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The History of “History Is Written by the Victors”

Many attribute the adage to winston churchill, but it turns out he was just rewriting some losers..

Late in the new movie The Report , Adam Driver’s Dan Jones argues with his prospective defense attorney over who really said, “History is written by the victors.” The lawyer (played by Corey Stoll) attributes the quote to Winston Churchill, but Jones counters by pointing to an earlier iteration of the sentiment by Hermann Göring, Churchill’s enemy in World War II. So: Who said it first, the victorious Churchill or the vanquished Göring?

Neither of them. At a bare minimum, Driver’s Jones is correct to point out that Göring is indeed recorded as having voiced this sentiment at the Nuremberg trials. In the original German, Göring is reported to have said, “ Der Sieger wird immer der Richter und der Besiegte stets der Angeklagte sein ,” which more or less translates to the quote Driver utters in the film, “ The victor will always be the judge, and the vanquished the accused .”

As for Churchill, while he is strongly associated with the aphorism, as seen on inspiring Pinterest macros , at Brainy Quote , and in taunting tweets from WWE wrestlers , there’s actually no concretely documented instance in which he’s known to have uttered “History is written by the victors.” There’s a good chance part of the confusion here comes from a joke Churchill actually did say, in a speech before the House of Commons on Jan. 23, 1948: “For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself.” Churchill was apparently fond of the line, as he had been trotting out versions of it since the 1930s . He even tried another version of the witticism on Josef Stalin.

So who really coined the phrase? It was in use long before either Churchill or Göring uttered their variations. “I believe that the adage evolved over time,” says Garson O’Toole, proprietor of the indispensable site Quote Investigator . “There are versions of the saying in English, French, Italian, and German. But most of the early instances … do not contain the adage in general form. These instances are precursors.”

For example, on the mailing list of the American Dialect Society, quote researcher Ken Hirsch has pointed to instances in French from 1842 (“ [L]’histoire est juste peut-être, mais qu’on ne l’oublie pas, elle a été écrite par les vainqueurs ” or “[T]he history is right perhaps, but let us not forget, it was written by the victors”) and Italian from 1852 (“ La storia di questi avvenimenti fu scritta dai vincitori ”—or, as Hirsch translates it, “ The history of these events was written by the winners ”). And by 1844, as Hirsch noted, at least one of these narrower statements had made it into English. A description of defeated Maximilien Robespierre, the Jacobin hero during the French Revolution, described the state of his reputation like so: “Vanquished— his history written by the victors —Robespierre has left a memory accursed.”

But in each case these were not broad pronouncements about the nature of history itself. Those arrived toward the end of the 19 th century. For example, in 1889, as O’Toole told me, one biographer’s description of the 1746 Battle of Culloden in Scotland laments that we will never know how many members of his subject’s clan died on the battlefield, because “ it is the victor who writes the history and counts the dead .”

Two years later, the saying was in use in United States. In 1891, Missouri Sen. George Graham Vest, a former congressman for the Confederacy who was still at that late date an advocate for the rights of states to secede, used the phrase in a speech, reprinted by the Kansas City Gazette and other papers on the next day, Aug. 21, 1891. “In all revolutions the vanquished are the ones who are guilty of treason, even by the historians,” Vest said, “for history is written by the victors and framed according to the prejudices and bias existing on their side .” In other words, the world has rewritten history to credit the saying to one of the 20 th century’s greatest victors, but it’s always been very popular with history’s biggest losers.

Thanks to the editor of the Yale Book of Quotations , Fred Shapiro , and to the Quote Investigator, Garson O’Toole , for critical research into the central question of this article.

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Is history really written by the victors?

Winston Churchill once remarked: “History is written by the victors.” Or so we are led to believe; a German might have said it in 1941 before Mr Churchill later claimed it as his own.

It is one of the most commonly-cited quotes pertaining to the academic discipline of history, used to illustrate that history is often highly subjective because the people, groups or nations involved will mould accounts to their own ends. More specifically, the version of history written by the victorious people, groups or nations – the more powerful ones – will usually win out over others.

Perhaps though, and it is never wise to disagree with an individual held in such high esteem by so many, this is not entirely true. Perhaps it is unrealistic and slightly lazy to suggest that the weaker, defeated people from the past are merely subjects of their conquerors’ making without a voice of their own. If anything, to say history is written by the victors is to do a disservice to history itself.

Naturally there will be times when those in power suppress and silence opposition – they could use propaganda, censor material they don’t like or destroy entire civilisations and remove any traces that remain.

However, to be a good historian is to dig deeper, to account for such actions and come to more fair and balanced conclusions. When we look back on significant historical events, from the Roman Empire and medieval Vikings through to the European colonisation of Africa and the 20th Century’s World Wars, we have a broader understanding of exactly what happened – and why it happened – that goes beyond what the victors would say.

By bringing together a multitude of sources and accounting for discrepancies – such as a nation consciously trying to write history in a certain way – we can arrive at a fair conclusion. And that is they key: victors might write one version of history, but a history student’s job is to understand that is just one account and to then bring it together with other sources to get an accurate picture of the past.

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“History is written by the victors” — true?

Clichés are often over-generalizations for rhetorical purposes. “History is written by the victors” is punchy, but it is too often a cynical dismissal of objectivity in history. So here is the beginnings of a list of influential history books that do not fit the cliché:

* Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War (431 BCE) was an Athenian’s account of a long war (431–404 BCE) between Athens and Sparta. The Spartans won.

* Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776) was not written by one of the victorious barbarians.

* Friedrich Meinecke’s The German Catastrophe (1946) was a hugely influential work, nationally and internationally, by a German thinker grappling with his homeland’s disastrous record.

American examples would include the many histories written by southerners after the Civil War and the outpouring of post-Vietnam War books by U.S. historians.

Feel welcome in the Comments to add to the list.

8 thoughts on ““History is written by the victors” — true?”

Barbara Tuchmans a “distant mirror “

Years ago I met a pleasant, intelligent Turkish guy studying at the University of Toronto. What do you think he was studying? You guessed it: Middle Eastern history.

Said back home and neighbouring countries every historical narrative is distorted by the biases and propaganda needs of the political elites e.g. “Saddam, direct descendent of the prophet”, etc. He felt Westerners were not so entangled and had a greater interest in obtaining an objective understanding of the subject.

I think it depends. In the past, a lot of historical documents only presented the victor’s perspective–folks write from the perspective of the culture they’re in, after all, and victors tended to not treat conquered people kindly. Rome was an exception, allowing the conquered people to maintain their own culture and even adopting some of the gods of other cultures into their pantheons (Rome was notorious for praying to the gods of their enemies on the eve of battle, too!).

In contrast, modern history is written from an outsider’s perspective. None of us are Romans, or Visigoths, or Jacobians, or Sumarians. So we don’t favor one side or the other, or at least do so to a far lesser degree than folks did in the past. Plus, history is augmented with archaeology. History is a science now, one that makes testable claims and puts those claims to the test.

The film “Braveheart” starts with “History is written by the Victors”. The presumption being that, because he lost, we don’t know the truth about William Wallace. This forgets, of course, that Robert The Bruce ultimately defeated the English. So the Scots were the Victors.

Rome was not an exception to the general rule of Conquers. Once Emperor Constantine (325) declared Christianity the official religion of Rome Empire, the persecution began, of the indigenous religious beliefs. By the 600’s A.D. they outlawed all religions besides Judaism and Christianity. Emperor Theodosius 2 and third declared that, death in some cases, was the punishment for worshipping the old gods.

Just one question … how many _History of the Punic Wars_ books do you see written by Carthaginians? I have never seen any history where the implicit biases of the author did not actively, if unconsciously, filter what was written. If you can get them better to get them written by multiple from different countries so the facts come through different filters and you get a better overall view.

While it is true that history isn’t always written by the victors, it can be said that the victors sometimes diminished the influences and existences of the conquered through the desecration and destruction of their lands, structures, and documents.

Clearly what we need is a school / discipline of historical investigation, where major historical events / eras are comprehensively re-evaluated by a committee of academics, representing all of the relevant ‘stakeholders’….

Someone said history is now a science; so, let’s apply some objective rigour to the subject matter.

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Winston Churchill: 'History is written by the victors.'

History is written by the victors.

History is a complex tapestry that weaves together the narratives of countless individuals and civilizations. It is a record of events, both triumphs, and tragedies, that shape the world we inhabit today. Winston Churchill's famous quote, "History is written by the victors," succinctly encapsulates the idea that those who emerge victorious in conflicts have the power to shape and mold the historical accounts that future generations will come to know. At its core, this quote suggests that the dominant perspective of the winning side becomes the prevailing narrative, often overshadowing or even erasing the perspectives and experiences of the vanquished.The significance of Churchill's quote lies in its insight into the subjective nature of historical accounts. The victors, in their position of power, have the ability to mold events and narratives to suit their own agendas. They have the authority to determine which stories are highlighted or omitted, allowing them to project a version of events that paints their actions in the most favorable light, even if it means distorting the truth. Consequently, the voices and perspectives of the losers, who might offer a nuanced or different understanding of these events, are often marginalized or silenced altogether.Yet beyond the surface meaning lies a thought-provoking philosophical concept: the idea that history might not only be written by the victors but also rewritten by the losers. This notion challenges the notion of history as a static, predetermined truth and suggests that historical narratives are constantly evolving and subject to reinterpretation.Imagine a world where the victors' narrative is not the sole authority. What if history were to be written collaboratively, incorporating diverse perspectives and allowing for a more holistic understanding of events? This opens up the possibility of engaging in dialogue between the victors and the conquered, giving voice to the marginalized and offering a more nuanced understanding of history's intricacies.As we delve into this philosophical concept, we can examine contrasting case studies where the prevailing narrative of 'victor's history' has been challenged or rewritten. Take, for instance, the decolonization movements that swept across Africa and Asia in the 20th century. These struggles for independence sought to challenge the oppressive reign of colonial powers, often led by European nations. Once victorious, these formerly colonized nations were presented with an opportunity to redefine their history and reclaim their narratives.In this process, we witness how the oppressed began to reinterpret their turbulent past, seeking to highlight the untold stories and contributions of their people. Through the exploration of indigenous traditions, oral histories, and local perspectives, these nations embarked on a journey to rectify the biased historical accounts imposed on them. In doing so, they reshaped the narrative and provided a counterpoint to the version of events propagated by the colonizers.The decolonization movements are just one example of how history can be rewritten. There are countless other instances where suppressed voices and perspectives emerge, challenging dominant narratives. Women's movements, civil rights movements, and LGBTQ+ movements have all played a crucial role in rewriting history by highlighting the contributions and struggles of marginalized communities that were long ignored or misrepresented.If history is written by the victors, then it is also rewritten by those who seek to break free of the constraints of outdated narratives and power structures. By embracing diverse perspectives and engaging in ongoing revision, we can foster a more accurate and inclusive understanding of the past. It is through this collaborative rewriting of history that we can progress towards a more equitable future, rooted in empathy and understanding.In conclusion, Winston Churchill's quote, "History is written by the victors," offers a stark reminder of the subjective nature of historical accounts. It highlights the power dynamics at play in shaping the prevailing narrative. However, when we delve deeper, we discover an unexpected philosophical concept: that history can be rewritten by those previously marginalized or silenced. By amplifying diverse perspectives, challenging established narratives, and embracing ongoing revision, we can create a more inclusive and accurate understanding of the past. As we embark on this journey of collaborative storytelling, we not only challenge the notion of victors in history but also pave the way for a future where all voices are heard and acknowledged.

Winston Churchill: 'If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.'

Winston churchill: 'in wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.'.

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Is History Written by the Winners?

It’s the most tired of historical clichés, but is it so for a reason? Who writes history? Four would-be winners debate.

‘The powerful of one era are not the same as those of the preceding one’ 

Levi Roach, Associate Professor of Medieval History at the University of Exeter and author of Empires of the Normans: Makers of Europe, Conquerors of Asia (John Murray, 2022).

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The history of “history is written by the victors”.

Late in the new movie  The Report , Adam Driver’s Dan Jones argues with his prospective defense attorney over who really said, “History is written by the victors.” The lawyer (played by Corey Stoll) attributes the quote to Winston Churchill, but Jones counters by pointing to an earlier iteration of the sentiment by Hermann Göring, Churchill’s enemy in World War II. So: Who said it first, the victorious Churchill or the vanquished Göring?

Neither of them. At a bare minimum, Driver’s Jones is correct to point out that Göring is indeed recorded as having voiced this sentiment at the Nuremberg trials. In the original German, Göring is reported to have said, “ Der Sieger wird immer der Richter und der Besiegte stets der Angeklagte sein ,” which more or less translates to the quote Driver utters in the film, “ The victor will always be the judge, and the vanquished the accused .”

As for Churchill, while he is strongly associated with the aphorism, as seen on  inspiring Pinterest macros , at  Brainy Quote , and in  taunting tweets from WWE wrestlers , there’s actually no concretely documented instance in which he’s known to have uttered “History is written by the victors.” There’s a good chance part of the confusion here comes from a joke Churchill actually did say, in a speech before the House of Commons on Jan. 23, 1948: “For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself.” Churchill was apparently fond of the line, as he had been  trotting out versions of it since the 1930s . He even tried another version of the witticism on Josef Stalin.

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History is written by the victors.

Image by Carlos Latuff

Ever wondered why history books seem to tell one side of the story? It’s because history is often written by those who win, shaping our understanding of the past in their favor. “History is written by the victors,” a phrase famously attributed to Winston Churchill, is just one illustration of the inherently biased nature of historical narratives. It suggests that the winners of conflicts have the power to craft and dominate the stories that are passed down, often sidelining the defeated. As we dive into this concept, let’s see who gets to tell the story and whose stories are left out.

Victors not only win battles but also have the privilege to tell their stories. These narratives often emphasize their courage and righteousness, building a legacy that overshadows the defeated. This selective recounting influences how societies remember past events, molding collective memory to reflect the victors’ virtues and, at times, justifying their actions under the disguise of heroism or divine mandate.

The Silenced Stories of the Conquered

Perhaps nowhere is the maxim “History is written by the victors” more vividly illustrated than in the conquest of the Aztec Empire by Hernán Cortés in the early 16th century. This episode shows how the Spanish victors controlled the narrative, portraying their conquest as a noble mission to civilize and spread Christianity, while the catastrophic impact on the Aztec civilization—ranging from cultural erasure to demographic collapse due to violence and disease—was minimized or outright ignored in mainstream historical materials.

In this context, the Aztec perspective is often overshadowed, if not lost, painting an incomplete picture of the conquest. The voices of the Aztecs and their interpretations of the events, their rich culture before the Spanish arrival, and their resistance during and after the conquest are downgraded to the margins of history if mentioned at all.

The realization that history is shaped by the victors challenges us to critically examine the sources of our historical knowledge. Ask yourself: Who is telling this story? Whose interests are being served? What perspectives might be missing from the established narrative?

This critical approach to history doesn’t lead to the undermining of the accomplishments of those in power. On the contrary, it allows us to recognize and question the biases that can influence historical accounts as well. It encourages a more inclusive approach to historiography. The one that brings forward the voices of historically marginalized groups and confronts the complexities of power dynamics that have shaped our understanding of the past. By broadening our perspective, we can appreciate the full spectrum of human experiences and understand the past more completely.

The phrase “History is written by the victors” serves as a powerful reminder of the biases inherent in historical narratives. It shows us the importance of approaching history with a critical and inquisitive mindset, seeking out diverse perspectives to gain a fuller understanding of the past.

What is an example of how victors have shaped historical narratives?

A classic example is the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire in the early 16th century. The victorious Spaniards portrayed the conquest as a noble mission to civilize and Christianize the indigenous peoples, largely omitting the violence, diseases, and exploitation that accompanied their victory. This narrative minimized the devastating impact on the Aztec civilization and marginalized their perspective in historical accounts.

How are historians working to address the biases in historical narratives?

Modern historians and scholars are striving to present a more balanced view of history by seeking out and amplifying the voices and perspectives of those who were defeated or marginalized. This includes examining archaeological evidence, indigenous art, and surviving pre-Columbian and early colonial texts to uncover a fuller understanding of events like the Aztec conquest.

Why is it important to question and reexamine historical narratives?

Questioning and reexamining historical narratives is crucial for several reasons. It allows us to recognize and address the biases and omissions that have shaped our understanding of the past. By considering multiple perspectives, especially those of marginalized groups, we can develop a more accurate, comprehensive, and inclusive view of history. This approach helps us understand the complexities of past events and the diverse experiences of all people involved, fostering a more empathetic and informed perspective on history.

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Writing History: An Introductory Guide to How History Is Produced

What is history.

Most people believe that history is a "collection of facts about the past." This is reinforced through the use of textbooks used in teaching history. They are written as though they are collections of information. In fact, history is NOT a "collection of facts about the past." History consists of making arguments about what happened in the past on the basis of what people recorded (in written documents, cultural artifacts, or oral traditions) at the time. Historians often disagree over what "the facts" are as well as over how they should be interpreted. The problem is complicated for major events that produce "winners" and "losers," since we are more likely to have sources written by the "winners," designed to show why they were heroic in their victories.

