Bonfire night, also known as the Fifth of November, is an old British holiday that has gained notoriety here in the United States since the 2006 release of the movie “V for Vendetta.” The movie and the comic book on which it is based feature the main character, V, a man clothed all in black with a cape and a Guy Fawkes mask, working to subvert a totalitarian party-state Britain.

The character adopts the Guy Fawkes disguise because in 1605, Fawkes tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament; that is the main goal of V. As he states in the movie, the act is merely a symbol, but with enough people it can gain a powerful meaning. His mission is to topple the oppressive government and lead to a restoration of justice and liberty. The movie is pretty violent, but it has a powerful message to it: that tyranny should not be tolerated, and we should prize and maintain our liberties.

As a student of history, however, I find the appropriation and then misuse of Fawkes and his Gunpowder Plot disturbing. The most commonly mistaken historical facts are often the simplest ones, such as Rep. Michele Bachmann’s, R-Minn., statement to a group of people in Manchester, N.H., that their’s was “the state where the shot was heard around the world at Lexington and Concord.”

Fawkes was not a champion of liberty in anything but the 16th- and 17th-century sense. His was not a mission of toleration. In 1605 he tried to blow up Parliament because King James VI of Scotland had inherited the English throne two years earlier and retained Protestantism as the official religion and continued the Elizabethan rejection of state-sponsored Catholicism. Like the Puritans and the rest of Europe at this time, religious liberty consisted of living under whichever faith was true.

Often, that faith would be imposed on dissenters who had the misfortune of living within the realm of a prince who disagreed with them. Toleration, to the extent that it existed at all, did not mean acceptance. The Test Act of 1673, in England, required communion in the Church of England to hold office. England’s Act of Toleration, passed in 1689, allowed freedom of worship to Protestants, including dissenters from the Church of England, but not Catholics and non-trinitarians. The Catholic Relief Act, passed in 1829, repealed the 1673 Test Act, removed penal laws and allowed Catholics to sit as members of Parliament.

Louis XIV of France repealed the Edict of Nantes, which granted religious toleration to Protestants in 1598, in 1685. The Thirty Years’ War across Europe, from 1618 to 1648, ended the religion-based conflict with a compromise: each German prince would be able to choose his own religion. Choice was not an option, however, for anyone but the prince.

The American colonies are often pointed to as examples of religious freedom, but often they disenfranchised adherents to certain creeds, such as Catholicism, or substantially limited their rights and denied them legal equality. Religious intolerance has been a fixture of life for centuries, and Guy Fawkes’ Gunpowder Plot was part of that tradition.

Historical accuracy is vital. To know where we’re going, we have to have an idea of where we are now and how we got here. In short, we have to know our history. Assigning an incorrect meaning to an important historical event only corrupts the history and makes our understanding of it more biased.

Ideas are important, but they exist in a factual context of past and present. To understand how they will impact our world and the people in it, we need to know history. The French Revolution, for instance, ignored it. The revolutionaries had lots of rational, enlightened, liberal ideas. But they worked to impose those ideas on a society unready for them, without moving in increments toward their goals. Their revolution included a bloodbath of a terror because they believed their ideas were so good that they no longer needed to work them out in a society formed by long-standing traditions.

Even the worst offenders against historical accuracy acknowledge their need for it. History — the human experience — provides the best evidence for an argument. In citing the American Revolution and the Founding Fathers, the tea party movement seeks to tie us back to an earlier age.

No matter who does that hearkening back, however, must take great care to do it correctly. Looking at history with rose-colored lenses, romanticizing and glorifying it, and ignoring its unsavory parts only means we’ll end up acting on inaccurate assumptions.

Remember, remember, the fifth of November. Britons do so by burning effigies of Guy Fawkes, not King James.