Our reexamination, though, will not involve an attempt to simply replace one set of assumptions or interpretations with another. Instead, our reexamination should demonstrate for us the essential validity of some of the remarks made above by university administrators. History is a picture filtered through the lenses of time, language, and point of view. The history of the moment, of the daily headline, has immediacy and heat but can often lack the depth and accumulation of detail a later look can provide. As for point of view, accounts of an event vary not only with the witnesses' physical perception of the instant but also their political and philosophic perception of the world and of human nature itself.
History is a tricky story that depends on who is telling it and where they're coming from.
I first heard stories of the coal wars of the twenties . . . Some years later I wrote a screenplay for a movie called Matewan based on what I'd heard and what little I could find that was written about it. Most of this came from people on one side or the other of the union struggle, people who were there in the thick of the fight and chose their words as weapons in a battle still raging. But as history usually belongs to the winners, and the story of the coal wars is largely that of a people who lost and continue to lose, it was a story more often told in ballads and folktales than in the pages of library books. As we began shooting the movie, we discovered Lon Savage's Thunder in the Mountains .