something. Do I believe this? Why am I being told this? Is it likely to be true? Have I got evidence? What can I corroborate it with? That's history. And that's why it's a great subject to do at school. And it's a great subject to do at college, university. And employers want it because it trains you to be, it trains the brain.

And especially in this world, we've been bombarded with dodgy information all the time. That's what history is to me as well uh there's another part in the mendez interview that uh is more about you than it is about him because at one point you you kind of implore him in terms of his next next event you say 18th century it's got to be 18th century nobody does 18th century didn't it like did nothing happen in the 18th century or like what what is it against the 18th century. Like, did nothing happen in the 18th century? Or like, what is it against the 18th century that historians or filmmakers or what have you have against it? Isn't it funny? I don't know. I mean, I guess, I mean, you know, some, and yet, you know, Las Lajecas, we can all agree, one of the great movies of all time.

Sure. movies of all time. So the French-Indian War, extraordinary depiction of the frontier and the sort of shifting alliances there with the Indigenous Americans, the French, the Brits, this complicated tapestry fighting it out in the heart

of this beautiful continent. So I love that movie. And yeah, it's a funny century. It's the, I guess, the Second World War looms so large in our popular history, right?

Why is that, do you think? Why do you think that is? You know, why do you think that is? It still really does. It is kind of the dominant fact, especially in terms of British discussions about the past. Second World War is always the one that pops up. Well, Peter, this is where it's difficult to talk about it

because I think with Britain it's quite straightforward, really. That's the last time Britain strode on, was mighty on the world stage. It was the end of 250, 300 years of an extraordinary national tale, which saw this funny little island that I live on, with its terrible weather and its strange geology and its interesting positioning on the fringes of Europe. This funny little island rose to a position of global prominence, global power that no other state had ever done before. And it was a mixture of technology and luck and timing and wind directions and geography and everywhere and colonize and enslave and do remarkable things

and do dangerous things and put its finger on the scales of history, really. And so I think the Second World War is the end of that. That's the end of that story, when Britain slugged it out with the world's most powerful nations, battleships, exchange, shellfire in the Atlantic, its mighty armies rampaged across continents in asia africa and europe never again would britain do that and so

i think for the british people it's it's a it's a it's a sort of a lost facet like almost arthurian got past age you know we don't want to we don't want to return there it's a terrible time and life's better for people in Britain now, ironically. You know, we live in more, you know, people back then lived in straightened circumstances, poverty and hardship. But it's become this kind of strange. I'm just not using the word golden age because it's not that it was golden. It's not that times were better back then, but it's become a thing that people hark back to,

a time that is very compelling for people. And that's why I think we're obsessed with it. You know, I thought that as the generations passed, that there would be a lessening of it. But it almost seems like it's the opposite of lessening. There's more and more of it i guess that harkening back to a a time they they they thought was better or the they thought the country was more dominant within the on the world stage clearly was more dominant on the world stage but that they're somehow looking back to it but it's not it's not just that i mean it's sort of everything about that time the way they kind

of pulled together and yeah you're right yeah Community with community, it's quite something how they keep touching that cord of a connection back to a time that none of them were a part of anymore. I mean, those generations are gone. I think that's right. And actually, as the history fan, I'm always thinking about the big history picture. But you're right, there's all sorts of other things going on there. There is the fact that, yeah, it's right. And actually, as the history fan, I'm always thinking about the big history picture. But you're right.

There's all sorts of other things going on there. There is the fact that, yeah, it's community. It was, you know, in an age where our big problems, well, apart from climate breakdown, which is too big for most people to think about and see and feel, but they've got big problems. You know, commuting and obesity and too much sugar and kids are spending too much time on screens. There was a purity back then. You know, there was a national energy. There was a coming to everyone was get your uniform on. The women are in the factories and the fields.

The women are serving in code-breaking roles and, you know, active roles and espionage roles. The men are fighting. Everyone knows what everyone, you meet someone in the street and say, what are you up to? Well, I'm in the infantry and I'm going to be going.

