Addendum ...

WOW! Cool column by Mark Morford on the way Texas writes (sorry, re-writes) history textbooks. A quotation:

... Yes, everyone knows that history is slippery and spurious to begin with, all about context and spin and who's telling the tale. History is, after all, written by the victors.

What they don't usually add is how history is then revised by the politicians, gutted by the church leaders, molested by the power mongers, skinned alive by paranoid militants, poorly codified by the speechwriters and then spun, torqued and diluted by countless mealy "experts" before being shoved down the gullet of unsuspecting youth, where it is partially digested like so much liquefied school lunch meat, only to be wrongly half-remembered later in life by the most insane among them, who then quickly gets his own talk show on Fox News. And lo, the circle of life continues.