So a response to @PhillipsPOBrien thread about how to respond to myths of Battle of Britain. Glad to see so much discussion and engagement 1/ https://twitter.com/phillipspobrien/status/1282913872937209857

Think we’re basically in agreement about what happened in 1940 and about historians’ role in encouraging better understanding of the past. Question: how? 2/

For that need understand what myths are and how they work. Myths = shared simplified version of past. Simplification doesn’t have to mean simple or wrong. Simplifying allows social sharing. Historians can’t stop there being myths but they might try to make the myths better! 3/

Myths endure because they have function - story telling, lesson imparting, defining identity. Makes them very hard to shift - lots of historians will have had experience of vehement rejection when we do our ‘normal’ business of being critical - we’re attacking who someone is! 4/

Hence also problem that @DEHEdgerton identified of debunking keeping myth central. WW1 historians: ‘it wasn’t just mud blood and poetry’. Audience ‘Mud, blood and poetry’ 5/

There’s another challenge. Explaining modern wars is about complexity and as @PhillipsPOBrien said deeply challenging to norms of heroism and individual agency. This is not just a historian’s problem - look at difficulties war artists had showing scale of eg Western Front 6/

In trying to improve things we can try a head on approach. That is good and probably necessary. But I want to suggest value of indirect approaches that ju-jitsu emotional investment into better understanding. 7/

I’ll add some ways to do this when I restart this thread after my next meeting.... TBC