Okay, I know that. Now people are disengaged. I go, I just sit around watching Netflix all night. So I think there was a kind of, there's an idea that this was a simpler time and a time where people were sort of mobilized and also a baddie that was bad right i mean it's it's convenient there's all sorts of myths about the second world war people

will forget that we're on the same side of mouse as mouse a tongue and stalin but we were that's forgotten that would be a good idea but what you think about is that we were fighting the guy who was murdering millions of Jews and other people in Europe at the time, and destroying, carrying punishment raids on whole villages, murdering women and children. And we Brits can go, this was unambiguously good. This was, we are allowed to enjoy this thing

because it was black and it was white. And I think that's how lots of people feel. I'm going to ask you a question that I asked a librarian the other day. So I'm going to read from the transcript because this is a part of the debate that we're having in this country and other countries are having as well, including in Britain. Here's the question. We've been confronted in this country, meaning Canada,

that much of the history in schools, in textbooks, in movies, that history has come from one perspective, more or less. And that most notably, black and indigenous versions of history have been underrepresented in typical ways, especially when so many other diverse groups are much more oral-based than text-based. So what responsibility do historians have to make that right? Yeah, we're living through a very interesting time, and it's a time that's making some people feel very uncomfortable. I mean, I've been on a journey. My grandpa, my great-great-grandpa, emigrated from Scotland, the Mull of Kintyre, which I know is an area of the world pretty close to your heart, Scotland, Peter. And he came to Canada. He settled just outside London, Ontario, and cleared the land of the rocks, cleared the trees, built a farm,

and lived the Canadian dream. His kid ran the farm, and eventually their great-grandson would go to Toronto and get a medical degree and became a doctor. He was served in the trenches in 1917, since we mention it. And then he came back and ended up being quite a fashionable practice in Toronto and became pretty wealthy, I think. And then his son, doctor, and his sons and daughters, academics and universe and journalists,

and one of them worked with you. And then I came out. You know, this is a story of a family's journey from scratching out a living on the Mull of Kintyre as an assistant farming and fishing to the kind of modern, affluent international family, right? This is a story that I grew up with, very proud of.

We told these stories. They served in the wars. They went to university. They cleared land. They developed things. And I'm now increasingly aware, of course, there was another story, a parallel story, right, going on at the time. And it was a story of marginalized people and there was a story of, you know, indigenous people and a story of struggle and civil rights struggles for women and black. Anyway, so I'm enjoying learning about that.

I don't find it threatens my pride in my format. And by the way, the whole thing against this, now we know that all that chopping of trees and draining of land and clearing of swamps, that also was really bad for the environment. There's a climate story here, and there's stories of overlooked, marginalized people. I can hold all these ideas in my head at once, I think, Peter. And so, yeah, I think it's important that we learn more about the fascinating stories of the Aboriginal peoples, of the places that, of where European settlers arrived and what happened there.

We learn about it in not just a black and white way. We learn about it in a kind of sophisticated way, how there was agency. There was indigenous peoples worked with the new arrivals. They settled local scores. Like the Aztecs were toppled, not really by the Spanish, but by indigenous allies of the Spanish. And so it's not that we're saying, you know, Europeans bad.

We're trying to move beyond the whole thing and we're trying to learn more. And that's the exciting thing about history and archives. We're learning that there are new sources becoming available. We're looking at different places that we looked before. The Inuit, the story of the Franklin Expedition in the North, I know you know a huge amount about. The oral archives, the oral stories of the Inuit have been essential in piecing together what happened to that expedition that we're looking for the Northwest Passage.

And so I just think that's a great example of how we now are in a place where we're not looking down on other sources. We're able to incorporate them and celebrate them. And there's a reckoning. What that reckoning means going forward, I don't know. But I'm enjoying it, I think. And as I said, I don't think it's taking away from still having that pride in Grampy Macmillan and my grandma Laidlaw, two good Scottish names, they're getting together

and hacking out that life in Canada. That's all part of that human story as well. There were victims of this. There were, were you know my grandpa was sent by the imperial government to trench the first world war that was a horrific like so people are suffering people are winning and losing and our environment was winning and losing like it there's all sorts going on here and i think it's great that we're now looking at this more in the whole last question you've been very generous with your time um

here's the last question i mean it seems like for decades centuries the the term a version of this of this term the sort of you know those who ignore history you know run the risk of repeating it. That seems to be ignored by a fairly significant number of leaders in our world today. That is sort of like, to hell with that. That doesn't apply anymore. What's happened there? Like why, or were we wrong all this time in learning from the past problems that history has shown us had? If you ignore them, you can run the risk of repeating them. Was that all a myth or what? I think it's – I think there's a couple of things going on.

Tony Blair actually said – we talked about Iraq war earlier. Tony Blair said that history – we were living in an age where history no longer matters much because of technology, because of the changes. I mean, it's tempting to look at the world today and think,

I don't know why we're worrying too much about like some 17th century stuff where they were horses and carriages, you know, like we're, we got a drone on Mars. We're testing out hypersonic weapons here, right?

