Have We Failed as Historians?

Today's Commencement Speech         “ Over the years, for example, I've met adults - many with university degrees - who thought the Quakers massacred the Indians and stole their land (then I had to explain who the Quakers are); that WWII was fought in 1930; that Henry VIII's divorce was the only cause of the English Reformation and slavery the only cause of the Civil War; that educated Medieval people thought the Earth was flat; that Charles Darwin's theory of evolution was just an idea the naturalist "floated" rather than the result of two decades of research (another said evolution was invented by 17th Century Jesuits); that William Levitt infested potato fields with parasitic worms to force farmers to sell; that anti-Asian racism was why Americans dropped the atomic bomb on Japan (which surely would have been used on Germany had it been ready before May of 1945); that the American colonists in 1776 overwhelmingly were in favor of independence; that American Indian tribes were all pacifistic environmentalists; that Franklin Roosevelt knew about Japanese plans to attack Pearl Harbor weeks before December 7, 1941, etc. The list goes on and on. I nearly fell out of my chair when I heard a popular Irish-American TV journalist say that Oliver Cromwell "conquered Ireland for the British crown".   Have We Failed as Historians?   Or that Bill Clinton was not impeached.  Or that the reason Bill Clinton was impeached was his adulterous behavior.  Or— ”