When Ralph Waldo Emerson remarked that "there is no history, only biography," he was implying that our annals are really only accounts. Like so much else, history is a construction, a ledger of what we have decided to believe.
It is agendas, not events, that determine what we chronicle. For example, consider the current fracas about the textbook corrected by the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform, the one that was recently approved by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology.
Here the workings of an agenda are fairly obvious. The members of the textbook-reform group are considered to hold strongly nationalistic views, and 137 revisions were made in a 337-page book. The claims were that the textbook was biased in that it was marked by self-condemnation. Critics say that it distorts history and attempts to justify Japan's wartime atrocities.