History in Your Textbook

Many textbooks acknowledge this in lots of places. For example, in one book, the authors write, "The stories of the conquests of Mexico and Peru are epic tales told by the victors. Glorified by the chronicles of their companions, the conquistadors, or conquerors, especially Hernán Cortés (1485-1547), emerged as heroes larger than life." The authors then continue to describe Cortés ’s actions that ultimately led to the capture of Cuauhtómoc, who ruled the Mexicas after Moctezuma died. From the authors’ perspective, there is no question that Moctezuma died when he was hit by a rock thrown by one of his own subjects. When you read accounts of the incident, however, the situation was so unstable, that it is not clear how Moctezuma died. Note: there is little analysis in this passage. The authors are simply telling the story based upon Spanish versions of what happened. There is no interpretation. There is no explanation of why the Mexicas lost.   Many individuals believe that history is about telling stories, but most historians also want answers to questions like why did the Mexicas lose?

What Are Primary Sources?

To answer these questions, historians turn to primary sources, sources that were written at the time of the event, in this case written from 1519-1521 in Mexico. These would be firsthand accounts. Unfortunately, in the case of the conquest of Mexico, there is only one genuine primary source written from 1519-1521. This primary source consists of the letters Cortés wrote and sent to Spain. Other sources are conventionally used as primary sources, although they were written long after the conquest. One example consists of the account written by Cortés ’s companion, Bernal Díaz del Castillo. Other accounts consist of Mexica and other Nahua stories and traditions about the conquest of Mexico from their point of view.

Making Arguments in the Textbook

Historians then use these sources to make arguments, which could possibly be refuted by different interpretations of the same evidence or the discovery of new sources.  For example, the Bentley and Ziegler textbook make several arguments on page 597 about why the Spaniards won:

"Steel swords, muskets, cannons, and horses offered Cortés and his men some advantage over the forces they met and help to account for the Spanish conquest of the Aztec empire".

"Quite apart from military technology, Cortés' expedition benefited from divisions among the indigenous peoples of Mexico."

"With the aid of Doña Marina, the conquistadors forged alliances with peoples who resented domination by the Mexicas, the leaders of the Aztec empire...."

Ideally, under each of these "thesis statements," that is, each of these arguments about why the Mexicas were defeated, the authors will give some examples of information that backs up their "thesis." To write effective history and history essays, in fact to write successfully in any area, you should begin your essay with the "thesis" or argument you want to prove with concrete examples that support your thesis.  Since the Bentley and Ziegler book does not provide any evidence to back up their main arguments, you can easily use the material available here to provide evidence to support your claim that any one of the above arguments is better than the others.  You could also use the evidence to introduce other possibilities:  Mocteuzuma's poor leadership, Cortés' craftiness, or disease.

Become a Critical Reader

To become a critical reader, to empower yourself to "own your own history," you should think carefully about whether the evidence the authors provide does in fact support their theses.  Since the Bentley and Ziegler book provides only conclusions and not much evidence to back up their main points, you may want to explore your class notes on the topic and then examine the primary sources included on the Conquest of Mexico on this web site.

Your Assignment for Writing History with Primary Sources

There are several ways to make this a successful assignment. First, you might take any of the theses presented in the book and use information from primary sources to disprove it—the "trash the book" approach. Or, if your professor has said something in class that you are not sure about, find material to disprove it—the "trash the prof" approach (and, yes, it is really okay if you have the evidence ). Another approach is to include new information that the authors ignored . For example, the authors say nothing about omens. If one analyzes omens in the conquest, will it change the theses or interpretations presented in the textbook? Or, can one really present a Spanish or Mexica perspective?  Another approach is to make your own thesis, i.e., one of the biggest reasons for the conquest was that Moctezuma fundamentally misunderstood Cortés.

When Sources Disagree

If you do work with the Mexican materials, you will encounter the harsh reality of historical research: the sources do not always agree on what happened in a given event. It is up to you, then, to decide who to believe. Most historians would probably believe Cortés’ letters were the most likely to be accurate, but is this statement justified? Cortés was in the heat of battle and while it looked like he might win easy victory in 1519, he did not complete his mission until 1521.  The Cuban Governor, Diego Velázquez wanted his men to capture Cortés and bring him back to Cuba on charges of insubordination.  Was he painting an unusually rosy picture of his situation so that the Spanish King would continue to support him? It is up to you to decide. Have the courage to own your own history! Díaz Del Castillo wrote his account later in his life, when the Spaniards were being attacked for the harsh policies they implemented in Mexico after the conquest.  He also was upset that Cortés' personal secretary published a book that made it appear that only Cortés was responsible for the conquest. There is no question that the idea of the heroic nature of the Spanish actions is clearest in his account. But does this mean he was wrong about what he said happened and why? It is up to you to decide. The Mexica accounts are the most complex since they were originally oral histories told in Nahuatl that were then written down in a newly rendered alphabetic Nahuatl. They include additional Mexica illustrations of their version of what happened, for painting was a traditional way in which the Mexicas wrote history. Think about what the pictures tell us. In fact, a good paper might support a thesis that uses a picture as evidence. Again, how reliable is this material? It is up to you to decide.

One way to think about the primary sources is to ask the questions: (1) when was the source written, (2) who is the intended audience of the source, (3) what are the similarities between the accounts, (4) what are the differences between the accounts, (5) what pieces of information in the accounts will support your thesis, and (6) what information in the sources are totally irrelevant to the thesis or argument you want to make.

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The Civil War: Losing the War, Winning the History

• Steven Conn

One hundred and fifty years ago today, April 12, 1861, Edmund Ruffin proudly fired a shot at Fort Sumter, the Federal military installation in the Charleston, South Carolina, harbor.  Almost ceremonially it began the Civil War.  Four years and more than 600,000 dead Americans later, Ruffin fired what has been called the last shot of the war when he killed himself, so distressed was he that his beloved Confederacy had lost.

Steven Conn is Professor of History and Director of Public History at the Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio.

Writing History in the Global Era

FLeading historian Lynn Hunt rethinks why history matters in today’s global world and how it should be written. George Orwell wrote that “history is written by the winners.” Even if that seems a bit too cut-and-dried, we can say that history is always written from a viewpoint but that viewpoints change, sometimes radically. The history of workers, women, and minorities challenged the once-unquestioned dominance of the tales of great leaders and military victories. Then, cultural studies—including feminism and queer studies—brought fresh perspectives, but those too have run their course. With globalization emerging as a major economic, cultural, and political force, Lynn Hunt examines whether it can reinvigorate the telling of history. She hopes that scholars from East and West can collaborate in new ways and write wider-ranging works. At the same time, Hunt argues that we could better understand the effects of globalization in the past if we knew more about how individuals felt about the changes they were experiencing. She proposes a sweeping reevaluation of individuals’ active role and their place in society as the keys to understanding the way people and ideas interact. She also reveals how surprising new perspectives on society and the self—from environmental history, the history of human-animal interactions, and even neuroscience—offer promising new ways of thinking about the meaning and purpose of history in our time.

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"The Victors Write History"

I didn't push on this, but many commenters noted that the "victors" bit was an especially tepid strain of weak-sauce offered up by Lane. Indeed historians frequently invoke the Civil War to point out how awful the "victors" line really is. From Cynic :

Since when do "the victors write history?" It is the writers who write history. Often, that means the perspectives of the literate and the literary trump those of the unlettered. Those writing in societies with a strong degree of cultural continuity are more likely to have a lasting impact. But it is absurd to suggest that history is nothing more than the justification of events as they unfolded, straightforward triumphalism. If anything, it is more often written as a critique of society and events, past and present. Has Lane ever actually opened a textbook? Do they cast every failed attempt at justice as an ignoble stain upon our past? Certainly not. Nor are successful efforts at genocide, ethnic cleansing, or revolution necessarily lauded. So his entire premise here is utterly fallacious, built upon a common truism that happens to be false.

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"History is Written By Victors" is a Foolish Phrase

Some quotes are clever; some only superficially so. Often, we are so awed by a statement that we don’t ever question its veracity. Take, Betteridge’s law of headlines , for example. The maxim assets that every headline ending with a question mark can be answered with a “no.” A straightforward analysis points that the law only applies 25% of the times . Probably, the originator didn’t consider genuine uses of having a question as a headline.

“History is Written by Victors.” The quote gets attributed to Winston Churchill, but its origins are unknown . It implies that history is not grounded in facts, rather it’s the winners’ interpretation of them that prevails. The victors can force their narrative down on the people. (Actually, there could be multiple interpretations. The term ‘winner’ itself is ambiguous. So, I have made certain assumptions.)

To an extent, this happens. Mercedes had to apologize for tweeting a quote of Dalai Lama after receiving a backlash form the Chinese. Why? Because he’s considered a terrorist in the mainland. Debate on Tibet’s sovereignty aside, it’s obvious that PRC has tried to disseminate a twisted version of the history.

However, there are so many things wrong with the phrase that it can’t be taken seriously (unless you were to severely limit its scope.)

First, history isn’t set in stone. When new facts emerge, it gets revisited. The Wright Brothers, who were celebrities in their heyday, believed so strongly in their innovation that they never considered that they are crossing the line in enforcing patents. Such was their stature that they won every major lawsuit. Today, those actions are rightfully considered patent trolling. Of course, the public view is still in their favor today. But, that’s only because what they did was truly revolutionary.

You might win history for a certain time period, but that doesn’t imply no one will question you actions in the future.

Second, it’s difficult to assume that a person or a regime can force an interpretation unless they were to be highly oppressive. Promoting and mantaining a false image of the past would mean to oppress all the facts and mediums of free speech. After all, it only takes one dissenter to take down the whole narrative. Some regimes, like North Korea’s, have been exceptionally successful at this. Amid deep surveillance, and strict control on access to information, the public is fed with patently false information: “South Korea is poverty-stricken,” “North Korea ended WWII,” and “Koreans are a pure and superior race.”

But, how far can one go when there’s a little bit of democracy and free speech? China is known suppress all accounts of Tiananmen Square Massacre, but that hasn’t erased the knowledge of the event from the nation.

The counterexamples to the phrase are numerous.

• Japan carried out a brutal attack on China and its citizens during the WWII. But, except maybe by their own people, the attacks were never seen in favorable light.
• Robert Moses, one of the most successful public official in terms of projects executed, had mastered the art of having media and public opinion on his side. Nevertheless, his dirty, manipulative tactics did come in light later (particularly after Robert Caro wrote his biography.)
• Genghis Khan, one of the great victors in all history, is generally viewed quite unfavorably in practically all sources because his conquests tended to harm the literary classes.

The Reality

Sometimes, historical facts do get twisted for petty gains. Sometimes, people are made to buy a blatant lie. I can recall a book that proudly claimed that plastic surgery, nuclear weapons, aeroplanes and big bang theory were already discovered in ancient India.

But, that doesn’t have to do anything with who’s the winner or the loser. The driving factor here is who stands to gain the most. It’s fairly simple to bolster citizens’ self-image by harping about the glorious past. Hence, the Indian politicians’ sustained efforts to do.

History is written by everyone. The more accurate quote would be, “History is temporarily twisted by people who’re going to profit from it in the short term.”

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Written by the Winners

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When the official history of the setting is overwritten by the ones in power and their Propaganda Machine . As such the real heroes and good guys are given Historical Villain Upgrade , the bad guys build a Cult of Personality around their actions and all the bad sides of the past is submitted to a Rose-Tinted Narrative .

Also worth pointing out that not every "winner" is going to be slick and sly about their crimes, simply because they don't view them as crimes . Many of history's "winners" will be surprisingly honest about atrocities or even write proudly of how they brutally crushed their opponents, because it would serve their self-interest and their careerist aspirations. For example, Caesar wrote of his genocide of the Gauls in his personal memoirs , and historians doubt that account and other Roman accounts only because they feel Caesar is exaggerating, not only his actions but also those of his enemies, since Romans always did like painting its wars as "defensive" and their victories as underdog triumphs, so historians are skeptical about the moments when Romans invoke Worthy Opponent on their enemies as well. It likewise appealed to the vanity and pride of an Empire to preserve trophies and symbols of their conquest of foreign peoples, after all if the winner is writing a history, they would need losers to make themselves and their achievements look special. You can't be a King without a Kingdom and a People to rule over, so in every work of propaganda there are, for lack of a better term, Freudian Slip and other bits and moments that actually do allow the multitude to peep over the shoulder of their rulers. It's also worth pointing out the most obvious fact that even people on the same side will often disagree wildly on events and motivations .

This is also connected with Grey-and-Gray Morality and Morality Kitchen Sink in that picking one side of the story over the other in this context does not necessarily make it correct. After all, Your Terrorists Are Our Freedom Fighters .

Note that if the historical dispute already exists its use may become controversial at worst, or people may feel there is a Writer on Board at best. And if it doesn't, people may not take it seriously, and think that Beethoven Was an Alien Spy is at play instead (disputing historical accounts is the task of historians, not authors of works of fiction). The usual way to deal with this is to apply the trope to completely fictional history , where both the official and disputed events are fictional to begin with. Such as the exploits of the national hero of a fictional country, or a Empire with a Dark Secret . The usual way is to provide a recap of the official history, have the hero find out the real and darker history, and start a conflict between him and the figures in power that may be in problem if the actual history comes to light. There are three possible outcomes. One, The Bad Guy Wins and official history stays. Two, the actual history comes to light, and Nothing Is the Same Anymore . Third, the hero realizes the scope of the changes that would take place and decides that it's not worth it; for good or evil, history has already happened a long time ago, and its discussion should be merely academic.

A prime belief of every Conspiracy Theorist . Sub-trope of Might Makes Right . Supertrope of Internal Retcon and Pop-Cultural Osmosis and Hollywood History . Contrast You Cannot Kill An Idea and Won the War, Lost the Peace .

Example Subpages:

