I'm really interested in talking about the adoption of dominant historiography into mainstream discourse, and why sometimes it seems to just not happen.

For example, I was recently explaining the origins of the word Thug, and why it could be said to have racist connotations. When I was looking for sources, I was surprised to find that basically every website discussing the Thuggee at all contained a description that's basically indistinguishable from official British reports in the 1800's. The Wikipedia page had a small section describing the revisionist view on the bottom, but that was about it for lay sources.

As far as I know, (this is a subject I took a class on in undergrad, and that's the extent of my knowledge) the 1800's British view is literally entirely discredited. There is still a lot of heated controversy, but it centers around other questions. Mike Dash is probably the most pro-British/anti-revisionist person writing on the topic, and he totally accepts that the British idea of an organized cult worshiping Kali by robbing people is clearly false, and more than a bit silly.

I would guess that the main reason that this change hasn't entered the mainstream is that the cult idea seems more interesting, but I wonder about other possible reasons, and how important they are.

Is the way most high-school and 101 level undergrad readers are constructed around pretty uncritical reading and parroting of primary sources part of the problem? I don't think I was asked to engage in historiography before I was taking classes that had grad students in them. Should high-school history have a historiographical component?

Is part of the problem that people mostly stop learning about history when they're adults, so whatever the dominant view was when they were growing up remains? If so, how can that be corrected? You can't force people to buy books.

How much of the problem is the disconnect between popular and academic history growing? How can we fix that besides not being so bad at writing?

I'm not exactly sure this fits under the Philosophy of History category, if not, I won't get my knickers in a knot if it gets deleted, I'll just post it in the Friday thread, I suppose.

I just watched a video on the sinking of the Lusitania (shout out to the Great War channel for sharing it), today being the centennial for it. I understand the importance of remembering the victims, and I certainly understand the importance of learning from history. But in the comments to said video, an individual states that this sort of thing is why he distrusts Germans.

100 years after the event, and people are still harboring hatred over this. So it made me wonder, and I have no answer for myself, thus I pose the question to you. Do you think remembrances of specific events like this do more harm than good? Granted, this is purely anecdotal evidence, but surely he can't be alone. Does remembering the specific mistakes of our past help us to, or hurt us from coming together as a planet?

And if it hurts us, what's the solution? How do we remember the past in a way that keeps us from making the same mistakes again without harboring the kinds of feelings that inevitably lead to exactly the same mistakes?