The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - The Bridge: Encore Presentation - Is History Accurate?

Episode Date: December 29, 2021

We're looking back at The Bridge in 2021.  Today an encore presentation of an episode that originally aired on October 25th.  Peter talks with historian Dan Snow.  Is history accurate?

You're tuned in to a special encore presentation of The Bridge. In this episode, recorded October 2021, Peter discusses the accuracy of history with Dan Snow. Enjoy. 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 6000 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, 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. Anne's 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. no fooling around get right to it fooling around man straight shooting uh i think you're probably in a way more expert chances than i am because i i let's put it this way i find it so fascinating let's let's talk about well let's talk about the deep deep past the battle of hastings 1066 right we have no idea really what went on we got a bay tapestry source, a pictorial source done by the winners, probably a sort of celebratory thing. We've got a song written pretty soon after, it's called the Carmen of the Proelio Hastings guy. So the song of the Battle of Hastings, 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're 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 in 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 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 house committee in the u.s on the capital trying to work out what happened on january 6th 2021 uh during that insurrection what 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. I'm pretty proud of that fact. You guys in the French, that's exactly right. I'm so sorry.

But the same goes for that. Exactly why they didn't, 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 get in the way as well. So, I mean, there are a number of obstacles to knowing exactly what happened on whatever the event may be.

That's right. You know, and if we're trying to work out what, you know, what was motivating Jean Chrétien, youien, 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, wow, as you know, 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, it's 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 that's always fun. But no, so there's all of these problems. There's all of these... And you look back at your own life. I mean, again, I always ask people to ask these simple questions themselves. Like, 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 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

i got you know you can't you can throw your phone your laptop in the sea and you've got you still have all your detailed documents and everything so that that is what we get in history as well we get these huge so tragically you know 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 with a black marker basically that the sexiest bits of her diary 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 certain amazing people, their husbands or their wives, after they died, they just destroyed all their papers.

They just destroyed them all. They don't want – and, you so so we the people we tend to know most about and admire and think oh these people are important they're people who are very very careful about leaving their archive they made they left they when they died researchers rent the house there it is nice box all carefully indexed hey this guy's great you know 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 to cleanse his archive very effectively. So that's a big issue. We can only go on what we have. And so I always think about this as classical history, right?

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 sadists. We have one. They were immoral. They were sexually deviant. They were this Mercedes. We have one source basically for those guys. We've got Suetonius, a kind of 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 like nearly anyone, if they didn't even know about history, they kind of know that Nero and Caligula were like crazy people. So it is very unique. And that's why there's a great Winston Churchill quote, history will be kind to me for I intend to write it be and that's why 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 that he he spent the rest of his life writing beautifully detailed crafted gigantic histories the second world war first world 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 interpretation

is in try and if you pull that piece of string, sure enough, it comes back from Churchill's writings about himself. So fair play to the guy, but it's all about your chronicler. If you're going to do something amazing, listeners listeners make sure someone's there to write it down we don't have stuff and in a way peter 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 we are old people like me like these young people just live life for the sake of living but actually they're very much in the spirit of of the great women 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. It was a brilliant movie of the First World War, one particular episode in the First World War.

And there was a part of it 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 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, I follow the recognized historical facts 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 was an interesting concession, because film, of course, is part of the historical document these days, even if it's not classified as 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, 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 it's not like history benjamin west's painting of uh wolf 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 it's not that's not how general wolf died right he didn't have a loving aboriginal uh sort of ally next to him holding his arm he wasn't surrounded by his obstacle he was pretty unloved um when he went at the moment of his death and it was a it was a lonely bloody tawdry battlefield death, as battlefield deaths are, right? There's nothing glamorous about them. So that's the job of artists. It's the job of Sam Mendes, the job of Benjamin West. It's the job of Shakespeare to create wonderful art. And it's the job of people like you and

I who love history and getting to the facts and journalism and to sort of say, hey, enjoy the art, but let's dig a little deeper and create podcasts around it and chat and try and make sure that people are, well, 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. 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. There's another part in the Mendez interview that is more about you than it is about him. Because at one point, you kind of implore him in terms of his next event. You say, 18th century, it's got to be 18th century. Nobody does 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, last of the H Mohicans, we can all agree, one of the great 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, you know, 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, 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 all sorts of interesting reasons for that. And it saw this little island send out settlers to places like New Zealand and Australia and Canada and the States and India 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 it's 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, like almost Arthurian past age. We don't want to return there. It's a terrible time. And life's better for people in Britain now, ironically.

We live in more people back then that 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 hearkening back to a time they thought was better or they thought the country was more dominant on the world stage.

Clearly it was more dominant on the world stage, but that they're somehow looking back to it. But 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 you know community i think a community with community uh it's it's quite something how they keep touching that cord of a connection back to a time that uh you know none of them were part of anymore i mean those generations

are gone i think that's right and actually always 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 that there is the fact that yeah it's community it was you know in an age of where our big problems are 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, get your uniform on.

The women are in the factories and the fields. The women are serving in code-breaking roles and 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 when people were sort of mobilised and also

a baddie that was bad right I mean it's convenient there's all sorts of myths about the second world war and people will forget

that we're on the same side as Mao Zedong and Stalin but we were that's forgotten that would be difficult to think about but what you think about. But we were, that's forgotten. That would have been a bit more difficult. 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 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 mentioned 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 were academics

and universe and journalists, and one of them worked with you. And I came out. 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, you know, 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, that 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, and indigenous people

and a story of struggle and civil rights struggles for women and black. Anyway, so I'm enjoying learning about that. and it's a story of struggle and civil rights struggles for women and black anyway so i and i 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 us off that's also was really bad for the environment, which is, you know, so there's a climate story here and there's an overlooked, you know, 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 arrived what happened there we learned about it in and not just a black and white way we learned 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. So it's not that we're saying, you know, Europeans bad, the other people... 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 yeah, 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 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, you know, my grandpa was sent by the imperial government to trench the First World War. That was horrific. Like, so people are suffering.

People are winning and losing. And our environment was winning and losing. Like, 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 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, you know, 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 as 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're, we got a drone on Mars. Yeah, we're testing out hypersonic weapons here, right? I mean, like we've just got a vaccine from earliest thought to into people's arms in 11 months. Like, no, the rules are different now. And I have sympathy with that.

Like I think that is, we are 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 right 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

with 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 they how they convince us of that one i think i genuinely after election i'd like to see them for two months bang into into mcgill into you know wherever ubc i don't know i'm overlooking now i'm gonna 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 money. I don't mean to, I didn't, the marks 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 get price inflation. 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. Let's just know these things and then let them

crack on and make their decisions. But I think it might be useful for them. 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? Well, yeah.

Back in the good old days. A long time. A 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 i the spot i'm in in scotland's on the east coast so i'm out looking at the north sea and if you you know if you could see right across the north sea you'd see nor. 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. There 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 Mahomic, 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, line the mansbridge podcast at gmail.com the mansbridge podcast at gmail.com uh we've got a week of uh interesting programming coming up for you uh wednesday will be smoke mirrors and the truth bruce anderson will be back on board and friday of course chantilly 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 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.