• One of the tools that 20th Century Boys ' Friend uses to win over all of Japan and, later, the rest of the world . It's so much easier to be a Villain with Good Publicity when the public at large is convinced that you saved the world from that Ragtag Bunch of Misfits .
• In Attack on Titan the history of the Eldian people sees this from both sides. During their reign, the Eldians depicted themselves as bringers of civilization and wealth; the Marleyans who replaced them depict the Eldians as bloodthirsty racists who tried to exterminate the Marleyans. Even their link to the Titans is subject to this, with Eldians claiming it as a divine blessing and the Marleyans as a demonic pact. The Eldians were imperfect humans and so could not have been perfect rulers; at the same time their rule was so long that if they had truly tried to exterminate the Marleyans none would remain. It's eventually revealed that the truth is somewhere in-between. The Eldians did indeed use the Titans to develop civilization and bring wealth to themselves, but they were also conquerors who went around destroying and subjugating other nations and did indeed try to wipe out the Marleyans, who were their hated enemies. And the connection to the Titans is neither divine nor demonic, but the end result of a total accident .
• In Campione! , Athena used to be Queen of the Gods, as well as the Goddess of Death. Then Zeus defeated her in battle and took over as ruler. He rewrote history and the myths so that her true role was forgotten and she was demoted to being one of his daughters. This is the underlying principle of all Divine Ancestors. Earth goddesses defeated by warrior gods have their power stolen and memories sealed, rendering them obedient daughters or wives of the victor. This usually appears in mythology as a hero conquering a dragon (earth goddesses often manifest as dragons) and rescuing a maiden.
• In Death Note , Light tells the Task Force that if Kira wins, he's justice; if he loses, evil. He loses.
• Gate : Three years before the main story, the Empire invaded the Kingdom of the Warrior Bunnies . The Warrior Bunnies fought back, but Queen Tyuule realized that if this continued, they would lose. She bravely offered herself to Prince Zorzal as a Sex Slave if he would spare her people. Unfortunately, he took her as a slave and then had the Kingdom razed anyway , with anyone who couldn't escape killed or enslaved. The Empire then recorded in their public records that Tyuule cowardly sold out her people and offered herself to Zorzal to save her own life. As a result, the survivors hate Tyuule's guts and think she is a traitor. Sometime after Tyuule's death, the protagonists find out the truth of the matter and manage to clear her name.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stardust Crusaders : Early on, while brainwashed by DIO , Kakyoin justifies his villainy on the grounds that the victor is the one who has justice and the loser is always the evil one. How one goes about winning is irrelevant as long as they're the last man standing. Jotaro proceeds to throw it all back into his face with a series of punches.
• Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans features a particularly infuriating example. Despite being one of the most corrupt members of Gjallarhorn , Rustal Elion crushes both Tekkadan and the Revolutionary Fleet, and with the help of Nobliss Gordon's media connections, is able to spin the whole thing to make himself look like the good guy. He completely gets away with everything , and even earns more good publicity for himself by implementing "reforms" to Gjallarhorn (which are really just a means of expanding his own personal power) while Tekkadan only go down as footnotes in history.
• At the end of Ōoku: The Inner Chambers , the Meiji government destroys all evidence that the Tokugawa Shogunate were women or that women ever had any kind of ruling position in any of Japan's Clans, and rewrites history with all the people involved having been male all along. The Chronicle of a Dying Day started under Iemitsu the Younger, which contained the history of the female Tokugawa dynasty, is burned, and the Inner Chambers that made up the main setting of the manga are scourged of any evidence that men lived there. Only a few people escape the Boshin War alive with knowledge of the original history, and they are all sworn to the Ooku code of secrecy.
• This trope is an explicit belief held by Donquixote Doflamingo, who says that whoever wins the war between the World Government and Whitebeard will be the ones to define what "Justice" means. Considering that Doflamingo is one of the descendants of the "winners," this is not surprising in the least.
• In Wano, children of the Flower Capital are taught that Shogun Orochi saved the nation by defeating the Kozuki Clan and stopping them from opening the nation's borders to invasion. The truth is, Orochi teamed up with and basically gave Wano to the Beasts Pirates who slew the rightful Lord Oden (The next shogun) in a bloody invasion and the country outside the capital is dying because of the pirates' factories.
• In PandoraHearts , it turns out that the most detailed records of the Tragedy of Sablier were written by Arthur Barma, who was manipulated by Jack Vessalius . Jack was the one who tried to throw the former capital into the Abyss , killed Glen Baskerville and put all the blame on him. As a result, the Baskervilles and their allies were treated like criminals for a century.
• Record of Ragnarok : When Lu Bu was defeated and executed, he met his death with quiet dignity. However, to spite him, it was recorded that he cried and begged for mercy.
• The backstory of the former La Résistance in the anime of RideBack , which becomes a global military, is only vaguely discussed to the mostly-cheerful populace , but there is clearly some betrayal that forms the antagonism between former teammates.
• The motto of Big Bad Makoto Shishio in Rurouni Kenshin .
• Saint Seiya — Cancer Deathmask subscribes to this theory, but was in the wrong side of the conflict. However, in the Hades arc, he could've been subscribing to this and just been smart for once.
• In Scrapped Princess , Earth was conquered by the aliens who then rewrote history, presenting the heroes of La Résistance and Les Collaborateurs as evil and good gods, respectively.
• Once upon a time, the Shi'ar were almost destroyed by the Mephitistoids, an Always Chaotic Evil race with Compelling Voice . But, in their darkest hour, T'Kyll Alabar managed to inspire bravery in the Shi'ar troops, who fought with renewed strength and managed to turn the tide of the war and win. The Mephitistoid leader was sentenced to roam space in a Sleeper Starship , alongside the hero who defeated him. Legend Fades to Myth , until the day the ship crashed on Earth. Alabar, the living legend, explained to the Shi'ar Deathcry that it was all propaganda, that the reviled Mephitistoids were actually noble aliens defending their homeland from an invading Empire . And the Vision figured out something else as well. Legend says that Alabar inspired bravery in the soldiers all by himself, but doesn't mention how . It would be better to forget that little detail ...
• Asterix : Asterix and the Missing Scroll is about the Roman's attempts to pull off this trope. Caesar plans to leave his failure to conquer the Gaul village out of Commentaries on the Gallic War , knowing the illiterate Gauls will have no way to protest. A rouge scribe steals the chapter containing these losses and passes to the Gaul village, who in turn pass it to a teacher who spreads it orally until it reached René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo in the 20th century, who then tell the stories as the ''Asterix'' comic books .
• In an issue of Peter David 's Captain Marvel , Rick Jones and Genis-Vell travel to a far-flung After the End future where the Earth is covered in desert and has been colonized by aliens. The only surviving history was written by Doctor Doom . Notably, this means that all superheroes were portrayed as evil villains who stood in the way of progress. Hitler was still a bad guy, though, because he persecuted the Roma (Doom's ethnic group).
• Final Crisis : Legion of 3 Worlds begins with Superboy-Prime being thrown into the Legion Of Superheroes ' time. Soon after, he happens upon the Superman museum, and is outraged to learn that history depicts him as an even bigger loser than he really is; the holographic tour guide mocks Prime for always "whining" about how his lost Earth was "better", and not only claims that he was easily defeated in all his major battles, but that the C-list villain Neutron had a bigger impact on Superman than Prime ever did. This leads Prime to decide to become a villain that history cannot ignore, which he attempts to accomplish by gathering together every villain in the future into an army to destroy the Earth and everything Superman helped build in the future.
• Legends of the Dead Earth : In Adventures of Superman Annual #8, the Curatti believe that their ancestors invaded Ramar, the homeworld of the Sarkons, a millennium earlier and that the Sarkons defeated them, bringing an end to their cruel campaign of conquest. However, it turns out that Ramar is in fact the homeworld of the Curatti and that it was invaded by the Sarkons. The myth that the Curatti's ancestors were a race of conquerors who preyed on the weak was perpetuated by the Sarkons so that the Curatti would hate themselves, making them easier to subjugate.
• Wonder Woman Historia: The Amazons : The opening intro evokes this with stating everything everyone knows about the Amazons are a biased history written by men as the Amazons ultimately lost the war with Man's World. The book presents itself as a history of the Amazons that would have been written for a young Amazon.
• In another issue of Peter David 's (this time X-Factor (2006) ), Quicksilver offers his own version of the phrase: "The future is written by the winners. History is written by the survivors."
• Anyone : All For One is quite clear when he tells Izuku and Shoto that their history books are full of lies and propaganda to hide the blatant corruption of the early Quirk era. Some examples he mentions include a politician who supposedly advocated for the rights of quirked people but actually used them for slave labour, and a vigilante said to have died in a battle against a Villain, but was actually assassinated by the government in her hospital bed.
• In Avenger Goddess , Clint wonders if this trope is the reason that Herakles is seen as a hero after hearing about the god's past crimes, but Diana explains that Herakles genuinely was a hero once before Hera's actions drove him mad with grief. Clint is subsequently heartened to learn that the Trojan War happened basically as recorded.
• Bad Future Crusaders : The official story of Twilight Sparkle's rise to power is that Princess Luna once again became Nightmare Moon after Celestia's death, conveniently "forcing" Twilight to strike her down and assume complete control of the country for herself. Even those loyal to her don't hesitate to call this out as BS (in private, at least).
• In Black Book of Arda , one of the most prominent Russian J. R. R. Tolkien fanfics, The Silmarillion is revised this way.
• Invoked in The Chosen Six when Hermione's parents question how wizarding society can hold Salazar Slytherin in such high esteem after he became a racist madman, Hermione pointing out that his personal prejudices generally aren't a big deal and that various historical figures have equally controversial pasts despite their otherwise positive impacts.
• In Custody Battle , a My Hero Academia fanfiction, All for One reveals that much of modern history was revised to be "more palatable", based on his personal experiences as someone who lived through the dawn of the age of quirks.
• A Divine (Romantic) Comedy : It's mentioned that Belos destroyed and rewrote the history of the Boiling Isles to fit his anti-Wild Magic agenda, with researchers trying to uncover the truth now that he's gone. Already, the "Savage Ages" have been renamed to the "Wild Ages" as a result of casting off his old propaganda.
• In Equestria: A History Revealed , the Conspiracy Theorist Lemony Narrator seems to think that all of Equestria's history was rewritten by Celestia, despite clear evidence that this is not the case. However, Celestia does alter history a few times in eliminating Discord's name before his return, sealing away the records on the Crystal Empire, and altering some aspects of the Equestrian Civil War , which hints that the Lemony Narrator was not entirely incorrect.
• In Fury and Flame , after Azula and other Fire Nation personnel appear in Westeros (and set up a miniature Fire Nation on Dragonstone, with numerous small outposts across the continent), Westeros receives a highly biased version of the Fire Nation's history — the Air Nomads, Water Tribes, and Earth Kingdom are, in a highly unflattering analogy, compared to the Dothraki, the Wildlings, and Slavers' Bay, respectively.
• The Games Tent : When Oblina is looking for the 'Human Manual' she presumes exists as a counterpart to the Monster Manual , she demands Bradley's history book. Later, when she returns it while singing the praises of humans and all their accomplishments, he gives her a paperback detailing the darker aspects of history, bitterly calling his history book propaganda and insisting the new one will give her a much clearer picture of humanity. She doesn't take it well.
• Halloween Unspectacular : During the climax of the seventh edition's Story Arc — which initiates the Darkest Hour of the second Myth Arc — General Rausseman gleefully talks about how after he's won, the history books will remember him as a hero for wiping out all nonhumans and superpowered people , and the actual heroes as terrorists and criminals for trying to stand in his way.
• A variation occurs in How I Lost My Mother where Princess Celestia uses the Elements of Harmony to not only strip her daughter of her immortality and access to Unicorn Magic, but also to erase everypony's memories and official documentation to make it impossible for Cozy Glow to try proving that she really is Celestia's daughter in the first place.
• The Last Ringbearer points out that the Red Book, which is the basis of The Lord of the Rings , is actually a history written by the winners. It's bursting full of examples. In it, the Orks and Wild Men of the south are simply people of color. The Red Book dehumanizes its enemies, makes light of Aragorn using Necromancy to defeat the Mordorians and condemns the scientific nation of Mordor as corrupters by blaming the desertification of their homeland on them. The war was started by Gandalf because the enemy technology was becoming stronger, while the magic of the eldritch elves and the wizards became only weaker as knowledge was lost. Saruman saw that the only way to stamp out science was to commit genocide and wanted nothing to do with it. Further, Aragorn taunts the Mordorian general after having him shot in the back during a honor duel: "The history books will say you got killed by a midget and a broad." Though this whole premise is rather undermined by the fact that Hobbits that actually wrote the Red Book don't exist in the fic, raising way too many questions.
• Legends of Equestria : When Princess Luna became Nightmare Moon, her actual goal was to re-acquire equal footing with her sister, who had taken all the power in the country for herself. Luna fully intended to restore the day and go back to business as usual afterwards. Rather than give up sole power over the country, Celestia disposed of Nightmare Moon and vilified her in the history books.
• The Lunar Rebellion : The Pegasopolan ephors, and Swift Blade and Bright Charger in particular, claim that Celestia rewrote much of Equestria's official history to make herself look better, considering the tale of Nightmare Moon to be a smear campaign created by Celestia after unjustly overthrowing her sister to make herself sole ruler of Equestria, and further justify their alliance with warlocks and lunar cultists by the reasoning that assigning such titles is simply a way for Celestia to discredit political opponents. Subverted in the end, as this is all portrayed as being completely incorrect — Nightmare Moon is still a self-centered Mad God , the warlocks are genuinely horrible people, and this belief in general seems to be more than anything a way for the Ephorate to retroactively justify their rebellion against Celestia — and not all ephors buy much into this line of reasoning, for that matter.
• My Mirror, Sword and Shield : The history that gets written down is very different from what happened in the fic. Cornelia, Schneizel and the Black Knights were the heroic resistance fighters who put aside their differences to fight a tyrant. In reality, Cornelia and Schneizel were planning to back stab their Japanese allies so they could hold onto Imperialist power. The Black Knights hated every second they had to work with them and were extremely nationalist. Euphemia and Sir Raleigh go down as martyrs when they were murdered by Suzaku for attempting peace with the Japanese people. Euphemia was actually murdered by Sir Raleigh who feared she was cheating on him with Suzaku and his racism refused to accept that. Emperor Lelouch is remembered as a horrible tyrant and Suzaku is remembered as The Quisling who slept his way into becoming the Emperor's right hand man and murderously loyal Yandere to him. Lelouch actually ensured his sister, Empress Nunnally's peaceful rule through many backroom deals and purges ; Suzaku was actually a time traveler who sided with Lelouch to make sure he didn't derail history. Suzaku is believed to have been the most powerful person in the War of Ascension after Emperor Lelouch. Suzaku had relatively little political power due to everyone despising him due to his race. Emperor Lelouch was believed to be assassinated and Suzaku committed suicide in grief. Suzaku and Lelouch escaped to the future after faking their deaths.
• Night's Favored Child : After defeating Celestia , Nightmare Moon spends the next thousand years not only removing all traces of her from history, but also of the very concept of day , including removing words like "dusk", "dawn", "sun", and (notably) "twilight" from the lexicon.
• Celestia reveals she erased Discord from the history books because, in her mind, he didn't deserve a legacy after all he'd done. She also explained that she didn't want the memory of those like Shady who were related to Discord to be tainted by association with him .
• We later see the Sea Ponies in the Epilogue timeline are fed a completely rewritten version of history that's the complete opposite of what happened, right down to Discord blaming the Alicorns for the genocide he committed .
• The Hooviet empire does this via propaganda, so that they never have to admit to having ever lost a war.
• Cadence defies this after the Changeling battle: Cadence beats Chrysalis and becomes the Changeling Queen, while Chrysalis dies of her injuries and is reincarnated as an innocent filly . Cadence then tells the Changelings to remember Chrysalis for the good she did, but also not deny the evil either .
• A Thing of Vikings : Referenced in Chapter 36, in a scene where Ruffnut pledges to help her husband Magnus break free of Einar's control, and envisions a future in which Magnus is revered as a strong, wise and beloved ruler. "Well, the ones who write the sagas are the winners, yeah? I wanna write that one."
• In This Bites! , Luffy plans to use this trope when he becomes Pirate King . Luffy is a Friendly Pirate , but he knows adventurers like him are the minority and that most pirates are Rape, Pillage, and Burn monsters. Luffy hates these kinds of pirates, and that the world sees them as the status quo . When he becomes Pirate King, it will prove that his style of piracy is what a real pirate is, and the criminals will be the "fakes" to the world.
• Vainglorious carries over Thor: Ragnarok 's depiction of Odin rewriting Asgard's history to mask its violent rise. Aside from erasing Hela's era, the fic also includes the wars with the Dark Elves and Vanir. Current history vastly understates the power and threat of the Dark Elves. Meanwhile the Vanir's supposed defeat was actually a peace treaty after the Aesir found themselves unable to break a stalemate with their vastly more populous rival.
• Frozen II begins with Elsa and Anna being told a story about their grandfather, King Runeard. Having established a treaty with the neighboring Northuldra tribe by building a dam in their homeland, the Enchanted Forest, Runeard threw a feast to celebrate the peace between Arendelle and Northuldra. However, a fight broke out, and the native spirits of the forest lashed out at Runeard and his people. Later in the film, though, we find out Runeard built the dam to cut off the Northuldra's water supply, and the "feast" was intended to help him find out how big their army was. Once he decided it was a fight he could win, he tried to kill the unarmed leader of the Northuldra in secret. The sisters only manage to make everything right when Anna destroys the dam .
• NIMONA (2023) : The official history of the kingdom was that Gloreth, a mighty knight, defended her village from a wicked monster before founding the Institute. In truth, Gloreth was just a child who befriended the monster, Nimona, before the adults turned on her for her shapeshifting. After the village was accidentally set ablaze in the riot, Gloreth simply told Nimona to leave, ending their friendship.
• The Sea Beast : Throughout the film, Maisie starts to wonder if the books she (and everyone else) read about sea beasts aren't skewed in perspective after she and Jacob note several things wrong with it with regards to sea monsters and their history. She later realizes that the books are part of a campaign to stoke hatred against the sea monsters with the ultimate goal of wiping them out so the empire can expand far beyond its current borders.
• Trolls World Tour : The six Troll tribes in the film each possess a magical string tied to the music which represents them: the villain, Queen Barb, seeks to gather up all the strings and destroy them so only rock music is left. Poppy's father, King Peppy, is the one who tells her about the strings and sends her off to stop Barb: what he leaves out is that the six tribes used to live together, with all the strings in the same place. It was the Pop Trolls, Poppy's tribe, who caused the schism by attempting Barb's plan years ago, only they intended to replace it all with pop music . Interestingly in this case, it was the winners of the conflict (the tribes that stopped Pop from taking over) that wrote history as it happened, while the losers scrubbed it out and played it as more Grey and Gray than it was.
• The documentary The Act of Killing is essentially about what happens to society after war criminals win .
• This is the impetus behind Thanos's revised plan in Avengers: Endgame — a completely new universe that is unaware of the destruction of the current one will eliminate any chance of someone attempting to undo Thanos's work.
• Braveheart , the opening monologue: "I shall tell you of William Wallace. Historians from England will say I am a liar, but history is written by those who have hanged heroes." Note, however, that both the English and the Scottish were united in calling out the film for its blatant historical inaccuracies (on the Scots' side, it sidelined an even greater national hero — the future King Robert the Bruce — in favor of Wallace, whom he is falsely portrayed as betraying).
• Evoked in The Devil's Advocate : Kevin Lomax tells John Milton that Satan and his progeny lost in the Bible, and they're destined to lose again at the end of time. Milton retorts that of course the Bible would say that, considering who it's written by. The ironic part is that the Bible has very little to say about Satan and "the Heavenly argument", and in earlier Jewish tradition, he was even considered an ally of God. Much of the Satanic role came from later traditions of Christianity and was informed by the poet John Milton's "Paradise Lost", who was famously called "of the devil's party without knowing it".
• Fahrenheit 451 (2018) : The regime has edited history to claim Benjamin Franklin started the Firemen, and thus even the Founding Fathers backed their book-burning work. Franklin did in fact start the first real fire department in the then-Colonial America (Philadelphia's), though he would no doubt be appalled by this.
• Directly addressed by former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in the 2003 documentary The Fog of War , who admitted that firebombing 63 Japanese cities and following it up with 2 nuclear bombs would be considered a war crime if not for the fact that he was on the winning side, and then wonders why that should make any difference.
