Clearing Safari History

Used to be able to clear history by clicking on

settings>safari>"clear history..." After doing that, reopening safari shows all the bookmarks.

Further, if I open the bookmarks, I find that I can no longer use "clear" or "select all". I can select edit and then go one-by-one to delete the hundreds of bookmarks. I must be missing something - there's no way to simply delete all of the history??