The case for "revisionist history"

[Winslowalrob]

From answers.com

http://www.answers.com/revisionist%20history

Historical revisionism has both a legitimate academic use and a pejorative meaning. The pejorative use refers to illegitimate manipulation of history for political purposes, for example Holocaust denial. This meaning is described further in the article historical revisionism (negationism).

Within the academic field of history, historical revisionism is the legitimate reexamination of historical facts, with an eye towards updating histories with newly discovered, more accurate, or less biased information. The implication is that history as it has been traditionally told may not be entirely accurate.

Historical revisionism

Those historians who work within the existing establishment and who have a body of existing work from which they claim authority, often have the most to gain by maintaining the status quo. This can be called an accepted paradigm, which in some circles or societies takes the form of a denunciatory stance towards revisionism of any kind.

If there were a universally accepted view of history which never changed, there would be no need to research it further. Many historians who write revisionist exposés are motivated by a genuine desire to educate and to correct history. Many great discoveries have come as a result of the research of men and women who have been curious enough to revisit certain historical events and explore them again in depth from a new perspective.

Revisionist historians contest the mainstream or traditional view of historical events, they raise views at odds with traditionalists, which must be freshly judged. Revisionist history is often practiced by those who are in the minority, such as feminist historians, ethnic minority historians, those working outside of mainstream academia in smaller and less known universities, or the youngest scholars, essentially historians who have the most to gain and the least to lose in challenging the status quo. In the friction between the mainstream of accepted beliefs and the new perspectives of historical revisionism, received historical ideas are either changed, solidified, or clarified. If over a period of time the revisionist ideas become the new establishment status quo a paradigm shift is said to have occurred.

"History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon." –Napoleon Bonaparte.

Historians, like all people, are inexorably influenced by the zeitgeist (the spirit of the times). Developments in other academic areas, and cultural and political fashions, all help to shape the currently accepted model and outlines of history (the accepted historiographical paradigm). As time passes and these influences change so do most historians views on the explanation of historical events. The old consensus may no longer be considered by most historians to explain how and why certain events in the past occurred, the accepted model is revised to fit in with the current agreed-upon version of events. Some of the influences on historians, which may change over time are:

* Developments in other academic areas. DNA analysis has had an impact in various areas of history either confirming established historical theories or presenting new evidence which undermines the current established historical explanation. Professor Andrew Sherratt a British prehistorian was responsible for introducing the work of anthropological writings on the consumption of currently legal and illegal drugs and how to use these papers to explain certain aspects of prehistoric societies* [1].

* Language: For example as more sources in other languages become available historians may review their theories in light of the new sources. The revision of the meaning of the Dark Ages are an example of this.

* Nationalism: For example when reading schoolbook history in Europe, it is possible to read about an event from completely different perspectives. In the Battle of Waterloo most British, French, Dutch and German schoolbooks slant the battle to emphasise the importance of the contribution of their nations. Sometimes the name of an event is used to convey political or a national perspective. For example the same conflict between two English speaking countries is known by two different names, the "American War of Independence" and the "American Revolutionary War", or the Irish War of Independence and the Anglo-Irish War. As perceptions of nationalism change so do those areas of history which are driven by such ideas.

* Culture: For example as regionalism has become more prominent in the UK some historians have been suggesting that the English Civil War is too Anglo-centric and that to understand the war, events which had previously been dismissed as on the periphery should be given greater prominence; to emphasise this, revisionist historians have suggested that the English Civil War becomes just one of a number of interlocking conflicts known as Wars of the Three Kingdoms.

* Ideology: For example during the 1940s it became fashionable to see the English Civil War from a Marxist school of thought. In the words of Christopher Hill, "the Civil War was a class war." In the post World War II years the influence of Marxist interpretation waned in British academia and by the 1970s this view came under attack by a new school of revisionists and it has been largely overturned as a major mainstream explanation of the middle 17th century conflict in the British Isles (IONA).