• Invoked by Long John Silver in Muppet Treasure Island , when he sings about Sir Francis Drake : ". . .The Spanish all despise him / But to the British, he's a hero, and they idolize him."
• Thor: Ragnarok reveals that Asgard's power and influence was won the way most empires win influence. Odin just had a change of heart and covered the messy bits up.
• In the Underworld (2003) movies, Viktor rewrote vampire history to appear as if he was the original vampire, when, in fact, it was another Elder, Marcus . So this is a literal case of history being written by the Viktor. Despite this, he doesn't hide the fact that Marcus is a son of the first immortal Alexander Corvinus, although he claims it's a children's story .
• An important theme in Wang De Sheng Yan , where control over records and histories is shown to be a powerful tool. Empress Lü Zhi has scribes record events that will happen to her enemies at court. The she makes them happen. Something of An Aesop about how powerful people falsify history.
• Referenced in 1632 by Cardinal Richelieu, as to why he isn't surprised or bothered all that much by how villainous he looks in our uptime media.
• Nineteen Eighty-Four . This was the whole purpose of MiniTrue (The Ministry of Truth) , which constantly rewrites history to suit the Party's current needs and destroys and replaces "inaccurate" accounts and records with today's official version of events — which is in turn likely to be "corrected" again tomorrow, when the Party's needs change. ("He who controls the past, controls the future; he who controls the present, controls the past.")
• Animorphs . Interestingly, it's the humans that do this, refusing to put Jake on trial for war crimes while happily trying Visser One for the same charge.
• In Arcia Chronicles , The Church rewrote history of the War of the Deer to remove all positive mentions of those heroes who didn't comply with its official doctrine.
• A side story in the series has a copy of Artemis's report card. The headmaster says that Artemis proposed building a Time Machine to get around this trope, and doesn't doubt Artemis would succeed if he tried.
• In The Bartimaeus Trilogy , history classes are mandatory for commoners' children, where they're taught a version of history that uplifts the magicians on the side of the British government and casts commoners in general as weak and unable to rule. Foreign governments are vilified, and the Czechs have a particularly bad time of it, this being the ruling government prior to Britain. Questions are generally discouraged and regarded with disdain. Ironically, the government has whitewashed things so thoroughly that even the magicians themselves are never taught the full truth and actually wholeheartedly believe the state line in many things. This is rather ironic, because if they did know the real history it would help them identify certain recurring patterns and thus, at least for a time, help them maintain their faltering power.
• In a BattleTech novel, a character counters to someone stating this that "History is written by the survivors" and that "given my track record, you should hope I remember you fondly".
• Glen Cook's The Black Company novels have a lot to say about warfare and human nature, particularly as depicted in High Fantasy . The first book strongly implies that most Black-and-White Morality shown in High Fantasy is actually the result of history being written by the winners (who them portray themselves as the purest light, and their foes as blackest darkness). The Lady is a story of redemption, but also of Grey-and-Gray Morality , as it is repeatedly emphasized that, while she may be evil, she is not nearly as evil as her husband.
• The Commentaries on the Gallic War are a literal example. Our primary source of information about the Gallic Wars was written by the man himself who won them.
• Subverted... kind of... in Small Gods : Om: Winners don't have glorious victories. That's because they're the ones who get to see what the battlefield looks like afterwards. It's only the losers who have glorious victories.
• Another Discworld example, from Hogfather , as Susan tells a bedtime story: Susan: And then Jack chopped down what was the world's last beanstalk, adding murder and ecological terrorism to the theft, enticement and trespass charges already mentioned, but he got away with it and lived happily ever after without so much as a guilty twinge about what he had done. Which proves that you can be excused just about anything if you're a hero, because no-one asks inconvenient questions.
• In Unseen Academicals , all the histories say the goblins were on the other side, regardless of which side wrote them. The goblins didn't even have a pencil.
• Doctor Who Expanded Universe : In Just War , the Doctor deconstructs this mindset in a Russian Roulette confrontation with a captured Nazi, pointing out that even if you get to write the history books it doesn't make you and your cause good: The Doctor: You can't create anything with a gun, Herr Wolfe, let alone Utopia, authority, or truth. You can dress up in a scary black uniform and talk about destiny. You can use the full power of the state to rewrite biology, mythology, genealogy, history, and geography. Burn all the books you disagree with, burn all the people who wrote or read them. Hold a parade in every street, attend a thousand Party rallies. Gang up on the weak, persecute the minorities. Win the war. It still won't make you right.
• Dragon and Damsel : The school play in the prologue is an example of this. According to it, Edmonton was saved from the dragon tormenting them by the brave and noble Sir Edmond. Later, one of the descendants of the slain dragon reveals that the dragon wasn't harming the village at all, that the knights did several terrible things to even reach their castle, and slaughtered several innocent dragons, some of them hatchlings.
• In The Egyptian , Sinuhe muses that due to Horemheb's rewriting of history, no one will ever remember the three Pharaohs that preceded him: Ay, Tutankhamon and Achenaton. Horemheb was, obviously, less than successful.
• Played with in Ender's Game . The eponymous character wins the war, and then goes on to write its history from his defeated enemy's point of view , leading him to be vilified as a war criminal for thousands of years. The winners write the history books, but that doesn't mean they have to cast themselves as the heroes.
• This is a major theme in For Want of a Nail , an Alternate History of the North American continent following a quelled The American Revolution . The In-Universe persona of the author has very little sympathy for them, and is called out on it by an In-Universe peer review at the end of the book, who invokes this trope to some extent.
• In A Gift From Earth , the official histories say that the social stratification of Plateau was initially agreed upon by the crew and colonists because the crew had done the work and taken the risks. In fact, the original crew "convinced" the original colonists at gunpoint.
• In Fleet of Worlds , the official histories say that the Puppeteers rescued a crippled human colony ship and settled its occupants on one of their worlds. In fact, the Puppeteers themselves had attacked the ship out of panic that it had discovered one of the worlds being moved into the fleet, and then enslaved the occupants in order to breed a compliant population.
• Orientalism by the Palestinian-American critic Edward W. Said is a non-fiction work that explores in detail how colonialist nations abuse their control of the media and command of universities and textbooks to spread stereotypes and Flanderization of a complex, subtle and regionally diverse culture and how this comes to define the general perception of the Middle East well into the 20th Century.
• Practitioners in Pale , who write most of the relevant in-universe histories, can't lie verbally or in written form, so instead they tend to leave out context or search for events that justify their worldview in their writings. This is most notable in Famulus , where the cordial relationships between practitioners and Others in Namibia is portrayed as a direct result of the most dangerous Others being killed or bound by colonial practitioners.
• Princess Academy : Discussed in the third book, The Forgotten Sisters. Miri relates an event in Danlandian history where a pair of royal twins, Katarina and Klas, were born. Before Klas could be crowned king, Katarina forced the royal physician to declare that she was actually the firstborn and thus the rightful queen, sparking a civil war that she eventually lost. Miri asks her students what would be written in the history book if Katarina had won. Astrid suggests that the physician, after years of being threatened into silence, bravely revealed that Princess Katarina was the firstborn, but the evil, greedy Prince Klas started a civil war in an attempt to murder his sister.
• The same is done in Reflections of Eterna , particularly in the prequel Flame of Eterna : Rinaldi Rakan was sentenced to death by his royal brother and left in history as a monster, while he was framed by his brother and Beatrix Borrasque. In the Taligoian Ballad , his distant descendant Ramiro Alva was killed by Alan Oakdell for regicide and betraying the Cabitela City to the Maragonian Bastard. 400 years later, the last will of the "murdered" king was found and revealed that the king himself ordered Ramiro to give up the city.
• Subverted in the Alternate History novel Resurrection Day , in which the Cuban Missile Crisis turned into WW3 . The Soviet Union has been obliterated while the United States has been reduced to a virtual Third World country. President Kennedy, who died in the war, has been blamed for the situation, but the actual culprit is the General Ripper who now runs the US as a military dictatorship. As one character states, in this case history has been written by the survivors.
• Safehold : The official history of Shan-wei's fall and the War Against the Fallen was written by the "Archangel" Chihiro, who had fought the war on the side of Langhorne, the late leader of the "Archangels". All documentation they could find that portrayed Shan-wei and her husband Kau-yung sympathetically was destroyed, often along with any evidence of the existence of the person who wrote it . However, at the end of book 10, Chihiro's fellow "Archangel", Schueler, is revealed to have secretly left behind his own Testimony of what happened, which, judging by Schueler's denunciation of Chihiro as a liar in the same scene, promises to be somewhat more truthful .
• Santa and Pete : where young Pete asks his amateur historian grandfather, "Who was right, the Indians or the Dutch?" His grandpa laughs and answers, "Depends on who's telling the story."
• The tragic and poignant consequences of this trope is explored more subtly in The Sworn Sword in the case of Ser Eustace Osgrey who lost his entire family fighting for the defeated Blackfyres but continues to believe that their fight was just and honorable. He claims that because the Blackfyres lost the rebellion they're condemned as traitors and rebels, but had they won they'd be idealized heroes.
• Played with over the events of the Dance of the Dragons, particularly in that there were no winners. Black history books portray Rhaenyra as a woman trying to reclaim her birthright from a murderous usurper and his scheming mother. Green history books portray her as a mentally unstable harlot who tried to steal the throne from her brother, male-preference primogeniture be damned. In all reality, it's become increasingly clear that they were both mentally unstable murderers, and were not so different. Aegon had Rhaenyra eaten by his dragon in front of her son , as well as having one of his supporters murder Rhaenyra's son for seeking support with the Baratheons. In retaliation, Rhaenyra had two men sneak into the Red Keep and force a mother to choose which of her children she wanted dead, and then proceed to murder the other one , so the living child would spend the rest of his life knowing his mother wanted him dead. What would have happened had either of them kept the throne may never be known, but it probably wouldn't have been good.
• Lost Stars shows that the Empire wasted no time doing this after its establishment: There's a scene where protagonists Thane and Ciena, who were born the year the Empire was established, are studying for a history class in their Imperial school. They're specifically studying how the Clone Wars started, and the version they learned in school portrays Jedi Master Mace Windu as the leader of a criminal gang that interfered with a legal execution of a certain peace mongering Senator who hated Clones on Geonosis. Anyone who's seen Attack of the Clones will know that's... incorrect.
• Servants of the Empire also does this, though this time it's the Trade Federation , portrayed in the lessons Zare Leonis learns in his history class as engineering a famine on Chrona to protect their profit margins and destroy genetically modified crops that would've been a viable alternative so they can render the local population dependent on their medical services until the Empire saved the day by nationalizing agriculture and reintroducing the modified crops. While Leonis takes issue with this due to being around when the Trade Federation was still a major company, he's still glad they're no longer in business, considering all their bad history, like the Invasion of Naboo , blockading Pantora in order to make them go over to the Separatists while kidnapping Baron Papnoida's daughters , and overall making profits over the many dead people in the Clone Wars.
• Star Wars Legends : Addressed but averted in Timothy Zahn 's Vision of the Future : Shada: What do you mean by "true" [history]? What does anyone mean by "true"? We all know history is Written By The Winners. Jorj Car'das: History is also written by the bystanders... peoples who had no part or stake in what happened. Would you accuse them all of lying?
• The Stormlight Archive : One of the reasons that Jasnah Kholin, an avowed atheist, dislikes the Vorin religion so much is because hundreds of years ago, when the church was at the height of its power, they took to rewriting history books to match their dogma. While the Vorin Hierocracy was struck down and replaced with a system of slave-priests called ardents, modern Vorinism still accepts those ancient "corrections" as truth.
• The Sundering reimagines The Lord of the Rings with an aversion of this trope.
• The Sunne in Splendour was written in response to this trope, imagining Richard III as a brave and decent man living in brutal times. By the Downer Ending , Richard is dead and history is being written by his enemy, Henry Tudor.
• Swordspoint : In The Fall of the Kings , earlier in the setting world's history, the kings and their wizards were overthrown and the ruling nobility burned all the works about magic that they could find and made it illegal even to claim that magic was real. This causes some frustration for one of the protagonists, a historian living 200 years later who has trouble finding reliable sources for his research on the wizards. Especially when he proposes a debate to prove that the wizards' magic was real, disregarding the fact that the aforementioned law is still on the books...
• Tortall Universe : In the first book of The Numair Chronicles , it's taught that Ozorne's father Apodan was sent to put down a Sirajit rebellion in southern Carthak and was killed in the conflict, leading to both Ozorne and his mother swearing vengeance on the Sirajit. A classmate later tells Arram that the "rebellion" was nothing more than a tribal feud that had gotten out of hand. Prince Apodan slaughtered everyone involved, including babies, until he was assassinated by a member of one of the tribes. The imperial heralds proclaimed that the Prince died tragically in battle putting down the "rebellion". Ozorne and his mother are unaware of the truth, as are most Carthakis.
• To Shape a Dragon's Breath : The Anglish have control of the historical narrative regarding New Markesland. History is is consistered to have started with the explorations of Norsemen to the land and with the arrival and settlement by Stafn Whitebeard; almost no history of the indigenous people is considered, simply because they had no written history. In recent memory, the Naquisit massacre has been cleaned up by the Anglish, who call it the Nack Island uprising. It's portrayed as the Naquisit violently attacking the Anglish and brutally slaughtering Anglish women and children in their beds, and as murderers of the innocent and deserving of thier executions. What really happened is that when the Anglish discovered coal on the island, they broke their treaty to get access to it, and tried to drive the Naquisit off completely. A group of elders tried to seek accord and were murdered for it, and the Anglish went so far as to burn farms, poison food and water sources to kill the population, and turning dragonfire on whole villages. A party of Naquisit led the war party to try to drive the Anglish off and when they failed were executed as traitors, including both of Theod Knecht's parents. As Anequs puts it, it was a war that the Naquisit lost—but that doesn't mean they were wrong to fight it at all, and they're no more vicious murders than the Anglish were.
• Shtetl Days : As shown by their title of World War II, the War of Retribution, the Nazis have framed their war of aggression as a just cause.
• Vorkosigan Saga : In The Vor Game , Gregor hasn't heard any of the stories about his father except stuff he could dismiss as propaganda. Miles is able to assure him that the stories he has heard are not all true.
• Babylon 5 : After conquering the Narns a second time, the Centauri lay the blame for the conflict squarely on their shoulders, to the point of placing every member of the Narn ruling council on trial for war crimes (this just after the Centauri used orbital bombardment with meteors on the Narn homeworld, something which is outlawed by every civilized government in the setting). Then again, the two powers have been taking stabs at each other ever since the Centauri overthrew the Narns the first time. And the Centauri are still not willing to acknowledge that the first time even happened either. They keep claiming that they landed peacefully on Narn and uplifted the primitives, who repaid their generosity with violence. The Narn on the other hand claim they peacefully greeted the strange alien visitors, who then conquered and enslaved them. Given that G'Kar's father was hung from a tree by his thumbs until he died three days later (for the crime of accidentally spilling a cup of tea on a Centauri woman ), it renders the Centauri account a bit questionable.
• Tom Zarek uses this theory to gloss over murdering Laird and The Quorum in Battlestar Galactica (2003) . He loses. Not that it mattered, since history was one of the many, many things that the Colonials decided to jettison upon reaching Earth .
• Blackadder shows how Henry Tudor , after winning the Wars of the Roses , completely removed Richard IV and his family from the historical timeline and changed Richard III into a child-killing madman.
• Becomes a plot point in the Community episode "Alternative History of the German Invasion" , which helps the study group come to a Heel Realization regarding their presence at Greendale .
• In the Doctor Who episode " The Lie of the Land ", the aliens that have taken over Earth brainwash everyone with propaganda that they have always been there, guiding the evolution of humanity and civilization, while in reality they have only been there for a few months. People who disagree with the so-called "True History" are arrested by the Memory Police and sent to a forced labor camp.
• Farscape : A variation in that they didn't really "win", but the version of the Peacekeeper battle against the Venek Horde that Aeryn relates in " ...Different Destinations ". Subofficer Dacon was a cook and only ended up negotiating the ceasefire because everyone else was killed. Alternatively, if this is a case of a Stable-ish Time Loop , he was just following Aeryn's instructions in the first place.
• Game of Thrones : According to Robert Baratheon, Rhaegar Targaryen is an insane rapist and Lyanna Stark is a helpless martyr torn cruelly from Robert's loving arms by way of Rhaegar's word and will alone. None of this is true. Though you can't blame him for rebelling since The Mad King called for his head on less-than-questionable grounds.
• Generation Kill gives us a more "unique" interpretation of this trope. Sgt. Eric Kocher: If something happens to me, I want my wife to know the truth. If they say we fought valiantly here, I want her to know we fought retarded.
• Jack and the Beanstalk: The Real Story : The show posits that the giant atop the beanstalk, Thunderdell, was in fact nothing but friendly and benevolent, with most of the fairy tale being a lie made up to cover for what Jack and his mother did for their own selfish ends. This includes killing the giant after he falls off the beanstalk.
• Lost Girl . Trick mentions that this is the only reason people have a favorable opinion of the ancient Blood King. Considering that the Blood King has reality warping powers when writing with his blood, he may mean this literally. Also, since Trick is the Blood King, this doubles as him recognizing his own past crimes and mistakes.
• Several characters of the Greater Nazi Reich sometimes mention the "American genocide", referring to the mass murder of the Indians in their history. By accentuating these negative events, the victors portray the Americans they conquered as a savage people with a tendency to brutally kill off whoever gets in their way, making the victors look more sympathetic (or, alternatively, as proof that the Americans already had Nazi-like tendencies before the Axis invaded).
• The Nazis also refer to their genocide against the Jews as their war against Semite terrorists. This chillingly shows that the winners of a war can portray the losers as terrible as they want them to be, distracting the people from their own wrongdoings.
• The opening of Season 2 shows some Nazi students praising the fact that George Washington and Thomas Jefferson owned 600 and 300 slaves, respectively. It is fitting since in our timeline, these facts are glossed over or underappreciated.
• Crops up in the Once Upon a Time episode "Tallahassee". Captain Hook tells the Human-Giant wars as a war against brutal giants who came down to pillage the land and kill humans. Humans drove them back up the beanstalk, and killed all but one, the most vicious of them all. The last surviving giant claims humans started the war and slaughtered giants for no real reason, but since they won got to paint history how they wanted. The giant was telling the truth. Humans started the war for the giant's gold and magic beans, and gleefully slaughtered them .
• In " Promised Land ", the Tsal-Khan rewrote the history of their conquest of Earth so that their descendants would view it in a more favorable light, claiming they first came in peace but humanity attacked without provocation. In reality, it was an unprovoked attack and enslaving humanity was always their intention. The Tsal-Khan poisoned all of the plants on Earth; eating the fruit and vegetables that grow naturally is typically fatal even twelve human generations later. According to the revised version, they came in peace and freely offered the advantages of their more advanced technology. However, the humans resisted and the Tsal-Khan won the long and bitter war that followed, which resulted in the plants being poisoned. The true history was passed down to Dlavan through his great-grandparents, who were among the original Tsal-Khan settlers after Earth was conquered.
• Played with in " Abaddon ". Virgil Nygard claims that the North American Corporation vilified him by severely exaggerating the number of people that he killed. It is never made clear whether he is telling the truth.
• In one episode of Red Dwarf , Rimmer invokes this with regard to Robert Scott, pointing out that his diary is the only record of Laurence Oates' Heroic Sacrifice , and that if Rimmer had been Scott he'd have bludgeoned Oates to death with a frozen husky and eaten him , telling everyone that he had sacrificed himself. As is immediately pointed out by Lister, however, Rimmer is an exceptionally self-centred and ignoble person.
• Julius Caesar in Rome is a walking, talking example of this. Caesar : It's only hubris if I fail.
• Invoked. Crassus muses that both he and Spartacus see themselves as the hero of the tale, and their opponent as the villain. Crassus then states that only history will judge who the hero was; he, of course, wins .
• Defied, however, by Agron , who swears that it is ultimately Spartacus who history will see as the hero. Agron: One day, Rome will crumble and fall. But your name will be remembered forever.
