History is always affected by politics. To pick a subject I know a little about, the Swahili coast. There are all sorts of political agendas about the Swahili people.

They themselves claimed to be Persian in origin rather than African due to a distaste for their more rural neighbours (they were city dwellers and they looked down upon the farmers of the countryside, so they told themselves that they persians and those were natives).

This fit neatly into Arabic racial stereotypes so during the Omani colonial rule the Swahili were treated better than other African cultures.

When Europeans took over from the Omani's the same stereotypes were still useful. So the idea of swahili's being more arab than African was accepted.

And post colonialism it was likewise useful for the non Swahili to scapegoat the Swahili as 'not really african' and so 'colonial' and therefore ok to oppress.

But then you got pan Africans who wanted to big up african achievements and they wanted to claim the Swahili as african.

And you also had anti arab Portuguese who preferred to focus on the way the Swahili had Christian Indians among their number as traders as well as muslim arabs.

And that was picked up by indian nationalists as proof of the power of india, with the swahili being written as indian exiles rather than either Persians or Africans.

Now most modern historians (Michael Pearson being the outstanding one) hold the swahili to be an African people who's language and culture was influenced by trade with india and Arabia and Persia. So the Swahili word for ship's captain comes from Arabic, the swhaili word for nursemaid comes from hindi and the Swahili word for head comes from bantu. But the sheer politicization of that relatively obscure issue shows why the climate of the current time will always effect what history is written.

A straight example of pc culture affecting history books is Richard Burton, the welsh diplomat, who visited the african kingdom of dahomey as part of an attempt by the british empire to stop dahomey from selling slaves and executing prisoners at religious festivals. Burton talked to the king, was told that if the king tried to stop either he'd be overthrown as it was a huge part of dahomey's culture. Burton then wrote in his memoirs a few pages on the innate barbarity of blacks and how they weren't civilized. Those pages are not often included in reprints of the book precisely because those views are out of political favour.

Now to the two specific questions you asked. Which was views on islam and views on women.

For the latter, feminist history is a big thing. It explicitly takes the view that women are left out of conventional history due to the bias of historians and should be placed back in. So for instance an English governor in Ireland wrote to Queen Elizabeth I that one of the most powerful and notorious irish rebels was 'grace o'malley'. But the male irish chroniclers which talk about the irish rebellions at the time, don't mention her at all.

So several feminists have written books about Grace O'Malley as an attempt to bring her back into a history that often excludes her. The problem with that is by definition they're writing about someone who we don't know a huge amount about. Most of the sources is folklore precisely because she isn't in the main histories. This obviously runs the risk of focusing on generally insignificant or even fictional characters and overly magnifying their role (though O'Malley herself is mentioned enough times by the English that she obviously was important).

You also have the widespread feminist theory of a matriarchal bronze age society and that sexism was only introduced with the romans. Which is controversial, shall we say.

For the former, you very much can see a difference on the views of islam depending on when it was written. You read stuff written by the likes of Leopold von Ranke in the 19th century and it's openly biased in a way modern history isn't. Von Ranke writes about wars between the muslim ottomans and Christian Austrians and is perfectly clear that he thinks the world is better off for the muslims losing. Same with 19th century books about the Barbary corsairs which are open in their disgust for the Christians rulers who paid them off rather than just killing them all.

That sort of thing doesn't happen so much in 20th or 21st century books.

Having said that I own 7 books about muslim slave trades and the majority of them were written in the 21st century. Like 'white gold' is from 2004,'the trans-saharan slave trade' is from 2007, 'Black Morocco : a history of slavery, race, and Islam' is from 2014. 'Slavery in the Islamic Middle East' is from 2010.

So if anything I think more people are interested in writing about the dark side of islam in the last 10 years than previously.

Please define the loaded phrase "a more PC culture."