Ninety years ago, on May 25, Henry Ford coined a saying that has been widely misquoted ever since as, “History is bunk” or, sometimes, “History is bunk, the way it is taught in the schools.”

In fact, what Ford told a Chicago Tribune reporter was this: “History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today.”

The Tribune’s editors were incensed by the observation, and ran an editorial calling Ford an “ignorant idealist.”

Ford may have had some gaps in his education, and may have had his quixotic moments. In 1915, for example, he funded a peace commission made up of private individuals in a vain effort to negotiate an end to the First World War.

But if his remark to the Tribune reporter stamps him as ignorant, what would the Tribune’s editors have made of another famous comment on history by one Francois-Marie Arouet, better known as Voltaire: “History is nothing but a pack of tricks we play upon the dead”?