People say that history is written by the winning side - what would
some of history's key events / wars etc. have looked like, and been
recorded and remembered, if they had been written by the losing side?
Access to sources on different and alternative perspectives of key
historical evsnts please

just wondering, did you get this idea  from the movie The Fog of War,
all about Robert MacNamara?

If you haven't seen it, it would be show some important points along
this line of thinking.

ts

Well, the US lost the Vietnam War. Right?

But, of course, they reported it as a victory. Right?

Thucydides "History of the Peloponessian War" was written from the
Athenian point of view.  The war was the end of the Athenian empire,
an empire that was based on a strong naval position.

Google search strategy:
"Peloponnesian war" Thucydides

Best regards,

Omnivorous-GA

Thucydides (mentioned by omnivorous-ga)  is probably the best example,
but other major losing side accounts include:

The Song of Roland. A reader could be forgiven for forgetting that
this  describes a double failure. Charlemagne's offensive into Spain
failed, and then the rearguard, led by Roland, is wiped out. It's
historically important because had the offensive succeeded, then there
would have been no Reconquista. The whole of Spain would have rejoined
the Christian world before the fall of Grenada in 1492. Although the
"Song" is quite ahistorical, it is how the event was remembered in the
Middle Ages.

Much of the Old Testament. "Lamentations", Jeremiah's meditation on
the fall of Jerusalem, is the best example here, though Psalm 137 is
the most quotable: "By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea,
we wept, when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows
in the midst thereof. For there they that carried us away captive
required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth,
saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How shall we sing the LORD's
song in a strange land?"

The Kosovo Cycle. The Serbian national epics revolve around the defeat
and dissolution of the Serbian empire at battle of Kosovo, where they
fell under Ottoman rule.

A bit closer to the modern, "Gone With the Wind" is certainly a
(fictional) account of That Late Unpleasantness, also known as the War
of Northern Aggression, the War Between the States, and the US Civil
War. Probably any account of the war written by a non-black Southerner
before 1950 would fall in the same vein.

"All's Quiet on the Western Front" was written by a Eric Maria
Remarque, a soldier for Germany in World War I. For that matter, I
think that the more famous German soldier's "Mein Kampf" contained
Hitler's view of how Germany lost.

All told, I think losers get to write quite a lot of history. Winners
are pressed with the need to run their empires; losers are stuck at
home with nothing else to do but brood over their failures.

Oh, and if this is some school assignment that you're trying to get
the Google Answers people to do so you can plagiarize off them, then
you're a loser, and you're writing something!

Someone else mentioned the book of Lamentations in reference to the
tribes of Israel being on the "losing side."  A very good reference. 
In a nutshell, much of the old testament is about the people of Israel
sinning against God, getting punished, crying out to God for mercy,
getting rescued, forgetting that he had rescued them, turning away
from him again, and getting punished, etc.  Many of the Psalms reflect
the anguish, as well as the book of Exodus.  Also, at one point the
whole of Israel was carried off (literally) by the Babylonians, and
their temple was destroyed.

The other great example is the South.  They still don't admit they
lost down there.  Take a drive through southern Atlanta.  Southern
flags and other paraphanalia are all over the place.