
A tongue-in-cheek history of England which takes as its basic tenet the idea that history is only what you can remember and is therefore a collection of half remembered facts. The authors maintain that there are only two memorable dates, these being 1066 (the Battle of Hastings and the Norman Invasion) and 55 BC (the first Roman Invasion). The book begins with the Roman invasion and continues to the end of WW1, when America ‘was clearly thus Top Nation, and history came to a.
This article might exist just for this joke in the sub-headline. Pretty good.
"1066 and all that" is a highly influential satirical history book from 1930, and "[X] and all that" a meme/idiom in UK English.
1066! You should find a copy of 1066 and All That. I'm slightly surprised that the Gutenberg Project hasn't made it available. I know a few dates before and after that, but not that many.
History as remembered by the public is always going to be fragments made into a mythos. The problem is that some of that mythos defines the propaganda contours of the present, whether that's people saying the US civil war wasn't about slavery or whether it's Brexiteers saying that "no deal will be fine because we survived the second world war".
> America was thus clearly Top Nation, and History came to a .
(For any confused Americans, remember . is a full stop, not a period.)
