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In the early 1960s, America's top military leaders reportedly drafted plans to kill innocent people and commit acts of terrorism in U.S. cities to create public support for a war against Cuba.

plans reportedly included the possible assassination of Cuban émigrés, sinking boats of Cuban refugees on the high seas, hijacking planes, blowing up a U.S. ship, and even orchestrating violent terrorism in U.S. cities

to trick the American public and the international community into supporting a war to oust Cuba's then new leader, communist Fidel Castro

The Stalinist apparatus in the Kremlin was able to carry out its taming of the American party in large measure by appropriating the mantle of the Russian Revolution. At the same time it exploited ideological and political weaknesses within the American party and the US labor movement in general, weaknesses that took the form of national provincialism and indifference to theory.

By the time of the Great Depression, which brought new political opportunities and challenges in the US and elsewhere, the Stalinist grip on the American CP was complete.

Equating Stalinism with Marxism, this group saw the crisis of the bureaucracy as proof that the building of a Marxist party in the working class was impossible.

As one official explained, "we understand that school is a unique social institution that forms all citizens"; which means it is essential they should be taught history, especially the right kind of history. "We need a united society," the apparatchik goes on, and to achieve that end, "we need a united textbook".

in 1934, it was Stalin himself who convened an earlier meeting of historians to discuss the very same issue, namely the teaching of history in Russian schools. He disapproved of the conventional class-based accounts then available, which were strongly influenced by Marxist doctrines, and which traced the development of Russia from feudalism to capitalism and beyond. Not even Stalin's hometown wanted to be associated with him anymore... "These textbooks," Stalin thundered, "aren't good for anything. It's all epochs and no facts, no events, no people, no concrete information." History, he concluded somewhat enigmatically, "must be history" - by which, in this case, he meant a cavalcade of national heroes, whose doings might appeal more broadly to the Russian people than the arid abstractions of class analysis and social structure.

Who, for example, should decide what history is taught in schools: should it be the government, or academic experts, or examination boards, or the schools themselves, or even the parents?

His key episodes are based not around a grand organising narrative but a series of vignettes that make compelling stories.

If history is popular on TV, it can be made popular at school.

Teachers developed new methods, shifting away from chronology and narrative to topics and themes, where the emphasis was placed on "skills" of analysis over the regurgitation of facts.