On the occasion of International Literacy Day and as part of the CSIC's 2025 "Dialogues with Science" series, historian Eduardo Manzano Moreno invites us to reflect on how we use (and misuse) the past to construct identity narratives that appeal more to emotion than to knowledge. In his upcoming talk, Manzano challenges the supposed "historical roots" of Europe and Spain, often based on a simplified Greco-Roman and Christian legacy that erases the true diversity of our past. Manzano is a researcher at the CSIC and author of books such as The Caliph’s Court: Four Years in Umayyad Córdoba and Diverse Spain: Keys to a Plural History. His work reminds us that the past is not a single truth, but a space of debate and nuance.