Margaret MacMillan

I must admit I stumbled upon MacMillan's books. I picked up her book Women of the Raj sometime in 2008 and read it from cover to cover on a school trip to Malaysia. It was a fascinating study of the role of women in

British India and demonstrated that they were far from docile, but were in fact active members of the Raj and determined to contribute to the furtherance of the imperial cause.

Her second book I read was even better than the first! Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History (2009) exposed how history affects us all in many ways. Of particular help in shaping my thoughts is her explaining how "bad history" - one sided and imbalanced, often skewed to assist in nation-building - only tell part of complex stories, and must be avoided by the historian.

“Bad history also makes sweeping generalizations for which there is not adequate evidence and ignores awkward facts that do not fit.... [We must] do our best to raise the public awareness of the past in all its richness and complexity.... We must contest the one-sided, even false, histories that are out there in the public domain.”