I mean, like we've just got a vaccine from from earliest thought to into people's arms 11 months like no the rules are different now and i have sympathy with that like i think that is we are we're on a hell of a journey here right but the fact of the matter is we've only got one if we are trying to work out where we are and where we're going it's a bit it's imperfect but the only playbook we got is the past i'm not saying hey pick up your julius caesar and make all politicians read it and then there'll be better leaders right i'm just saying that it might help it's not it's not much but it's all we got to go on right and so i would like to see politicians i think of course they should also have scientific

literacy and i think there's all statistical i think politicians feel like i think the best trick politicians ever played in us was the fact they need no training to do that job right you need training to be a bus driver you don't need training to be a have a nuclear arsenal to to to run a country i i like i'm not sure where how sure how they convinced us of that one. I think, genuinely, after election, I'd like to see them for two months, bang, into McGill, into wherever, UBC.

I don't know, I'm overlooking now. I'm going to get UBC friends of mine getting angry. But I want to see them in there. I want to see them do a two-month intensive course. And I want the... No, I didn't mean to... The mark's made public. I want to see them do a two-month intensive course. And I want the – no, I don't mean – I didn't – the Marx made public. But, like, let's teach them a little bit about things that – like, things that have happened in the past that might be useful for you to know about.

Like the oil shock in the 1970s. What happens when energy supplies become constrained? Oh, you know, you get price inflation. You know, like, let's talk about climate change in the 17th century when they think possibly a quarter of the world's population died because of global cooling as a result of well various things possibly solar activity like let's let's just know these things and then and then let them crack on and make their decisions but i think it i think it's i think it might be useful for them yeah Yeah, I think so too.

Dan, it's always such a treat to talk to you. Always learn from you, including back to the day when you were what, captain of the rowing team? Yeah, well. Back in the good old days. Long time. Long time ago. But once again,

an absolute treat to talk to you. Continue good luck with History Hit and all the various things that you're doing, podcasts and film, et cetera, et cetera. And we'll talk to you again soon, I guess. Thanks, Peter. Like millions of others, I grew up watching you on TV. And it's a huge – it was the biggest honor of my life, actually, to work alongside you in Windsor a couple of years ago.

And it's been amazing being on the pod. So thank you very much. Thank you. Take care. Dan Snow. And Dan was just outside London talking to us the other day. I'm up in, you know, north in Scotland near Dornick, which is about an hour's drive north of Inverness,

if you're looking for a map. But, you know, as I often do at this point in a podcast, after a great guest, I say, I told you how interesting he'd be and how thought-provoking he was, right? And if you have some thoughts on this subject, about history and about the accuracy of history. You know, the spot I'm in, in Scotland, is on the east coast. So I'm out looking at the North Sea, and if you could see right across the North Sea, you'd see Norway.

That's kind of how far north we are. But this is an area where the Vikings came, you know, 1,200, 1,300 years ago. And when the Vikings came, the stories, you know the stories, you've seen the, you've probably seen some of the TV shows. It was all stories of rape and pillage and burning and et cetera, et cetera. Well, the historians now who are doing digs in different places from here further north up into the Orkneys are saying, you know, maybe it wasn't quite that way. There was some of that. There was some of it not far from here at Port Mahomac where they've discovered that that whole area was burned down by the Vikings, probably in the 8th century.

But in a lot of other areas, both in Scotland and in Ireland, and also up in the Orkneys, that was not the case. In fact, it seems that they actually got along with the Pictish who were here before the Vikings. And there's some clear indications of that from the recent dig. So that too strikes to this heart of history and how history has been written and whether it's okay to challenge history.

Under the central theme, is history accurate? I don't know. I found the conversation quite interesting. I'd love to hear what you think, and if you have some particular thoughts, drop me a line, themansbridgepodcast at gmail.com, themansbridgepodcast at gmail.com. We've got a week of interesting programming coming up for you. Wednesday will be Smoke Mirrors and the Truth.

Bruce Anderson will be back on board. And Friday, of course, Chantelle Bear and Bruce with a good talk. But we have shows on tomorrow, on Tuesday, and, of course, on Thursday. And send along your thoughts. I got a lot of emails from you over the weekend. Many of you wishing you were in Scotland or at least thinking now about traveling. I know this isn't over yet.

And it's probably going to be another six months, at least before it is. But it has stirred emotions about travel and getting out and doing things, traveling around our country, traveling outside of our country. These are all decisions that we're all going to be making over the next little while. I've got some more work to do here in Scotland. Looking forward to it. And looking forward to talking with you each day right here on the bridge.

So this has been The Bridge. Thanks so much for listening. And we'll talk to you again in 24 hours. Thank you.