• Referenced in Stargate SG-1 . Woolsey initially helps Kinsey in trying to shut down the SGC. He eventually realizes what kind of person Kinsey is, and then gives the President evidence of Kinsey's crimes. The following conversation then takes place: Woolsey: I also hope that one day history recognizes that I tried to do the right thing. President Hayes: Whose version of history, Mr. Woolsey?
• Star Trek: Voyager : In an inversion , in the episode " Living Witness ", the history was written from the perspective of the losers who were relegated to second class citizenry, and the winning faction was very annoyed at being portrayed as vicious, bloodthirsty tyrants who slaughtered innocents and made martyrs out of people that turned out to be pirates and raiders. As it turns out, both sides weren't exactly saints to begin with. Ultimately subverted at the end of the episode when we flash forward to the future to see that both sides have reconciled their differences (thanks in large part to the Doctor). The old anti-Voyager propaganda simulations are still on display, but only as an example of how past prejudices once pushed them apart.
• " Contagion ": Picard says this in reference to the Iconians.
• " Unification, Part 1 " has Picard asking for some help from his good buddy Gowron. Gowron himself was letting the press know that he did not have as much help from Picard as there really was; this trope's name is given word for word.
• " The High Ground " has Kyril Finn point out to a captive Dr. Crusher that if George Washington had lost his war, he'd be remembered as a terrorist, and not a revolutionary.
• Star Trek: Deep Space Nine : In the two-parter " The Way of the Warrior ", Gowron quotes it again just before the Klingon fleet and Deep Space Nine engage in battle.
• Star Trek: Enterprise : The Mirror Universe episode " In a Mirror, Darkly " opens with the conclusion of Star Trek: First Contact , but instead of returning the Vulcan's Strange Salute , Mirror Zephram Cochrane pulls out a shotgun and murders him, whereupon the humans storm the spaceship brandishing firearms. Mirror Archer is later shown proudly showing off this shotgun from his antique Wall of Weapons . Archer: I wonder how history would have played out if Cochrane hadn't turned the tables on your invasion force .
• In an episode of Timeless , the team travels back to the time of the Lincoln assassination and Rufus ends up saving the life of Andrew Jackson. However, since Rufus is a black man and it was an incredibly racist time, when Rufus returns to the present he is saddened but unsurprised to find that the historical record credits his actions to a white soldier instead.
• Ravages of Time so literally runs on this trope that in Chapter 209, a historian employed by Prime Minister Cao Cao discusses with an old friend named Chen Gong how the historian is going to demonize the prior Prime Minister to make the current one look better. Chen Gong : That's what happens after a dynasty change. In order to justify the rule, the enemy would have to take all the blame. Historians are but tools for propaganda.
• This trope is a recurring theme in the music of Brendan Perry of Dead Can Dance . It's presented most directly in " Song of the Dispossessed " and "Amnesia" but also more subtly in some other pieces.
• Silvina Garré's "Quien quiera oir que oiga": si la historia la escriben los que ganan, eso quiere decir que hay otra historia, la verdadera historia, quien quiera oir que oiga note  "if history is written by the winners, then that means that there is another history, the true history, whoever wants to hear then hear".
• New Model Army : "Drag It Down" talks about modern society tearing down statues, abandoning faith, and destroying its tales of heroes and magic. The song takes the view that "Mammon is a jealous master" who's now triumphed, discrediting and destroying the past.
• In the past decade it seems as if this trend has slowly been changing. Eric Bischoff wrote his pro-WCW, anti-WWE expose book Controversy Creates Cash while still working for WWE. And with Sting 's long-awaited arrival in WWE in 2014, the WCW legacy has been getting a lot more respect from its vanquisher, with Triple H depicted as a heel for wanting to expunge Sting's existence from the wrestling archives. Heck, at the WrestleMania match between these two, D-Generation X were the heels and the New World Order (one of the most notorious heel stables of all time) were the faces!
• Some Satan Is Good beliefs held this about The Bible , which would make some sense if only because the modern idea of Satan and the role of the Devil is more or less medieval traditions, fused with leftover paganism, and is not really part of classical Judaism.
• Hijacked by Jesus is this trope for some scholars who note that a lot of pagan myths and beliefs, especially Norse Mythology , were written down after most of its original practitioners and faithful were converted and unlike Greek, Roman, and Hindu myths we don't have works written by the people who believed in it.
• Averted in Classical Mythology , where it is established that Chronos ruled over a Golden Age, so the Olympians didn't bother to hide that.
• A theory is that this is why Jezebel and her family got such a negative portrayal. All of them were killed off, so nobody was around to tell their side of the story. Their opponents (who had won in the battle of faiths) were thus able to slander them as much as they wanted to.
• And as for their kingdom in general: around 720 BC, Israel was overrun by the Assyrians, while Judah was saved by a timely civil war that shortly thereafter broke out in the Assyrian Empire and continued to exist for a good 200 additional years. So all somewhat contemporary surviving records of that time come from the priesthood in Jerusalem, which explains why the inhabitants and kings especially of the northern kingdom are described in such a negative light.
• The Star League is viewed almost universally as the golden age of humanity... except within the Periphery States, whose absorption into the League came at 'Mech-scale gunpoint.
• A staple of Clan society. Most notably, in the aftermath of the Trial of Annihilation against Clan Wolverine, Nicholas Kerensky ordered official Clan history altered. The result was the recasting of the Wolverines from a Clan on the rise who'd made one too many enemies into bogeymen whose radical ideas would have ripped Clan society apart. The ilKhan even personally destroyed the sole surviving copy of the Wolverine Remembrance.
• In Eberron , there was the War of the Mark, the first half of which was basically genocide preformed by the dragon mark houses against those with aberrant dragon marks, and the second half was a war because the victimized party got organized and put up a valiant effort; anyways, it didn't end well . Most people don't like and fear aberrant dragon mark wielders, although the extent of the prejudice is up to the DM. The dragon marked houses, however, are quite accepted, and while many people know of the War of the Mark (despite it happening almost 2,500 years ago), almost none know what actually happened.
• Some of it is flat out wrong — namely, they say that the Anathema are humans possessed by demons (or demons in human form) rather than humans given power by gods that steadily drives them mad .
• Paranoia : It's the year 214. It's always the year 214. We are at war with the Communists, always were, and always will be. The Computer Is Your Friend , and this is the history the Computer tells you. Questioning the Computer's history of the world is treason. Treason is punishable by death.
• This helps explain the untidiness affecting a lot of Warhammer 40,000 's backstory. The various factions, and the Imperium of Man especially , will often rewrite historical records to reflect their side better. In reality, most of the setting veres between Black-and-Grey Morality and straight Evil Versus Evil ; everyone views themselves as the heroes, and writes their histories accordingly.
• Invoked mockingly in The Complete History Of America Abridged : "I believe it was Benjamin Franklin who said, 'History is written by the winners.' Well, tonight it's our turn."
• The Count of Monte Cristo , the musical, has the Villain Song called "A Story Told", referring to how "history is a story told by the men who make the laws". The three conspirators convene and choose to frame Edmond Dantés for crimes to further their own cause with the understanding that because he can't disprove the accusation, he will be remembered as guilty by everyone, and that's more real to the rest of the world than what actually happened.
• The same applies to Macbeth , which was written to please King James I, a direct descendant of Duncan, Malcolm, and possibly Banquo. The real historical Macbeth slew the 39-year-old Duncan fairly in battle when the latter invaded his lands, and proceeded to rule for 17 years, earning a reputation of having been a good and generous king.
• The Wizard's song "Wonderful" in Wicked is all about this. ("A man's called a traitor — or a liberator. A rich man's a thief — or philanthropist. Is one a crusader, or ruthless invader? It's all in which label is able to persist.") Of course, he's used this to his advantage by wielding the Propaganda Machine against his political opponents.
• Assassin's Creed posits that all of history is deliberately distorted by The Knights Templar to strengthen their position, cover up their existence, and vilify the Assassins. This Hand Wave permits the dev team to stuff the series with exquisite research while still taking creative license with history when necessary for the sake of the story .
• Baten Kaitos is centered around the aftereffects of an ancient mythical battle between the god of evil and the gods of good. The prequel reveals that this essentially has the morality of the parties backwards — it's just that the good guys (who were a group, not an individual as history recorded) had made a Deal with the Devil with an unrelated and forgotten third party.
• BattleTech (2018) : Referenced. Kamea waxes poetical about how history will describe the Aurigan Civil War as her reclaiming her rightful throne from her Evil Uncle with the aid of a noble team of loyal guns for hire. However, she is well aware that she won the throne because she was a better and more ruthless strategist, politician and spin doctor than her uncle, and that she never found out if you believed in her cause or just her ability to fend off loan sharks.
• The aptly named Borderlands 2 mini-mission "Written by the Victors" has you take a quick tour of the history of Hyperion and Handsome Jack. Naturally, every word of it is utter bull . Hyperion hasn't "won" anything yet, but they're winning , and they own the news media on Pandora. Hyperion spreads its version of events through Hyperion Truth Broadcasting , where DJ Hunter Hellquist is always spinning reality to make Handsome Jack look like the hero and the Crimson Raiders look like the vilest villains imaginable. Luckily, you get to shoot him in the face.
• In Breath of Fire III , after the Brood War that almost made the Brood (a race of dragons) extinct, the goddess Myria rewrote history so as to favor herself, as part of her grand plan to ensure she was the one and only deity watching over the world. The Brood were portrayed as bloodthirsty monsters due to their powers that could spell doom for the entire world if they were left unchecked, and her sister Deis was also portrayed in a negative light due to supporting such race. She also scattered the Yggdrasil trees to try to bury their collective knowledge and wisdom forever. Unfortunately, that plan didn't work out for Myria, as Ryu, the last of the Brood, sees through her lies.
• This point is made by Captain Price and General Shepherd in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 . One of them is very much counting on it. "History is written by the victor. History is filled with liars ."
• Crimson Echoes : Marle was not happy to find out her ancestor Cedric Guardia, aka King Guardia I, was quite the bloodthirsty asshole and not the hero the history books claimed, or that his feud with Antaeus Porre was because the latter thought he was taking things too far, or that this is all because the Frozen Flame messed with Cedric's head, which is cemented when Antaeus was corrupted by the Flame after stealing it from Cedric .
• In Dark Souls , the Furtive Pygmy was an ancient Lord that the intro narration describes as 'so easily forgotten'. Much, much later in Dark Souls III The Ringed City DLC reveals why they were so easily forgotten: because they were erased from history intentionally by Lord Gwyn and the gods of Anor Londo - and it wasn't just a single pymgy, it was an entire race of pygmies that were the ancestors of humanity as a whole, despite them helping Gwyn during the war against the Ancient Dragons. Gwyn rewarded them with a magnificent city at the edge of the world, sealed them there, essentially enslaved them by indoctrinating them about the benevolence of the gods, and then proceeded to struck any mention of them and their contribution on the war from history. From the story written by Gwyn and narrated to us in the first game, the Lords did all the work and mankind either didn't exist or remained meek until Gwyn took power - all a complete lie.
• Discussed in Dragon Age: Origins : At the Dalish Camp , the Warden can walk in on a Dalish storyteller recounting the history of his people, and how they were conquered and basically enslaved by Andrastian humans for refusing to convert to the worship of the human Maker . If a non-Dalish Warden points out that the Chantry says that the elves weren't so innocent either (kidnapped human children for human sacrifice blood magic rituals, attacked the helpless human village of Red Crossing, etc), he'll counter that history is written by the winners, and since humans won that war of course they'll demonize the elves to justify what they did to them afterwards (invaded, conquered, and stole their homeland; forced their people to convert or hide out in the woods; kept those who did convert as second-class citizens, etc).
• A sidequest reveals the true history of what happened at Red Crossing. It's a lot more complicated, but basically a misunderstanding and a tragic romance became a mutual Pretext for War while all the reasonable leaders from both sides (both of which were later substantially misrepresented in history) were busy getting killed stopping completely unrelated disasters.
• Inquisition gets even deeper into this with the history of the Ancient Elves, a.k.a. Elvhen. Both the present-day Elves and the Tevinter Imperium would have you believe that the Elvhen empire of Arlathan was destroyed by the Imperium and its survivors enslaved; the actual story is that the Elvhen were not destroyed by invasion, but by internal strife and being separated from the source of their magical powers, causing Arlathan to both literally and metaphorically crumble under its own weight, and the Tevinters just happened to be in the neighborhood to pick through the rubble left behind. So really, history wasn't written by the victors in this case, but by the opportunists who happened upon what was left and claimed it for themselves.
• The Jaws of Hakkon DLC reveals Ameridan, the first Inquisitor, to be a victim of this: Ameridan was an elf mage of combined Andrastean/Dalish faith, who was sent to slay a possessed dragon that threatened Orlais and who ended up disappearing — along with the dragon. Without his stabilizing presence , he was unable to mediate developing tensions between the Orlesian and Dalish nations, which culminated with the above-mentioned Red Crossing incident and subsequent defeat of the Dalish Elves; in the aftermath, the Chantry covered up any and all mentions of Ameridan being an elf or a mage.
• In Dragon Ball Online , it is revealed in the guide Dragon Ball Online Chronicles that the majority of humans in the future have forgotten the protagonists' existence in favor of Mr. Satan .
• Inverted with the conflict between humans and demons. Although the humans lost, Zazz is still in charge of the civilized world and claims the demons wiped out all humans except for him. However, his hidden logs and Asterisk's own words imply that most humans were going to die from climate change anyways, and most of the survivors of the demon attack didn't survive the extreme heat wave, including the ones that were in cryosleep. The reason Zazz needs the archdemons in the first place is because the sleeping humans melted, and he can't revive them without the demons' help .
• Zetacorp has a computer with information about each major humanoid species, but there's no entry on the Kolfos, who seem to be native to Vulcanite, which implies a species-wide Un-person .
• President Zazz states that insurrectionists like Akira will be written out of history, and his words imply that he inflicted Un-person to other rebels in the past. In the ending, Akira and their allies take over both Zeta and Vulcanite, meaning they're the ones who get to write history and expose Zazz's crimes .
• In the backstory, as shown most prominently in Morrowind : Because of Nerevar's death , the disappearance of the Dwemer, Dagoth Ur's presumed death , and the fact that Azura is a Daedric Prince who doesn't often openly communicate with mortals, the Tribunal were the only ones present for the events following the Battle of Red Mountain left in a position to declare how the events there took place. As such, the Tribunal Temple's official story about what happened is the most widely accepted version, even though it is clearly the version most full of Blatant Lies and Metaphorical Truths out of those that comprise The Rashomon once you've done a little research. All stories to the contrary are considered heresy, kept alive only by the actions of the Ashlander Nerevarine Cult and the Dissident Priests .
• Following the Dwemer's disappearance, the only groups in positions to know much about the Dwemer were the Dunmer (having been turned from the Chimer) and the Nords, both of whom warred with the Dwemer and wouldn't have had any reason to say anything good about them. In the years that followed, the Dwemer would be demonized by the Dunmer and popularized by ahistorical tales like Marobar Sul's Ancient Tales of the Dwemer series. Not helping matters is that their language was quickly lost after their disappearance, making it impossible for anyone to read the Dwemer's own records. (A means of translation was discovered around the time of Morrowind , but was apparently lost again by the time of Skyrim 200 years later.)
• Also from the backstory, the Ayleids (Wild Elves) are the "losers" to the Alessian Empire "winners". While there is plenty of evidence that the Ayleids committed atrocities against their human slaves, there has almost certainly been some exaggeration of the centuries since. Even though several rebel Ayleid lords supported Alessia during the revolt and were permitted to keep their lands and culture after the war, even they would be demonized once the monkey prophet Marukh came to power and founded the Alessian Order . In addition to the persecution of any elves within the empire, the Order also destroyed any records and cultural artifacts of the Ayleids that could be found. Eventually, only the (almost certainly heavily biased) Imperial records of the Alessian Revolt remained.
• In another backstory example, The ancient Falmer (Snow Elves) were nearly exterminated in a war with Ysgramor and his 500 Companions from Atmora. As part of destroying all traces of the Falmer culture in Skyrim that he could find, Ysgramor also destroyed any evidence of anything that happened other than what his official histories record. For instance, he claims that the Falmer attack on Saarthal was "unprovoked". However, surviving records of the Elves claim that the attack was in response to repeated "provocations and blasphemies" committed by the early Nords.
• Additionally, the Septim Empire would later play up the relationship between Alessia's Nedic people ( ancestors of most of the modern races of Men) and the Nords, whose support Tiber Septim badly needed to forge his empire. The Nedes were extinct as a unique race centuries before Septim's rise to power.
• The Imperial orthodox history of Tiber Septim's life covers up, denies, or suppresses any other stories of Septim as "heretical". Given that there is plenty of evidence that Septim's life was not the truly noble, humble, and heroic version detailed by the official histories, there is plenty to cover up.
• Between Oblivion and Skyrim , the Thalmor took credit for ending the Oblivion Crisis which brought them great support in their homeland. They assassinated Potentate Ocato 10 years later, irreparably destabilizing the Third Cyrodiilic Empire. Under their leadership, the Altmer quickly seceded and annexed Valenwood in order to reform the Aldmeri Dominion of old (and to give them a buffer state between their homeland and Cyrodiil). They then took credit for resolving a crisis with the moons that brought them Elsweyr, homeland of the Khajiit , as a client state.
• Mentioned in the Russian campaign of Empire Earth .
• The Fallout 3 expansion Operation: Anchorage has this as part of its backstory — a General Chase commissioned an elaborate virtual reality simulation of the Alaska campaign of the Sino-American War, in which he played a key role. But instead of serving as an adviser, he kept tweaking and changing the script, even as the world shuddered towards nuclear war, until the events depicted in the simulation bore little resemblance to what actually happened (including entirely fictional Chinese secret weapons). The technicians developing the program privately worried that the man had gone insane. Then they all died in a nuclear apocalypse .
• Fallout 4 has the Brotherhood of Steel do this to the events of the previous games. The Lone Wander is never mentioned in their accounts of Fallout 3 's events, and they insist that the Enclave was formed entirely postwar and their claims of being the United States government are fabricated.
• Final Fantasy Tactics is full of this trope. Saint Ajora, the leading messiah of the Church, was not a saint, but in fact a human possessed by a demon at best, and a actual demon at worst. The official history of Ramza has him as a heretic and usurper, while the truth is that he was just as influential, if not more so, in the kingdom's history than the eventual peasant king Delita. The Church, however, refused to acknowledge his role as his actions would have exposed massive corruption and generally unethical behavior, and suppressed everything that tried to tell the truth, including burning the author of the Durai Reports at the stake as a heretic. Possibly subverted by the Durai Reports though, causing Ramza to be Vindicated by History .
• In the first Hildibrand Adventures, official Ul'dahn records state that during the war between Ul'dah and Sil'dih, Sil'dih unleashed a terrifying alchemical weapon known as "Trader's Spurn", a powder that turned any who breathed it in into shambling undead thralls. But Sil'dih mishandled this weapon and was ultimately destroyed by it when its own populace was turned. As revealed by Ellie, one of the last surviving descendants of the people of Sil'dih and one of the two people behind the string of Phantom Thief robberies, Ul'dah was the one who created Trader's Spurn and used it against Sil'dih, going so far as to develop a secret Propaganda Machine unknown to even the sultana to keep this truth under wraps. By the end of the questline, Ellie is taken to prison for her attempts to use Trader's Spurn against Ul'dah, but Hildibrand, Godbert, and Briarden vow to bring the truth to light and ensure that proper history is recorded.
• In Heavensward , the official church record of Ishgard states that King Thordan I and his knights bravely faced the great wyrm Nidhogg while following a vision from Halone to create a new nation devoted to her. The king and much of his Knight's Twelve perished in the battle, but not before plucking out one of Nidhogg's eyes and chasing him off. The survivors going on to found the four High Houses of Ishgard. While history frames them as the heroes, Thordan I and his knights were responsible for starting the Dragonsong War by exploiting Ratatoskr's affection for humanity to murder her and consume her eyes for power. Nidhogg's attack was an act of vengeance for his fallen sister, and he lost both eyes in the battle, requiring Hraesvelgr to loan an eye to him so he may begin a Forever War with Ishgard to make it suffer for the actions of the Knights Twelve.
• In Shadowbringers , the dwarves of Tomra once suffered from a plague known as "stoneblight" that was inevitably fatal and had no cure, forcing the village elders to isolate the afflicted deep in the mines to avoid infecting the rest of the village. This swift and decisive action is said to have saved the Tomran dwarves, who revere the elders' actions as Necessarily Evil a century later. In truth, Lamitt, one of the Warriors of Light from before the flood, was able to venture deep into the ruins of Ronka to devise a cure from the ancient magics there. The formerly stoneblighted dwarves were none too happy about being left for dead and decided to remove their helmets and leave Tomra in protest. To maintain order and their own political standing, the elders exiled Lamitt along with the stoneblighted dwarves, who all perished in the Flood, allowing the elders to perpetuate their own self-serving narrative. Giott is disgusted to learn that one of these elders was her own great-grandfather.
• Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade has a rather half-hearted version of this. The prologue states that the Scouring, a brutal war between dragons and humans, began when humans broke the peace for no explained reason. Yet it doesn't go on to question the fact that the human "heroes" of that war are held in religious reverence and the one who joins your party is something of the mentor .
• Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones has a variant of this. The common myth is that the Demon King was defeated by the "Five Heroes" led by Grado. It turns out that the "Five Heroes" were led by Morva, the leader of the dragonkin. Together, they defeated the Demon King; Morva was even the one to land the killing blow. However, as centuries passed, the human nations which the heroes founded eventually forgot about Morva. The people of Caer Pelyn are rather unhappy about this, believing the other nations are being ungrateful to the Great Dragon who saved mankind, but Morva himself doesn't really mind .
• Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance tells us that Yune is an evil destroyer god who will wipe out humanity if she is ever unsealed. Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn reveals she is actually one of the Pieces of God who suffered a bit of Power Incontinence after a major war and is not actually evil; in fact, she sides with humans against Ashera, who decides that Humans Are Bastards and must be eradicated .
• Fire Emblem: Three Houses : The Verdant Wind route in particular reveals that much of the official history of Fódlan has been fabricated by The Church of Seiros — though parts of real history had to be integrated into the fiction for the sake of verisimilitude. Specifically, the Goddess Sothis is not a transcendent deity but an ancient dragon who uplifted humanity millennia ago, then slaughtered and forced them underground when they turned against her, falling into a deep slumber aftewards. The Remnant of this destroyed civilization, Agartha, has been erased from history by the Children of the Goddess, but continued to plot their revenge from Beneath the Earth . Nemesis was not an ancient king but a human bandit who, guided by the Agarthans, found and killed the slumbering Sothis, then drank her blood to acquire her Crest of Flames and had the Agarthans forge her bones into the Sword of the Creator. With it, he was strong enough to invade the Children of the Goddess' city-state in Zanado and to slaughter every Child of the Goddess he found, using their blood and bones to grant members of his gang superpowers and magical weapons, respectively. The five "Saints" of the Church weren't humans granted a divine revelation, but Children of the Goddess who survived the Zanado massacre, assumed human guise , raised an army, and waged war against Nemesis. After Saint Seiros killed Nemesis, his surviving goons have been re-branded as the "Ten Elites" — fictive generals of Seiros' own army — and made nobles under the emergent Adrestian Empire, while their dragon-infused bloodlines ("Crests") and dragonbone weapons ("Relics") were presented to the people as divine boons for the righteous. Seiros buried the remains of Sothis (the Sword and her petrified heart) and erected the headquarters of her new Church over her tomb. She then spent the next thousand years posing as the successive "human" Archbishops of the Church (with "Rhea" being her most recent guise note  while her true draconic form, the "Immaculate One", has been disassociated from her and explained away as another boon sent by the Goddess in the time of need ), isolating Fódlan from the rest of the world, maintaining a Fantastic Caste System based on Crests, and effectively locking the subcontinent into Medieval Stasis to prevent another human uprising, while simultaneously searching for a way to reincarnate Sothis. The other four Saints either assumed their true forms and retreated into solitude (Indech the Immovable, Macuil the Wind Caller), or fell into a slumber (Cichol, Cethlean) and only reawakened in modern times (as Seteth and Flayn, respectively). Finally, the Agarthans continued to scheme against Sothis' children even after Nemesis' defeat, but their subsequent plots (including Loog's rebellion, The Plague of 1165, and the Tragedy of Duscur) have been covered up by the Church and/or by the Empire . In the second half, Sylvain even lampshades that whoever wins the newest Fodlan-spanning war will be portrayed as the righteous side in the history books — despite the fact that none of them truly is .
• In Freedom Planet 2 , it is revealed that the earth dragons wrote themselves as an innocent party in a war against the water dragons, but the truth is that the destruction of the latter was a genocidal act by the former against a Slave Race uprising. The only reason the Magister never spoke the truth was because he was too young to know the full details, despite being the only earth dragon old enough to have seen that debacle; the truth comes out when Merga is released from stasis and makes her declaration to him and his entire army. While the Magister, his forces in Shang Tu, and the heroes all take umbrage with Merga based on what they know, as more of the truth comes out they become less offended by her motives in comparison to her methods ; even the Magister proposes that he will tell the unabridged truth to the people of Avalice as an attempt to make amends and end her campaign of revenge without further bloodshed.
• God of War (PS4) : It’s heavily implied that this is going on in both sides of the conflict between the Aesir and Jötnar. On one hand, the Norse gods portray the Jötnar as the evil monsters that their native mythology uses them as. The Jötnar, meanwhile, make themselves out to be poor innocent woobies that were unfairly persecuted by the Aesir. Both sides come off as if they’re demonizing the other side to justify their warring. Further, the ending heavily implies that Kratos and Atreus/Loki will be presented in propaganda as monstrous villains by Asgard in retaliation for them killing Baldur.
• In Guild Wars , White Mantle history records Saul D'Alessio's final battle against the Charr as a defeat. In fact, D'Alessio won the battle, but his gods murdered most of his followers and abducted him, never to be seen again. Ironically, this would lead to D'Alessio being villified by the people who overthrew the White Mantle when he would have likely sympathized with their cause.
• Charr history of the Searing and the following war against Adelbern has been written largely to reflect the glory of their victories, excising all mention of how it was Shamans who gave them their greatest victories and the important role of the Ebon Vanguard in killing their "gods".
• Likewise, Ascalonian history tends to focus on the Charr attempting to invade from the north many times before the Searing while conveniently glossing over the fact that Ascalon used to be Charr territory before the humans invaded, drove them north, and built a wall to keep them out.
• After conquering Elona, Palawa Joko rewrote history to depict himself as a savior figure and took credit for great achievements of others, such as killing Abaddon and Zhaitan. This is just part of the brainwashing he enacted to keep his human subjects docile.
• Hero King Quest: Peacemaker Prologue : The Cerulean King states that history will judge Spiderweb as a villain, but she points out that if the Dark Realm wins the war against the other countries, the Dark Ones will write history in their favor.
• The Ragnarok scheme involves the Chiefs of the North forging an alliance with the neighbouring ice giants to attack the capital. If the scheme reaches its final stage, they can vote to march with the ice giants or send them to attack alone and then show up to "save" the Kingdom while murdering the King in the chaos. If they choose the latter and succeed, the "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue observes that the history books claim the King was killed by the ice giants, not the traitorous Chiefs.
• If the Patricians of the Coast reach the final stage of the Corruption scheme, in which they bribe the Royal court silly, they can choose to publicly accuse the King of being the corrupt one and position themselves as the saviours of the Kingdom. If they succeed, the "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue notes that this perspective is reflected in the history books, referencing this trope by name.
• In Last Scenario , pretty much all of the standard history is a load of crap. This is used as part of the game's subversion of Video Game Tropes of all kinds, as it means the opening Info Dump lies to you .
• This is mentioned by the developers as the reason why Demacia is perceived as "good", while Noxus is "evil".
• The Journal of Justice is written by the League (neutral organization) and averts this trope (see also Morgana vs Kayle).
• In Blood Omen 2: Legacy of Kain , Kain combines this with In Their Own Image : Kain: Oh, Sebastian. Our destiny could have been glorious. The land was ours for the taking. History would have been rewritten in our image.
• In Legacy of Kain: Defiance , this is what Raziel says upon finding out what the Hylden have to say about their war with the Ancients .
• In Mass Effect 3 , it's revealed that the origins of the conflict between the Quarians and the Geth was an example of this. The winners in this case were the Quarians who killed off Quarians who fought to protect the Geth from being destroyed when they showed signs of sentience. The Geth originally didn't want to fight Quarians even as they were being destroyed — they only started taking up arms in an attempt to protect their friends.
• In Captain Qwark 's log in Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal , he claims to have defeated the previous game 's final boss, which ate him before Ratchet defeated it.
• In Red Dead Redemption , after the final mission, no matter how high or low you go on the Karma Meter , Edgar Ross sees to it that John Marston is remembered by most as a vile monster.
• In Robopon , Dr. Zero calls out Prince Tail for this; the King was defeated by Zero and only 'won' due to nearly killing him, but told everyone that he defeated Zero to begin with.
• Singularity has a variation: Demichev: History is rewritten by the victors. YOU LOST— [Renko shoots the pistol out of Demichev's hand]
• In Tales of Symphonia , quite a bit of the legend of Mithos the Hero is falsified, written by Mithos himself .
• Tales of Berseria ends this way, given that it's a distant prequel to Zestiria . History gets written by the remains of the Abbey, and while Velvet ultimately saved the world, she gets remembered as a monster and goes down in history as the first Lord of Calamity, and Artorius remains a glorious hero. It's helped along by the fact that Velvet did cause a lot of trouble and committed vile acts on her quest to bring down Artorius, including destroying an entire town's livelihood and having caused the deaths of many innocent people.
• Invoked in the Thief series, as the Keepers ' motto is " Propaganda is written by the winners. History is written by the observer."
• Valkyria Chronicles : The known history has The Valkyria as demigods who arrived from the north and saved the land from the Darcsen race, who were fighting devastating wars with Ragnite weapons. The Valkyria are still worshiped as gods and saviors, and the Darcsen are prosecuted and marginalized. In truth, the Darcsen were peaceful, and the Valkyria were invaders who enslaved them — as well as causing enormous destruction with their ragnite weapons. They rewrote history to suit themselves, and hid the truth from all but their own descendants.
• In World of Warcraft lore, the Gurubashi War occurred when settlers from Stormwind increasingly encroached on the ancestral lands of the jungle trolls resulting in a series of escalating retaliatory raids. Prince Llane and his friends assassinated the Gurubashi leader in an attempt to stop the raids only for the enraged trolls to send a massive retaliatory army. After the trolls were defeated, at great cost, Llane became king and hid knowledge of the assassination, instead letting the people believe this was a war of one-sided aggression.
• RWBY : The Girl Who Fell Through The World is Remnant's version of Alice in Wonderland , with the heroine Alyx written as a heroic girl who helps the people she meets. When the cast fall into the Ever After, they learn the real Alyx was a much more selfish, manipulative person, implying she wrote herself as a hero after returning to Remnant . Subverted when it turns out Alyx never returned to Remnant; she died in the Ever After after resolving to become The Atoner , and her brother Lewis was the one who wrote the book, trying to portray his sister in a better light .
• Blindsprings ’ winners are the Academists and the losers are Orphics. Cue 300 years of Fantastic Racism , Unequal Rites style.
• Played realistically in Noblesse ; the Union got their collective asses kicked by Frankenstein , but because they're an enormous organization and he's one guy, the only records in existence paint him as a traitor to humanity that stole their research, when the opposite is far closer to the truth.
• And as the spin-off Girls Next Door parodied it, when the Sarah (the winner) got confronted with the distorted account of her adventure:
• Sarilho : Steffano briefly discusses how odd it is that an empire who sports itself as the recoverer of the lost glory of mankind spends such an inordinate amount of time destroying the remains of the cultures it assimilates.
• In C0DA , part of Jubal's " Talking the Monster to Death " speech to Numidium , essentially explaining that Numidium was used by a succession of "winners" to get what they want: "...fuck it, we won, we do what we want.” "...fuck it, they won, they get to do what they want.”
• Referenced in The Nostalgia Critic 's review of The Magic Voyage , a story of how Christopher Columbus came to America. The film has the Native Americans thanking Columbus for his role in taking down an evil overlord and the film ends on a happy note. The film, written by and featuring white people, doesn't even mention what a bad turn the future is about to take for the Natives, instead acting like because Columbus "discovered" the continent, it would turn into a great and prosperous civilisation. Nostalgia Critic parodies it with a joke teaser for a sequel, saying that it would feature "lots and lots of slaughtering! Don't look for a G rating on the next one — it's gonna be a bloodbath!" while showing historical images of Europeans slaughtering Native Americans.
• Directly discussed and inverted in SMPEarth when Techno and Tommy are making a treaty to end the Wednesday War, and Techno spots Tommy (who had lost) editing the treaty. Techno: Y'know, they say history is written by the winners, but I can't help but notice him [Tommy] over there writing.
• Critical Role: Exandria Unlimited : Asmodeus, one of the Betrayer Gods (a title he despises ) claims this about the conflict between the Betrayers and the Prime Deities; in his story, he was a Well-Intentioned Extremist who genuinely loved mortals, and was unfairly punished by his tyrannical, self-aggrandizing siblings, who portrayed him and his siblings as purely evil monsters to advance their own agenda. Zerxus, who already hates and mistrusts the Prime Deities for his own reasons, sympathizes with him. Subverted when it's revealed that Asmodeus is every bit as evil as history claims, and only played the victim to manipulate Zerxus into helping him escape his confinement .
• An early episode inverted this trope, showing an instance where history was written by the losers. A town the Gaang visits was founded by followers of Chin the Conquerer (a warlord who successfully conquered much of the Earth Kingdom during a period of unrest), and claim that a previous incarnation of the Avatar, Kyoshi, murdered Chin. Kyoshi was in fact protecting her home from Chin's conquests and didn't even directly kill him, but Chin's followers bitterly held onto their grudge against Kyoshi, and between that and A Hero to His Hometown being in effect, Chin was celebrated in local history while Kyoshi was demonized .
• This trope is one of the many realizations that results in Zuko's Character Development and eventually completing his Heel–Face Turn during the Day of Black Sun . His whole life, he always bought into the propaganda that the Fire Nation is the epitome of national pride, believing that restoring his honor among the nation by capturing Aang is the only thing meaningful in his life. As he learns during his travels, however, the other nations see things differently: thanks to its power-hungry nobility, the Fire Nation has become feared and loathed as a corrupt empire that has oppressed all else for over a century. One notable instance where he's confronted with this dissonance happens at the end of " Zuko Alone ", wherein after he saves a boy he befriended and liberates his village, he proudly declares himself to be the Ozai's son and destined for the throne, only to be ostracized by that very village as a result, with the boy in particular furiously refusing a parting gift from Zuko and yelling that he hates him. Zuko: ( while lambasting his father for his selfish cruelty ) Growing up, we were taught that the Fire Nation was the greatest civilization in history, and somehow, the war was our way of sharing our greatness with the rest of the world. What an amazing lie that was. The people of the world are terrified by the Fire Nation! They don't see our greatness. They hate us, and we deserve it!
• In " The Headband ", Aang (in disguise) attends a Fire Nation school for a day. During the class's history lesson, the teacher quizzes the students on how Fire Lord Sozin defeated the "Air Nation Army". Of course, Aang (and the viewers) knows full well that the Air Nomads were a mostly peaceful population of monks, who didn't even have an established government , much less an army, and that Sozin's attack against them wasn't so much a battle as it was outright genocide . When he tries to point this out, the teacher irritably responds that unless he was actually around 100 years ago , he shouldn't be questioning the Fire Nation's history books. (Again, this is the same propaganda Zuko grew up on.)
• " The Ember Island Players " uses a variant of this in the episode's Show Within a Show , "The Boy in the Iceberg". As it happens, the playwright was a Fire Nation apologist, and on top of a lot of in-universe Adaptation Decay , he chose to portray the Gaang as incompetent bad guys , with the Fire Nation being shown as more sympathetic. Notably, because the events of the series finale haven't happened yet and the playwright didn't know how the war would end, he chose to portray a hypothetical outcome for the ending of the play where Zuko and Aang were killed and the Fire Nation won . Needless to say, the Gaang (even Toph , who was actually enjoying the botched portrayal of herself especially) are instantly turned off by what they see as a Cruel Twist Ending , and it's implied that this is a major factor towards the effects being decent being the only good thing any of them have to say about the show.
• Elena of Avalor : At the start of the Coronation Day special, Marlena sings Elena's story from the time she lost her parents up until the present, but the narrative treats Elena and her allies far more favorably; the account completely demonizes Esteban for helping Shuriki take over Avalor, and ignores the fact that Esteban helped take back the kingdom 41 years after his first betrayal (a fact that Francisco brings up later on). Additionally, the story completely ignores Victor's role in helping Shuriki (which Elena clearly saw in an earlier vision), along with him and Carla's other crimes, and portrays them as the victims . Of course, this was likely due to Elena's personal opinions and perception.
• In Gargoyles , Macbeth is shown to have been an honorable man and a good and wise king, while Duncan was cruel and spiteful. Word of God is that the account given in Shakespeare's play is largely due to the King of England at the time being one of Duncan's descendants.
• The Patrick Star Show : Discussed and subverted in " Klopnodian Heritage Festival ". GrandPat says that he and his powerful army conquered the land of Klopnod in half a day. Squidina, reading from a festival brochure, points out that he actually lost and had a cream puff named after him.
• The general history of the Boiling Isles as it's taught in schools is that it used to be a place where wild magic was practiced without limitations during a time period dubbed the Savage Ages, which angered the Titan and caused society to suffer endlessly. When Emperor Belos rose to power about 50 years before the show's canon, he introduced the Coven System, which allowed witches to practice magic the "right" way and society to flourish during a new period of peace. However, when Luz and Lilith go back in time during "Elsewhere and Elsewhen", they find that the Savage Ages are actually nicer than the present day, and that wild magic is not a threat in the slightest. The Coven System was created, among other things, to brand people with sigils, which would then be used on the Day of Unity to drain every witch with a sigil of their lifeforce, killing virtually every witch on the Boiling Isles .
• Philip Wittebane is revealed to have practiced this plenty of times. He talks in his journal about how he's lost many traveling companions to the various hazards on the Boiling Isles, but it's later revealed that he used his companions as cannon fodder, willingly sacrificing them to get what he wants. When Luz sneaks a peek at what he's writing, she sees that Philip has already written down her and Lilith's deaths in advance, as he fully intended on sacrificing them both to the Stonesleeper guarding the Collector's tablet. He was also so adamant about hiding the fact that he stabbed his own brother Caleb to death, that he Unpersoned Caleb entirely.
• In the Christmas Episode of The Real Ghostbusters , the quartet gets taken back to the time of A Christmas Carol and accidentally catch the spirits of Christmas past, present, and yet to come . Now with nothing existing to make him undergo his Heel–Face Turn , a vengeful Ebeneezer Scrooge proceeds to write a bestseller making him look like the big hero, the spirits to look as Jerkass ghosts bothering an innocent man, and the holiday to look like one huge joke, which in turn causes everyone to hate Christmas.
• In the Star vs. the Forces of Evil episode "Mewnipendence Day", Star is horrified and saddened to realize that her ancestors were not heroes who cleared the land of evil monsters like she had been taught, but invaders who kicked the land's original inhabitants out because they were stronger and better armed than the natives. They painted themselves as heroic when the only victims were the monsters.
• Gems raised on Homeworld largely believe the Earth was destroyed, and all life on it was wiped out, rather than the Homeworld forces having been driven off Earth by the Crystal Gems. Peridot wasn't even aware that there had been a war, only that Earth was no longer a viable colony. There is information available about Rose Quartz, but she's much more treated as a monster; not for starting the Civil War but instead for killing Pink Diamond . Complicating matters, Homeworld's leaders really did think at least the Gems were dead, as the Fantastic Nuke that caused The Corruption was meant to be a Depopulation Bomb .
• On the flipside, Steven and Amethyst, the two members of the Crystal Gems who were born after the war, are kept in the dark over some unsavory things their seniors have done. Neither knew until they were told that Rose shattered Pink Diamond, which Garnet and Pearl later tell them was a necessary step for victory and only Pearl knew (and was unable to tell anyone due to a geas ) that the shattering of Pink Diamond was actually faked, as Rose and Pink Diamond were actually the same person. Rose Quartz herself also poofed and bubbled Bismuth, a Crystal Gem rogue who was willing to take the war in a darker direction, and then allowed the other members of the group to believe she'd gone missing.
• Discussed in Transformers: Prime , where using the Omega Keys to restore Cybertron wasn't just about restoring Cybertron itself, but rather who are the ones to do so. It's pointed out that if the Decepticons are the ones who revive Cybertron, then Megatron would gain enough political influence to brand every Autobot as war criminals.

