"How we teach our kids history has become a big controversy these days, with liberals accusing conservatives of wanting to whitewash the past, and sometimes that’s true, sometimes they do. But plenty of liberals also want to abuse history to control the present, and last month, a scholar named James Sweet caught hell for calling them out for doing just that. He criticized the phenomenon known as ‘ presentism,’ which means judging everyone in the past by the standards of the present. It’s the belief that people who lived 100 or 500 or 1,000 years ago really should have known better, which is so stupid. It’s like getting mad at yourself for not knowing what you know now when you were ten."