Historical revisionism

Historical revisionism is the reexamination of the accepted "facts" and interpretations of history, with an eye towards updating it with newly discovered, more accurate, and less biased information. Broadly, it is a skeptical approach, that history as it has been traditionally told may not be entirely accurate, and that perhaps an accurate history is as unobtainable as a dispassionate autobiography.

Historical revisionism

All writings of history are in some way revisionist. If there was a universally accepted view of history, there would be no need to research it. 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.

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Those historians who work within the existing establishment, 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.

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

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

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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:

Related Topics:
Zeitgeist - Historiographical

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Categories

• 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 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).