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It's All Love

Alternative Title(s): Written By The Victors

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11,241--> Report

history is written by the victors

• 1.1 Alternative forms
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English [ edit ]

Alternative forms [ edit ].

• history is written by the winners

Proverb [ edit ]

• History is often told according to the interpretation and biases of prevailing historical actors , often those who won in geopolitical disputes or otherwise became dominant forces in society .

Translations [ edit ]

See also [ edit ].

• might makes right
• the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must

• English lemmas
• English proverbs
• English multiword terms
• en:Historiography

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History is written by the winners, so, who will win our current conflict.

History has always belonged to the winners.

Those who win the battles get to write the history books. The losers and the victims are often forgotten.

Today, that's changing. In the United States, the disenfranchised and the forgotten have found their voice. The establishment is under fire like never before. Challenges to the existing American status quo have come from both the right and left wings. I feel as if the Republican and Democratic parties as we know them will be both be extinct in less than 25 years. They will be replaced by the Establishment Party and the Anti-Establishment (or Resistance) Party.

Who will win?

The Establishment holds the power. Money is not a problem for the Establishment. They also have access to the channels of power and they know how it is dispersed. They can put down resistance in a variety of ways, from law enforcement to entertainment to drugs to the media.

The Resistance holds the people. And they hold something else: technology. They can organize using technology right under the Establishment's collective nose. They can spread ideas and fight oppression quickly and with originality. And they have the will and the moral assurance. That will carry them through any tough times.

America is fast splintering thanks to improvements in technology. Fault lines are forming along gender, race, religion, political positions, geographical location, and access to education, technology, and resources. And, of course, money. Through technology, they can join groups of like-minded individuals and gain exposure to ideas. They can work to bring about change on a national and local level.

I hear more people saying, "Well, fiscally I am a conservative, but culturally I am liberal." They don't join in lockstep with political party affiliation.

Even though prosperity is still all around, Americans can no longer count on a better life through persistence, good ideas, and hard work. The road is longer and tougher, with more obstacles. But life in New York is still better than life in Turkey or Somalia or even parts of Russia. The freedoms here are still more than can be found in most places in the world.

But we as a nation are heading, inevitably, to a totalitarian fascist state. Even if a revolution were to take place and topple the existing patriarchy, it is more than likely that democracy would not flourish. One needs to look no further than what happened in Russia after the Communists and Socialists overthrew the czars and nobility.

There will be, in the next decade or so, a charismatic leader or group of leaders who understands the forces in play and exploits them to gain power. Will that come from the Establishment or the Resistance? A struggle will take place, which hopefully does not mean an extended war. But sometimes war has a way of settling pressing ideological questions. It is a direction that I fear we are headed towards, and I also fear that nothing can be done to arrest it. I can only hope that the winners, the ones who will one day record the history of our present times, maintain the democracy and the freedoms that our country was based on.

But they should be expanded to all Americans. I will have more thoughts on this in my next post.

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25 beatles lyrics: your go-to guide for every situation, the best lines from the fab four.

For as long as I can remember, I have been listening to The Beatles. Every year, my mom would appropriately blast “Birthday” on anyone’s birthday. I knew all of the words to “Back In The U.S.S.R” by the time I was 5 (Even though I had no idea what or where the U.S.S.R was). I grew up with John, Paul, George, and Ringo instead Justin, JC, Joey, Chris and Lance (I had to google N*SYNC to remember their names). The highlight of my short life was Paul McCartney in concert twice. I’m not someone to “fangirl” but those days I fangirled hard. The music of The Beatles has gotten me through everything. Their songs have brought me more joy, peace, and comfort. I can listen to them in any situation and find what I need. Here are the best lyrics from The Beatles for every and any occasion.

And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make

The End- Abbey Road, 1969

The sun is up, the sky is blue, it's beautiful and so are you

Dear Prudence- The White Album, 1968

Love is old, love is new, love is all, love is you

Because- Abbey Road, 1969

There's nowhere you can be that isn't where you're meant to be

All You Need Is Love, 1967

Life is very short, and there's no time for fussing and fighting, my friend

We Can Work It Out- Rubber Soul, 1965

He say, "I know you, you know me", One thing I can tell you is you got to be free

Come Together- Abbey Road, 1969

Oh please, say to me, You'll let me be your man. And please say to me, You'll let me hold your hand

I Wanna Hold Your Hand- Meet The Beatles!, 1964

It was twenty years ago today, Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play. They've been going in and out of style, but they're guaranteed to raise a smile

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band-1967

Living is easy with eyes closed, misunderstanding all you see

Strawberry Fields Forever- Magical Mystery Tour, 1967

Can you hear me? When it rains and shine, it's just a state of mind

Rain- Paperback Writer "B" side, 1966

Little darling, it's been long cold lonely winter. Little darling, it feels like years since it' s been here. Here comes the sun, Here comes the sun, and I say it's alright

Here Comes The Sun- Abbey Road, 1969

We danced through the night and we held each other tight, and before too long I fell in love with her. Now, I'll never dance with another when I saw her standing there

Saw Her Standing There- Please Please Me, 1963

I love you, I love you, I love you, that's all I want to say

Michelle- Rubber Soul, 1965

You say you want a revolution. Well you know, we all want to change the world

Revolution- The Beatles, 1968

All the lonely people, where do they all come from. All the lonely people, where do they all belong

Eleanor Rigby- Revolver, 1966

Oh, I get by with a little help from my friends

With A Little Help From My Friends- Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, 1967

Hey Jude, don't make it bad. Take a sad song and make it better

Hey Jude, 1968

Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away. Now it looks as though they're here to stay. Oh, I believe in yesterday

Yesterday- Help!, 1965

And when the brokenhearted people, living in the world agree, there will be an answer, let it be.

Let It Be- Let It Be, 1970

And anytime you feel the pain, Hey Jude, refrain. Don't carry the world upon your shoulders

I'll give you all i got to give if you say you'll love me too. i may not have a lot to give but what i got i'll give to you. i don't care too much for money. money can't buy me love.

Can't Buy Me Love- A Hard Day's Night, 1964

All you need is love, love is all you need

All You Need Is Love- Magical Mystery Tour, 1967

Whisper words of wisdom, let it be

Blackbird singing in the dead of night, take these broken wings and learn to fly. all your life, you were only waiting for this moment to arise.

Blackbird- The White Album, 1968

Though I know I'll never lose affection, for people and things that went before. I know I'll often stop and think about them. In my life, I love you more

In My Life- Rubber Soul, 1965

While these are my 25 favorites, there are quite literally 1000s that could have been included. The Beatles' body of work is massive and there is something for everyone. If you have been living under a rock and haven't discovered the Fab Four, you have to get musically educated. Stream them on Spotify, find them on iTunes or even buy a CD or record (Yes, those still exist!). I would suggest starting with 1, which is a collection of most of their #1 songs, or the 1968 White Album. Give them chance and you'll never look back.

14 Invisible Activities: Unleash Your Inner Ghost!

Obviously the best superpower..

The best superpower ever? Being invisible of course. Imagine just being able to go from seen to unseen on a dime. Who wouldn't want to have the opportunity to be invisible? Superman and Batman have nothing on being invisible with their superhero abilities. Here are some things that you could do while being invisible, because being invisible can benefit your social life too.

1. "Haunt" your friends.

Follow them into their house and cause a ruckus.

2. Sneak into movie theaters.

Going to the cinema alone is good for your mental health , says science

Considering that the monthly cost of subscribing to a media-streaming service like Netflix is oft...

Free movies...what else to I have to say?

3. Sneak into the pantry and grab a snack without judgment.

Late night snacks all you want? Duh.

4. Reenact "Hollow Man" and play Kevin Bacon.

America's favorite son? And feel what it's like to be in a MTV Movie Award nominated film? Sign me up.

5. Wear a mask and pretend to be a floating head.

Just another way to spook your friends in case you wanted to.

6. Hold objects so they'll "float."

"Oh no! A floating jar of peanut butter."

7. Win every game of hide-and-seek.

Just stand out in the open and you'll win.

8. Eat some food as people will watch it disappear.

Even everyday activities can be funny.

9. Go around pantsing your friends.

Even pranks can be done; not everything can be good.

10. Not have perfect attendance.

You'll say here, but they won't see you...

11. Avoid anyone you don't want to see.

Whether it's an ex or someone you hate, just use your invisibility to slip out of the situation.

12. Avoid responsibilities.

Chores? Invisible. People asking about social life? Invisible. Family being rude? Boom, invisible.

13. Be an expert on ding-dong-ditch.

Never get caught and have the adrenaline rush? I'm down.

14. Brag about being invisible.

Be the envy of the town.

