The Real News Network has the dialog Untold History: Early US Imperialism, Hitler, Roosevelt, The Spanish Civil War as the second part of the series.  I posted the first part previously in The Making of “Untold History of the United States”.

It is hard to pull out a sentence or two to act as a teaser. All I can say is that it is a fascinating discussion of history. As in any telling of history, I am no authority to tell you who is right, or wrong, or even anywhere near the truth on what actually happened.

I am beginning to think that the only purpose of delving into history is to get an understanding of what various people think about each other based on what their understanding of history is. The reason for people to have the attitudes they do is based on what they think history is. It almost makes no difference how close to reality that imagined history is. Our understanding of people is probably no more accurate than our understanding of history. So where does that leave us?

Maybe the real lesson is that life is just very complicated. As an engineer, I feel like the best attitude to have is to always put safety margins in your plans based on the premise that what you think you know may not be completely accurate or may not be complete. Putting such contingencies in your plans has a cost. The art of engineering is to make these contingencies as small as possible without making them too small. Competition makes for pressure to cut the safety margin. As an engineer you have to give in to that pressure enough so that your enterprise survives the competition, but not give in so much that your product becomes unsafe. That’s a neat trick if you can do it.