In historiography, historical revisionism is the reinterpretation of a historical account. It involves challenging the orthodox (established, accepted or traditional) scholarly views or narratives regarding a historical event, timespan, or phenomenon by introducing contrary evidence or reinterpreting the motivations of the people involved. Revision of the historical record can reflect new discoveries of fact, evidence, and interpretation as they come to light. The process of historical revision is a common, necessary, and usually uncontroversial process which develops and refines the historical record to make it more complete and accurate. Debate forms an essential part of the practice of history: in the words of Simon Schama: "History is argument".
One form of historical revisionism involves denying the moral significance or accuracy of the historical record.Evans, Richard J. (2001) Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial. p.145. . The author is a professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge, and was a major expert witness in the Irving v. Lipstadt trial; the book presents his perspective of the trial, and the expert-witness report, including his research about the Dresden death-count. This type of historical revisionism, called "historical negationism", is contentious if it includes denying the veracity of genuine documents, or deliberately manipulating statistical data to reach predetermined conclusions. The destruction or alteration of cultural-heritage sites is also considered a form of illegitimate historical revisionism when it serves to deny the cultural or historical claims of ethnic groups. Negationists may use the term "revisionism" to portray their pseudoscholarship as legitimate, especially in the context of genocide denial.
Background
Historical revisionism is the means by which the historical record, the history of a society, as understood in its collective memory, continually accounts for new facts and interpretations of the events.
Revisionist historians contest the mainstream or traditional view of historical events and raise views at odds with traditionalists. In the field of historiography, the historian who works within the existing establishment of society and has produced a body of history books from which he or she can claim authority, usually benefits from the status quo. As such, historical revisionism can produce significant controversy within society.
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.
Historians are influenced by the zeitgeist (spirit of the time), and the usually progressive changes to society, politics, and culture, such as occurred after the Second World War (1939–1945); in The Future of the Past (1989), the historian C. Vann Woodward said:
The philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn, said, in contrast to the quantifiable hard sciences, characterized by a single paradigm, the social sciences are characterized by several paradigms that derive from a "tradition of claims, counterclaims, and debates over [the] fundamentals" of research. The philosopher Karl Popper said that "each generation has its own troubles and problems, and, therefore, its own interests and its own point of view."
Negationism and denial
Historians distinguish historical revisionism from historical negationism, which is a form of denialism.
In contrast, historical revisionism entails the refinement of existing knowledge about a historical event, not a denial of the event, itself; that such refinement of history emerges from the examination of new, empirical evidence, and a re-examination, and consequent re-interpretation of the existing documentary evidence. That legitimate historical revisionism acknowledges the existence of a "certain body of irrefutable evidence" and the existence of a "convergence of evidence", which suggest that an event – such as the Black Death, American slavery, and the Holocaust – did occur; whereas the denialism of history rejects the entire foundation of historical evidence."Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory" by Deborah E. Lipstadt. , 1993, p. 21Ronald J. Berger. Fathoming the Holocaust: A Social Problems Approach, Aldine Transaction, 2002, , p. 154. Historian Deborah Lipstadt states that Holocaust deniers, such as Harry Elmer Barnes, disingenuously self-identify as "historical revisionists" to obscure their denialism as academic revision of the historical record.
Basis for historical revision The process of historical revision involves updating the historical record to accommodate developments as they arise. The historical record may be revised to accommodate for a number of academic reasons, including the following:
Access to new data/records The release, discovery, or publicization of documents previously unknown may lead scholars to hold new views of well established events. For example, archived or sealed government records (often related to national security) will become available under the thirty-year rule and similar laws. Such documents can provide new sources and therefore new analyses of past events that will alter the historical perspective.
With the release of the ULTRA archives in the 1970s under the British thirty-year rule, much of the Allied high command tactical decisionmaking process was re-evaluated, particularly the Battle of the Atlantic. Before the release of the ULTRA archives, there was much debate over whether Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery could have known that Arnhem was heavily garrisoned. With the release of the archives, which indicated that he could, the balance of the evidence swung in the direction of his detractors. The release of the ULTRA archives also forced a re-evaluation of the history of the electronic computer.In 1972, before the release of official documents about ULTRA, Herman Goldstine wrote in The Computer from Pascal to von Neumann page 321 that: "Britain had such vitality that it could immediately after the war embark on so many well-conceived and well-executed projects in the computer field." In 1976 after the archive were opened Brian Randell wrote in The COLOSSUS on page 87 that: "the COLOSSUS project was an important source of this vitality, one that has been largely unappreciated, as has the significance of its places in the chronology of the invention of the digital computer."
New sources in other languages 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 is an example.
Developments in other fields of science DNA analysis has had an impact in various areas of history either confirming established historical theories or presenting new evidence that 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 legal and illegal drugs and how to use the papers to explain certain aspects of prehistoric societies. Carbon dating, the examination of ice cores and tree rings, palynology, scanning electron microscope analysis of early metal samples, and measuring oxygen isotopes in bones, have all provided new data in the last few decades with which to argue new hypotheses. Extracting ancient DNA allows historians to debate the meaning and importance of race and indeed current identities.Christine Kenneally, The Invisible History of the Human Race: How DNA and History Shape Our Identities and Our Futures (2014)
Nationalism Government bodies may engage in historical revisionism for political gain. For example, in schoolbooks' history on 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". As perceptions of nationalism change, so do the areas of history that are driven by such ideas. Wars are contests between enemies, and postwar histories select the facts and interpretations to suit their internal needs, The Korean War, for example, has sharply different interpretations in textbooks in the countries involved.L. Lin, et al. "Whose history? An analysis of the Korean war in history textbooks from the United States, South Korea, Japan, and China." Social Studies 100.5 (2009): 222–232. online
Culture For example, as regionalism has regained some of its old prominence in British politics, some historians have suggested that the older studies of the English Civil War were centred on England and that to understand the war, events that 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. Furthermore, as cultures develop, it may become strategically advantageous for some revision-minded groups to revise their public historical narrative in such a way so as to either discover, or in rarer cases manufacture, a precedent which contemporary members of the given subcultures can use as a basis or rationale for reform or change.
Ideology
For example, in 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." After World War II, 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 mid-17th-century conflict in England, Scotland, and Ireland.
Historical causation Issues of causation in history are often revised with new research: for example, by the mid-20th 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 François Furet revealed the social situation was much more complex, and the question of what caused the revolution is now closely debated.
Specific issues Dark Ages