But don't, I repeat, don't go in a locker room. Don't be a pervert with your power. No one likes a Peeping Tom.

Good luck, folks.

19 Lessons I'll Never Forget from Growing Up In a Small Town

There have been many lessons learned..

Small towns certainly have their pros and cons. Many people who grow up in small towns find themselves counting the days until they get to escape their roots and plant new ones in bigger, "better" places. And that's fine. I'd be lying if I said I hadn't thought those same thoughts before too. We all have, but they say it's important to remember where you came from. When I think about where I come from, I can't help having an overwhelming feeling of gratitude for my roots. Being from a small town has taught me so many important lessons that I will carry with me for the rest of my life.

1. The importance of traditions.

Sometimes traditions seem like a silly thing, but the fact of it is that it's part of who you are. You grew up this way and, more than likely, so did your parents. It is something that is part of your family history and that is more important than anything.

2. How to be thankful for family and friends.

No matter how many times they get on your nerves or make you mad, they are the ones who will always be there and you should never take that for granted.

3. How to give back.

When tragedy strikes in a small town, everyone feels obligated to help out because, whether directly or indirectly, it affects you too. It is easy in a bigger city to be able to disconnect from certain problems. But in a small town those problems affect everyone.

4. What the word "community" really means.

Along the same lines as #3, everyone is always ready and willing to lend a helping hand when you need one in a small town and to me that is the true meaning of community. It's working together to build a better atmosphere, being there to raise each other up, build each other up, and pick each other up when someone is in need. A small town community is full of endless support whether it be after a tragedy or at a hometown sports game. Everyone shows up to show their support.

5. That it isn't about the destination, but the journey.

People say this to others all the time, but it takes on a whole new meaning in a small town. It is true that life is about the journey, but when you're from a small town, you know it's about the journey because the journey probably takes longer than you spend at the destination. Everything is so far away that it is totally normal to spend a couple hours in the car on your way to some form of entertainment. And most of the time, you're gonna have as many, if not more, memories and laughs on the journey than at the destination.

6. The consequences of making bad choices.

Word travels fast in a small town, so don't think you're gonna get away with anything. In fact, your parents probably know what you did before you even have a chance to get home and tell them. And forget about being scared of what your teacher, principle, or other authority figure is going to do, you're more afraid of what your parents are gonna do when you get home.

7. To trust people, until you have a reason not to.

Everyone deserves a chance. Most people don't have ill-intentions and you can't live your life guarding against every one else just because a few people in your life have betrayed your trust.

8. To be welcoming and accepting of everyone.

While small towns are not always extremely diverse, they do contain people with a lot of different stories, struggle, and backgrounds. In a small town, it is pretty hard to exclude anyone because of who they are or what they come from because there aren't many people to choose from. A small town teaches you that just because someone isn't the same as you, doesn't mean you can't be great friends.

9. How to be my own, individual person.

In a small town, you learn that it's okay to be who you are and do your own thing. You learn that confidence isn't how beautiful you are or how much money you have, it's who you are on the inside.

10. How to work for what I want.

Nothing comes easy in life. They always say "gardens don't grow overnight" and if you're from a small town you know this both figuratively and literally. You certainly know gardens don't grow overnight because you've worked in a garden or two. But you also know that to get to the place you want to be in life it takes work and effort. It doesn't just happen because you want it to.

11. How to be great at giving directions.

If you're from a small town, you know that you will probably only meet a handful of people in your life who ACTUALLY know where your town is. And forget about the people who accidentally enter into your town because of google maps. You've gotten really good at giving them directions right back to the interstate.

12. How to be humble.

My small town has definitely taught me how to be humble. It isn't always about you, and anyone who grows up in a small town knows that. Everyone gets their moment in the spotlight, and since there's so few of us, we're probably best friends with everyone so we are as excited when they get their moment of fame as we are when we get ours.

13. To be well-rounded.

Going to a small town high school definitely made me well-rounded. There isn't enough kids in the school to fill up all the clubs and sports teams individually so be ready to be a part of them all.

14. How to be great at conflict resolution.

In a small town, good luck holding a grudge. In a bigger city you can just avoid a person you don't like or who you've had problems with. But not in a small town. You better resolve the issue fast because you're bound to see them at least 5 times a week.

15. The beauty of getting outside and exploring.

One of my favorite things about growing up in a rural area was being able to go outside and go exploring and not have to worry about being in danger. There is nothing more exciting then finding a new place somewhere in town or in the woods and just spending time there enjoying the natural beauty around you.

16. To be prepared for anything.

You never know what may happen. If you get a flat tire, you better know how to change it yourself because you never know if you will be able to get ahold of someone else to come fix it. Mechanics might be too busy , or more than likely you won't even have enough cell service to call one.

17. That you don't always have to do it alone.

It's okay to ask for help. One thing I realized when I moved away from my town for college, was how much my town has taught me that I could ask for help is I needed it. I got into a couple situations outside of my town where I couldn't find anyone to help me and found myself thinking, if I was in my town there would be tons of people ready to help me. And even though I couldn't find anyone to help, you better believe I wasn't afraid to ask.

18. How to be creative.

When you're at least an hour away from normal forms of entertainment such as movie theaters and malls, you learn to get real creative in entertaining yourself. Whether it be a night looking at the stars in the bed of a pickup truck or having a movie marathon in a blanket fort at home, you know how to make your own good time.

19. To brush off gossip.

It's all about knowing the person you are and not letting others influence your opinion of yourself. In small towns, there is plenty of gossip. But as long as you know who you really are, it will always blow over.

Grateful Beyond Words: A Letter to My Inspiration

I have never been so thankful to know you..

I can't say "thank you" enough to express how grateful I am for you coming into my life. You have made such a huge impact on my life. I would not be the person I am today without you and I know that you will keep inspiring me to become an even better version of myself.

You have taught me that you don't always have to strong. You are allowed to break down as long as you pick yourself back up and keep moving forward. When life had you at your worst moments, you allowed your friends to be there for you and to help you. You let them in and they helped pick you up. Even in your darkest hour you showed so much strength. I know that you don't believe in yourself as much as you should but you are unbelievably strong and capable of anything you set your mind to.

Your passion to make a difference in the world is unbelievable. You put your heart and soul into your endeavors and surpass any personal goal you could have set. Watching you do what you love and watching you make a difference in the lives of others is an incredible experience. The way your face lights up when you finally realize what you have accomplished is breathtaking and I hope that one day I can have just as much passion you have.

SEE MORE: A Letter To My Best Friend On Her Birthday

The love you have for your family is outstanding. Watching you interact with loved ones just makes me smile . You are so comfortable and you are yourself. I see the way you smile when you are around family and I wish I could see you smile like this everyday. You love with all your heart and this quality is something I wished I possessed.

You inspire me to be the best version of myself. I look up to you. I feel that more people should strive to have the strength and passion that you exemplify in everyday life.You may be stubborn at points but when you really need help you let others in, which shows strength in itself. I have never been more proud to know someone and to call someone my role model. You have taught me so many things and I want to thank you. Thank you for inspiring me in life. Thank you for making me want to be a better person.

Waitlisted for a College Class? Here's What to Do!

Dealing with the inevitable realities of college life..

Course registration at college can be a big hassle and is almost never talked about. Classes you want to take fill up before you get a chance to register. You might change your mind about a class you want to take and must struggle to find another class to fit in the same time period. You also have to make sure no classes clash by time. Like I said, it's a big hassle.

This semester, I was waitlisted for two classes. Most people in this situation, especially first years, freak out because they don't know what to do. Here is what you should do when this happens.

Don't freak out

This is a rule you should continue to follow no matter what you do in life, but is especially helpful in this situation.

Email the professor

Around this time, professors are getting flooded with requests from students wanting to get into full classes. This doesn't mean you shouldn't burden them with your email; it means they are expecting interested students to email them. Send a short, concise message telling them that you are interested in the class and ask if there would be any chance for you to get in.

Attend the first class

Often, the advice professors will give you when they reply to your email is to attend the first class. The first class isn't the most important class in terms of what will be taught. However, attending the first class means you are serious about taking the course and aren't going to give up on it.

Keep attending class

Every student is in the same position as you are. They registered for more classes than they want to take and are "shopping." For the first couple of weeks, you can drop or add classes as you please, which means that classes that were once full will have spaces. If you keep attending class and keep up with assignments, odds are that you will have priority. Professors give preference to people who need the class for a major and then from higher to lower class year (senior to freshman).

Have a backup plan

For two weeks, or until I find out whether I get into my waitlisted class, I will be attending more than the usual number of classes. This is so that if I don't get into my waitlisted class, I won't have a credit shortage and I won't have to fall back in my backup class. Chances are that enough people will drop the class, especially if it is very difficult like computer science, and you will have a chance. In popular classes like art and psychology, odds are you probably won't get in, so prepare for that.

Remember that everything works out at the end

Life is full of surprises. So what if you didn't get into the class you wanted? Your life obviously has something else in store for you. It's your job to make sure you make the best out of what you have.

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A Loving Daughter, Obsessed With Her Parents’ Misery, Seeks Its Roots

Inspired by her own family’s past, Claire Messud’s “This Strange Eventful History” unfolds over seven decades and two wars.

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By Joan Silber

Joan Silber’s most recent books of fiction are “Secrets of Happiness” and “Improvement.” Her novel “Mercy” will be out in 2025.

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THIS STRANGE EVENTFUL HISTORY, by Claire Messud

“Maman and Papa had always talked about how much they loved Algiers, how much a part of them it was … the most beautiful city on earth.” So thinks 8-year-old François, a French diplomat’s kid who’s lived all over, as he, his mother, little sister and aunt flee Europe ahead of the invading German Army in 1940 to shelter with relatives in Algeria, his family’s homeland but one new to him.

Readers of Claire Messud’s other superbly written novels will recognize the agile precision of her prose in her newest one, “This Strange Eventful History,” and some will nod at the mention of North Africa. A French household with Algerian roots is at the center of her second novel, “ The Last Life ” (1999), and tales of the pied-noir branch of her family are folded into her essays on Albert Camus in “ Kant’s Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write ” (2020) .

After a prologue citing her new novel’s sources in her own family history, the narrative moves along from 1940 to 2010, across three generations and five points of view, channeling the intimacy of fiction. We begin with young François in 1940, dutifully trying to watch over his whiny little sister, and then get a chapter with a more well-informed set of worries from his father, Gaston, a naval attaché who’s being sent to Beirut (still under French control) and is desolate in wartime without his wife. The book then leaps ahead 13 years to François’s arrival at an American college. Each section is absorbing, and the leap has our attention; we want to know who François turns out to be.

Family members keep relocating across the globe — Buenos Aires, Sydney, the French Mediterranean coast, Connecticut — and their thoughts (largely unspoken) are filled with disappointments, bearable and unbearable. Denise, François’s fragile sister, is elated by an intense crush and then gutted by it. Barbara, the Canadian wife François loves but never quite understands, mocks her own failure to be a Frenchwoman and hates hosting her in-laws — “three-course meals, the linen napkins, the bloody siesta, the rituals as ineluctable as Catholic Mass. The agony of it.” Gaston, the family patriarch, knows by the time he’s in his 50s that “the world had transformed around him, and he couldn’t seem to adapt.” His granddaughter, Chloe, who, we’re led to think, grows up to be the writer of this saga, watches her parents with rueful love — “I felt the burden of their misery like a magnet at once drawing me home.”

As the book moves over seven decades, our sympathies are dispersed — no single character owns the story and no one crisis governs the plot; our eye is on the group. It’s a risky but solid structure, ambitiously packed with material. What’s striking is the way Messud manages to let time’s passage itself supply great feeling.

How sorry we are to see François, whom we knew as a staunch child, become a man lonely in his marriage. How dismayed we are to see Barbara, his wife, happiest as a stylish young mother in law school, lapsing into an older woman confused by dementia.

For much of the novel, no one speaks of Algeria. I kept wondering if the book had opted to cover only private sorrows. Early on, in a chapter set in Algiers in 1953, Denise is sideswiped by a car and, recalling the incident a few years later, thinks the car may have been driven by an anti-French insurgent. But this memory is quickly dropped.

Only after 300 pages is there a fierce discussion of the Algerian war for independence — the long and bloody conflict, from 1954 to 1962, in which France’s atrocities against Algerians eventually lost it international support. François’ daughter, Chloe, a young woman in her 20s, utters the familiar “truism” that the French should not have been in Algeria in the first place, enraging her aunt, Denise, and her otherwise placid grandfather, Gaston.

Denise is still angry that the fleeing French and harkis — Algerians loyal to the French — were treated badly in France. Gaston’s defense of the more than 100 years of occupation is darker. He points out that the United States and Australia, where Chloe has happily lived without shame, “are simply more successful examples of settler colonialism — no less unjust, no less brutal, simply with a fuller obliteration of the native cultures.” He argues against “the danger of hypocrisy” as he cites the abundant company France has in historical shame.

A final chapter, flashing back to 1927, reveals a shocking fact about Gaston and his wife, dating to their time as a young couple. We’ve had hints of this secret but not ones we could have deciphered. Messud makes a point of tying the hidden scandal to the truth that “the country” in which the couple’s rule-breaking love — I won’t give away any more — was forged “does not belong to them, has never belonged to them.”

I wasn’t entirely persuaded by the link to political entitlement and was hungry for a longer comment on the meaning of the couple’s secret. This lingering wish was a mark of how attached I had become to this family, how mysteriously resonant my time with them had been.

THIS STRANGE EVENTFUL HISTORY | By Claire Messud | Norton | 428 pp. | $29.99

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“Guest Star” Wins 2024 Albright Creative Nonfiction Prize

• May 16, 2024 May 16, 2024

Ashlen Renner, originally of Pinehurst, NC, wins the 2024 Alex Albright Creative Nonfiction Prize with her essay “Guest Star.” “In a fascinating hybrid of astronomy, myth, history, speculation, and memoir,” final Judge Rebecca McClanahan writes of her selection, “this gifted writer moves seamlessly between the personal and the universal. The language is arresting and precise, the metaphors beautifully rendered. As readers, we witness how this narrator lives on stories – ‘those written on brittle parchment or never written at all’ – and the blend of curiosity and imagination that drives the essay is like the Guest Star itself, ‘a broken star trying to piece itself back together.’”  

Renner is a journalist based in northern Virginia. She earned her MFA from George Mason University. She has published in New Ohio Review and Feels Blind Lit , and she was a finalist for the 2023 Albright Prize contest. “Guest Star” will be published in the 2025 print issue of NCLR . 

McClanahan also selected two finalists for Honorable Mention: “Hurricane Season” by Erick Daniel Aguilar, a Honduran-American writer who lives in Chicago, and “I – The Mountain: A Nonfiction” by Loss Pequeño Glazier, Professor Emeritus of SUNY Buffalo, who lives in the mountains of Western North Carolina. 

Augilar’s essay was inspired by several hurricane seasons in North Carolina; this will be his first publication. McClanahan writes of the new writer’s essay, “This deeply affecting memoir, rich with sensory description and fueled by the narrator’s dying father’s wish to tell ‘the story of his American dream,’ takes us into a world most readers would never otherwise experience: the plight of migrant workers who, like the father, ‘worked the fields, slaughtered hogs, and cleaned the flesh off turkeys.’ Like the hurricanes that threaten the physical landscape, the uncertainty and fears – of deportation or family dissolution – threaten these immigrant families’ very existence. But even the most difficult story can redeem us, and this author, in telling the father’s story, becomes ‘not exactly a peddler of catastrophes, but a salvager of meaning.’” 

Glazier is a poet and essayist, with many publications, including in NCLR Online Winter 2024: a finalist poem in NCLR’s 2023 James Applewhite Poetry Prize contest. McClanahan writes of Glazier’s honorable mention essay, “Against the backdrop of the Nantahala Mountains, this ambitious, multi-layered essay is, on one level, a conversation between the narrator and a host of great writers, and, on the other, a profound meditation on the ancient mysteries of age, memory, and mortality, leading the narrator to understand that ‘I will disintegrate before the mountains do, maybe even before the sun rises. It’s just the order of things.’”   

The other finalists this year were “Presumed Parentage” by Henrietta Goodman, who lives in Montana but grew up in Gastonia, NC; “Year of the Acorns” by Ashley Harris of Asheboro; and “Kitchens” by Dawn Reno Langley of Durham. 

We are grateful to final judge Rebecca McClanahan , author of several books of (and about) nonfiction, including, most recently, In the Key of New York City: A Memoir in Essays .

Since its start over 30 years ago, NCLR has been a venue for strong creative nonfiction. The Alex Albright Creative Nonfiction Prize was created in 2015 to honor NCLR ’s founding editor. The North Carolina Literary and Historical Association funds this contest. In addition to a monetary prize for the author and publication in NCLR, the winning essay is nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Honorable mentions will also be published in 2025 and receive honoraria.  Find subscription information on the website at https://nclr.ecu.edu/subscriptions/ . 

Produced since 1992 at East Carolina University, and published by the University of North Carolina Press, the North Carolina Literary Review has won numerous awards and citations. The mission of NCLR is to preserve and promote North Carolina’s rich literary culture. NCLR introduces new and emerging writers; reintroduces forgotten authors; showcases work in literary criticism, interviews, book reviews, fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry; and reports on the state’s literary news. Artwork used by exclusively North Carolina artists.