* Historical Perspective: Social historians like Howard Zinn began to write about history from the perspective of minorities and the working class rather than the traditional elite in the United States. Perhaps one of the greatests works of historical revisionism is Zinn's A People's History of the United States.

* Historial causation: Issues of causation in history are often revised with new research: for example by the middle of the twentieth century the status quo was to see the French Revolution as the result of the triumphant rise of a new middle class. Research in the 1960s prompted by revisionist historians like Alfred Cobban and Francois Furet revealed the social situation to be much more complex and the question of what caused the Revolution is now a closely debated one.

Examples

These are examples of historical revisionist ideas.

"Feudalism"

The concept of feudalism has undergone a number of revisions. Recently some revisionist thinking has rejected the term and concept completely saying it is invalid and should not be used at all.

Agincourt

The Battle of Agincourt was for centuries believed to be an engagement in which the English army, though overwhelmingly outnumbered 4 to 1 by the French army, pulled off a stunning victory. However, recent research by professor Anne Curry using the original enrollment records, has brought into question this interpretation and although her research is not finished[2], she has published her initial findings[3], that the French only outnumbered the English and Welsh 12,000 to 8,000. If true, the numbers may have been exaggerated for patriotic reasons by the English.[4]

Military leadership during the First World War

The military leadership of the British Army during the First World War was frequently condemned as poor by historians and politicians for decades after the war ended. Common charges were that the generals commanding the army were blind to the realities of trench warfare, ignorant of the conditions of their men and were unable to learn from their mistakes, thus causing enormous numbers of casualties ('lions led by donkeys'). However, during the 1960s historians such as John Terraine began to challenge this interpretation. In recent years as new documents have come forth and the distance of time has allowed for more objective analysis, historians such as Gary D. Sheffield and Richard Holmes observe that the military leadership of the British Army on the Western Front had to cope with many problems that they could not control such as a lack of adequate military communications, furthermore military leadership improved throughout the war culminating in the Hundred Days Offensive advance to victory in 1918. Some historians, even revisionists, still criticise the British High Command severely, but they are less inclined to portray the war in a simplistic manner with brave troops being led by foolish officers.

There has been a similar movement regarding the French Army during the war with contributions by historians such as Anthony Clayton. Revisionists are far more likely to view commanders such as French General Ferdinand Foch, British General Douglas Haig and other figures, such as American General Pershing, in a sympathetic light.

Red Scare

For decades, the red scare of the late 1940s and early 1950s was generally accepted as paranoia. However, with the declassification of the Venona decrypts and the opening up of the Russian Archives, a review has been done, and it is now accepted that while the red scare was in many ways still irrational (e.g. the McCarthy/HUAC hearings), there was in fact a great amount of communist espionage going on in the US.

And so on and so forth. As someone that actually cares about history, I am pretty annoyed when people just throw out the term "revisionist history" with absolutely no idea what it means. Guys, all history is revision. Unless humans were born with the ability to recall every human activity that ever happened, we are going to have to look into the past to find such activities, and that means that, unfortunately, some current beliefs are going to be proven incorrect. But there are too many people that do not want their cherished historical notions to be wrong, and while that is understandable, do not categorize serious historical research as the pejorative "historical revisionism." You think you guys have it bad now? Imagine the first school-kids who learned that American plantation slavery did not have a bunch of happy black slaves working merrily for no wages, which was not a popular historical view when it came out. When you guys read about stuff that makes you uncomfortable, be honest and dismiss it because you do not like its conclusions, instead of its historical validity. It works both ways guys, it is not just the "liberuhls" destroying the historical cannon: the economic ramifications of the New Deal (mostly from Friedman and Schwartz's economic history, I believe) are a HUGE revision of what a lot of people were taught, and in the realm of Cold War history a lot of nutty right wingers are getting their paranoia validated by current findings as to the extent of Soviet intelligence services. So please use the words from now on; if a radical lesbian feminist historian proves that Jesus was a woman or something, do not call that historical revisionism, just call it "history you do not like and do not want taught to your kids" .