Bugger, I forgot that episode :smack:
Some do. If they’re looking to sell books, or if they have an axe to grind or a political point to make.
Mr. Rodgers
In addition to the points raised by Cecil, there is the allegation that’s been made that he made up, in whole or in part, the kite experiment. I dubiously discussed the Tom Tucker book that argues this in this old Comments thread generated by that column.
In the case of someone like Franklin it’s worth remembering that the pendulum of postumous reputation can swing wide in either direction. The widespread symbolic deification of him throughout US and Franch culture in the years after his death didn’t exactly play out as a sober assessment of the man.
The Indian (well, Marathi) warrior-king Shivaji Bhosle ( Shivaji - Wikipedia ) is pretty much remembered as an all-around nice guy.
Presumably the local Mughal governors weren’t fond of him, but I don’t see any reference to lingering resentment among the Indian Muslim community, and he was invoked by pretty much everyone as an icon of the Indian independence movement in the first half of the 20th century.
And of course, speaking of Indians, I don’t hear too many people talking smack about Mahatma Gandhi–other than to say that it was kind of kinky to sleep with his niece, even if they never got it on.
Among Americans, John Quincy Adams has stood up very well. He opposed Indian Removal and the Mexican War and was an anti-slavery crusader Before It Was Cool.
There is no Galileo Galilei The Untold Hollywood Story.
There are no embarrassing pictures of Pocahontas on the Internet.
Both of them are remembered historical reputation-wise very much like they were in, say 1908, before what I take the “revisionism” the OP is referring to takes place. More nuanced and understood sure, but not really torn down.
Known? :dubious: I hadn’t heard of it until this thread.
Looking things over, I do agree that the greatest claims of moral failings of Ben Franklin that have a basis in fact are of sexual behaviors of which many would disapprove.
Checking the Wikipedia article, there are a number of complaints that people have about Ghandi.
What has been revised about Shivaji is the notion that he should serve as an “icon of the Indian independence movement” 
( the first percolations of which surfaced with R. G. Manade in the late 19th century ). He was certainly no such thing. He has also been cast at times as a proto-Hindu nationalist ( starting in the 1940’s ) and he definitely wasn’t that either. And most recently, some scholars have cast him as the enemy of the worst abuses and oppression of caste discrimination. That too, is overreaching.
What he was, was a very capable warlord turned royal dynast that laid the foundations of a successful state. So again not so much a revisions of Shivaji himself, but more the nationalist mythology that has been imposed on him.
Stewart Gordon is worth a read on the topic, see in particular Marathas, Marauders, and State Formation in Eighteenth-Century India ( 1994, Oxford University Press ) and The Marathas, 1600-1818 ( 1993, Cambridge University Press ).
Yes, known. Even such fictionalized “biographies” as Wellman’s The Iron Mistress included the slave smuggling, dealing with pirates, land speculating, gambling, drunkenness and so on. Bowie was idolized as a monomachist even in his own lifetime, but the seamy facts of his life have never been in question for anyone who knew more about him than “died at the Alamo.” I suspect if he were alive today he’d be in organized crime.
Now mind you, I don’t have a hate on for Bowie. My interest in knives was what first led me to learn about him. Then I later taught in Texas where my neighboring teacher taught Texas history and regaled me with stories about the grimey lives of the Heroes of the Alamo. That teacher, in fact, thought I looked a lot like Bowie and presented me with a portrait of him which still hangs in my home. (Might even be something to it, for my daughter has insisted since she was first able to talk that “that’s a painting of dada!”) Bowie’s life, like a lot of 18th/19th century adventurers, is a great and exciting story; but it is the story of a flawed man who has often base motivations and doesn’t do what we would say today is the right thing. He and Richard Francis Burton are two of my favorite historical figures, but I don’t think they were any where near perfect.
Maybe scientists and explorers fare better in the public eye, over the long haul, than politicos. Thomas Edison, the Wright Brothers, Alexander Graham Bell, Lewis and Clark, and most of the astronauts all still have very positive historical images.
I wasn’t saying he was responsible somehow for the independence movement. Obviously he was dead.
I’m saying he was a symbol for it.
Oh, I know. It’s just that he’s not a very good symbol, except in the most abstract of ways. I should have used slightly different wording - it’s not that he isn’t an icon, so much as he shouldn’t be such an icon :).
Or at least not in the sense many nationalist historians ( of a variety of political persuasons ) have used him in the 20th century. He’s not a direct precursor, nor even a harbinger of either a) native Indian resistance to foreign invaders, nor b) Hindu resistance to Islam, nor c) movements towards social justice for the downtrodden. All of the above has been claimed for him at various times, but modern revisionists have pointed out that it just isn’t so.
Can you explain a) and b) a bit more fully?
Jesus of Nazareth is problematical from a historicity point of view, insofar as no records independent of the Christian gospels, epistles, and Apocrypha of the New Testament. Because this is both written well after the fact by followers of unknown or questioned authorship, and because it was written and later edited to glorify the life and death of a man said authors sought to regard favorably, it is essentially impossible to establish any objective canon. In any practical sense Jesus of Nazareth is more a literary character than a historical personage subject to factual revisionism.
Stranger
Well, I don’t know about that, but I DO think that in 30 or 40 years, people are going to look back and ask their grandparents, “Why did people dislike gay people so much? Why did people try so hard to keep them from getting married?”
Well let’s remember that there was no conception of “India” at the time, not in the modern, nationalistic sense, anyway. And his opponents weren’t exactly foreign. He fought with rival local dynasts ( Marathas and others ), Deccani sultanates ( Bijapur, primarily ) and the Mughals. None of them can truly be considered foreign - even the Mughal elite had been in India for over 100 years at that point and of course most of the imperial court had far older antecedents. And he was more than happy to treat with any of the above when it suited him to do so - he invited the Mughals to invade Bijapur in 1648, offering his fealty ( they declined ).
First Shivaji did not represent “proto-nationalism.” He did not lead a movement of Marathas. His was a polity like others at the time, offering mainly social mobility for Marathas and Brahmins, as had Bijapur and Ahmadnagar. In revenue administration and social structure it represented more continuity with those states than discontinuity. Second, Shivaji did not significantly alter the power of the rural elite families of Maharashtra, especially the deshmukhs…He was more successful with some than others; many remained partly or wholly loyal to the Mughals or Bijapur throughout his reign. Third, Shivaji was not attempting to create a universal Hindu rule. Over and over, he espoused tolerance and syncretism…Shivaji had no difficulty in allying with Muslim states that surrounded him - Bijapur, Golconda, and the Mughals - even against Hindu powers…Further he did not ally with other Hindu powers, such as the Rajputs, rebelling against Mughal rule. In his own army Muslim leaders appear quite early, and the first Pathan unit joined in 1656. His naval commander was, of course, a Muslim.
From Gordon’s The Marathas, 1600-1818, cited above.
Thanks. IMHO, even though there had been a Mughal presence in the area for ~400 years a lot of the locals would have considered themselves a subject people as long as they remained under Muslim rule.
I noted that he included Muslims in his modified power structure but there’s a difference between a vaguely secular Hindu-led government and a vaguely secular (at times) Muslim-led government.
I understand the essence of what you’re saying to be that he wasn’t really fighting for a cause at all, but to advance his own flag- but how many revolutionary (I use the term loosely) leaders were truly interested in a cause rather than their own primacy?
I don’t think John Chapman has ever been shown to be other than he is represented as in children’s storybooks. (With the exception that he planted nurseries, not just strewing seeds wherever he went.)