I was watching an interesting documentary on The [del]Hitler[/del]History Channel that my Dad had taped for me about the Battle of Isandhlwana, which basically re-visited the question as to how 22,000 Zulus (armed with spears, clubs, and cow-hide shields) managed to annihilate 1,500 British Soldiers (who had rifles, bayonets, and Congreve Rockets).
It’s basically been accepted that there were many reasons involved, but basically:
The British were outnumbered 20 to 1
The British firing lines were too far from the camp and too spread out to create effective volleys of fire; and
The Martini-Henry rifle jammed if you fired it too often- the barrel heated up and powder fouling in the barrel prevented the spent cartridges from being extracted or the gun reloaded.
All the research on the subject that can be done has been done, and (IMHO) there is nothing new to add or “Revise”.
That got me thinking about other events in History that are open to Historical Revisionism (such as the Maori Wars in New Zealand), and wondering if there are major Historical events in the recorded past for which no revision is possible?
I’m guessing most of the major battles of the US Civil War, WWI, and WWII are Beyond Revision, as they’ve been scrutinised to the Nth degree by pretty much every historian, scholar, and military buff since 1865 and much of what’s written would by now either be Accurate Fact or Near Enough (ie, not quite what happened, but the amount of work involved in deciding if the failure of the 15th Hussars to charge was caused by dysentry or typhoid isn’t worth the effort, given that it won’t change our understanding of the event anyway), but there must be other Historic Events for which the Accepted Wisdom has not changed in, well, long enough for it to be reasonable to assume that there is no applicable, realistic Revision for the subject?
I’m a Civil War buff, and believe it or not there’s still ongoing research, scholarship and discussion. I visited Antietam a few years ago, and through excavations and the use of ground-penetrating radar the Park Service was having to revise its charts as to how the September 1862 battle evolved (largely because lots of Minie balls were being found on park grounds where no fighting was previously thought to have occurred).
Events, battles or any complicated mass human interaction will always be subject to revisionism. The simpler an assertion or fact, though, the less likely it is that revisionism will address it. Grover Cleveland is the only President to serve nonconsecutive terms? No one would dispute that. Grover Cleveland’s policies worsened the Panic of 1893? Endlessly debateable.
The New Yorker had a cartoon a few years ago. Two crusty old professors glare at each other at a faculty party. One says to the other, “I hear the revisionists are hot on your trail, Bob!”
I was immediately reminded of the events of 9/11. It was the most documented and recorded event in History. It had over 15 million eyewitnesses, plus, several hundred million that saw it on live TV. The revisionists were all over it before the fires were out.
Why the Martini-Henry rifles and Congreve rockets? Did the family connections of under-secretary Fibblesworth lead to this set of equipment rather than Martini-Henry rifles and Gatling guns, or perhaps just good old-fashioned six-pounders?
Had the joint ministerial bang-powder commission of 1893 been aware of the impending selection of the Henry rifling system, would they have chosen a less fouling powder composition that might have saved the lives of Our Brave Boys?
Had the Imperial War Ministry Native-Slaughtering manual been appropriately updated viz positioning of firing lines when facing hordes of fuzzy-wuzzies or had the Staff College been neglecting their responsibilities? We definitely need a Public Inquiry to settle these important questions.
Seriously, anything involving people can be argued over till the cows come home. This isn’t physics or maths - there are no right answers.
Just to clarify the ground rules, are we talking about serious scholarly revision, or are we talking Apollo Moon Hoax, and the WTC was imploded type of arguments?
And then there were the folks who witnessed it on live television. Some of them saw more than others who were a few blocks away in NYC.
I’ve seen some comments in the last year ago that suggested that the Reconstruction Period in the South was not so bad. Generationally, I’m not that far removed and I know better. Let them read a little Shelby Foote.
I’ve also seen revisionism in how the possible conspiracies involving the death of JFK are viewed. (I credit some of that to Oliver Stone’s movie.) In the 1970s and 1980s, if you didn’t believe there was a conspiracy, you were likely to be considered naive and uneducated. Now the reverse is somewhat true. Many of us who lived through the assasination refuse to come down on either side anymore.
I think that what the OP is getting at is are there established historical events that despite the possibility of incorrect facts are not debated? A fact like the day Franklin Roosevelt died is not the issue, but an event like Lincoln’s assassination is on the table and is in fact open to revisionism (e.g. the role of Dr. Samuel Mudd)
For example, at Gettysburg, Chamberlain’s 20th Maine held the Union flank and when out of ammunition charged the 15th Alabama back with bayonets.
Now for the bizarre part, I was going to add that this event is not open to revisionism since it is pretty well established that the 83rd Pennsylvania was not part of the charge and that the 20th Maine was low or out of ammunition etc. I quickly went to wikipedia because like an idiot I wanted to say it was the 94th Pennsylvania next to the 20th but I KNEW that was wrong. So in checking my facts I see this:
Yes, that’s exactly what I’m getting at. I’m trying to keep clear of Tinfoil Hattery (so no 11/9 conspiracy theories or what have you), but things like how Little Bighorn was revisited and it was discovered that most of the soliders were cut down as they tried to retreat/run away, (instead of standing fast in a firing line as previously thought), whereas Isandhlwana/Rorke’s Drift have similarly been revisited and the Accepted Version Of Events has remained comparatively unchanged.
It was horrible, if you had dark skin. Southern white Democrats waged a ten-year campaign of terror, intimidation, and fraud to disenfranchise black voters and restore white supremacy. Unfortunately the so-called “radical Republicans” of the North couldn’t sustain enough support for federal military intervention to prevent this from happening.
There’s a myth that Reconstruction South was bad for whites. The idea being that northern carpetbaggers were coming down and taking advantage of southerners.
And indeed, instances of this happening were not unknown. Many (but not all) Reconstruction-era state governments were corrupt, and northern-born whites (“carpetbaggers”) did play a role in these governments (although they seldom dominated).
On the other hand, many non-Reconstruction and non-Southern governments have also been corrupt. Railroad aid and patronage were corrupting influences everywhere in this period.
And in any case, no amount of corruption justifies the brutal paramilitary overthrow to which the Southern regimes were subjected.
The earliest historians of Reconstruction, writing at a time of white supremacy (early Twentieth Century), exaggerated the corruption of the Reconstruction regimes and minimized the role of violence in their overthrow. Since the advent of the Civil Rights movement, historians have taken another look at the period and generally reversed those judgments. This reversal is no longer “revisionism”, outside of a few redoubts in the white South, it’s mainstream.
OTOH, I could make a coherent argument that patronage was a much better system then we have in place today, and that The Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883 is one of the root causes of the out of control governmental that is poisoning our country today, so even something that you seem (from the tone of your post) to view as unquestionably bad (patronage) might not be universally accepted as so.