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Battles over history are no joke. In June 1989 most of East-Central Europe was beginning to look toward the future. Pressure applied by Solidarity in Poland, the patient integrity of political prisoners in Czechoslovakia, and a handful of popular meetings at a few Lutheran churches in East Germany were pointing to the political miracles that soon spelled the end of communist regimes. But for Greater Serbia, the past seemed much more important. On June 28 of that year, over one million Serbs gathered at the Field of Blackbirds in Kosovo Province to observe the six-hundredth anniversary of a battle in 1389 when a doughty band of their ancestors, after heroic struggle, was finally overcome by a much larger army of Saracen Turks. The featured speaker of the day, Slobodan Milosevic, passionately reminded his fellow Serbs of the ignominy they had suffered at the hands of the Turks, then during their subjugation by the Austrian-Hungarian empire, and finally from assorted enemies in the twentieth century. It was a powerful message. Others had heeded it before, like Gavrilo Princip, the Serb nationalist who in 1914 assassinated the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and, by so doing, plunged Europe into war. The date of that assassination was also June 28. Warfare that Milosovic's 1989 speech helped to precipitate has not been as extensive as the great conflagration of World War I, but it has proven every bit as vicious.

In the United States, "history battles" have featured prominently in the culture wars of the last two decades. The cancellation in January 1995 of an exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum which was to have commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of the deployment of the first atom bomb at Hiroshima, and a raucous brouhaha in 1994–95 over the publication of guidelines for the teaching of history in U.S. public schools, are among the most prominent of these battles. But there have been many other conflicts over many other contested questions: Should commemoration of the five- hundredth anniversary of Columbus's first voyage to the Americas be a cause for celebration or lament? How should on-site museums memorialize the attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese in 1941 and the incursion against the Sioux by Gen. George Custer and the U.S. Cavalry in 1876? What should be made of President Reagan's curious remarks about World War II and modern Germany when in 1985 he visited a German military cemetery at Bitburg during fortieth anniversary celebrations for V-E Day?

Although these particular history battles have been violent only rhetorically, Americans who think that historically inspired violence is somehow un-American should think again. What ever else it represented, the terrorist bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building on April 19, 1995, was also a statement about the history that had unfolded with so much loss of life—exactly two years to the day before—at the Branch Davidian Compound near Waco, Texas. The American Civil War remains the most destructive war—in lives lost and property destroyed—ever fought by the United States. Among its other dimensions, that war was also a historical argument about the meaning of American independence in 1776 and of the United States Constitution from 1787. Northerners like Abraham Lincoln held passionately to the belief that for the South to leave the Union was to contravene the clear intention of the Founders who had staked their lives, honor, and fortune on the Declaration of Independence. Southerners like Jefferson Davis held just as passionately that their right to own slaves and their right to secede had been guaranteed by the express intentions of the Constitution. It took nearly 700,000 lives (more than 2 percent of the nation's population) to decide that Lincoln was a better historian than Davis.

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