History does get revised, and it doesn’t seem to me that there is anything inherently negative in the word ‘revision.’ Archives are opened up, documents become declassified, new archeological discoveries are made - all this causes new works to be written, arguments made and previously accepted history to be modified.
Yet the phrase ‘revisionist history’ today generally means Holocaust denial or deliberate distortion of events for whatever political agenda. My question is: has it always had this meaning or is this a fairly recent reading of the phrase?
Actual historical revisionism is completely respectible, and, in fact, what historians do. Unfortunately, it’s been hijacked by the holocaust deniers, who wanted a phrase more respectable than “holocaust denier”. (Ironically, what the deniers do isn’t even historical revisionism. They just ignore evidence that they don’t like.)
Historians may see it differently, but I think for the average person, revisionist history means history created by people who started out, like creationist, trying to force the facts into a point of view. Revisionist history is not only over-simplified, and often construced at the expense of well-established scholarship.
Many historical ideas have been enriched by, for instance, improvements in medical archeology – but usually this new information refines theories or answer questions that had been left open.
It would be more helpful if revisionists encouraged people to study history more deeply and thoughtfully. The contributions of non-white males become fairly apparent if you take the time to learn about all aspects of a time and place.
Perhaps historians should use terms like refine and enhance.
For many decades after the Civil War, the foremost historians on the subject of the war and reconstruction were southern. After World War II, however, a new school of historians called many of their conclusions into question. These historians forthrightly called themselves revisionists. In fact, I still have one of the book I was assigned in college - Reconstruction: An Anthology of Revisionist Writings.
The modern wave of Holocaust revisionists have stolen this term, but it was once extremely well respected, and I suspect remains so in real historical circles.
Since you didn’t offer a cite with this, may I provide an example? Teddy Roosevelt ran for president using his exploits on San Juan Hill as background color and to show his bravery under fire. This incident is factual, but the story was embellished with generous amounts of fiction, created by Roosevelt himself and his publicist. While TR was unquestionably a brave man, his charge up a hill with five men to capture an objective already acquired by the Buffalo Soldiers was not significant. It is only relatively recently that the Buffalo Soldiers have been properly credited with winning the conflict. See http://www.army.mil/cmh-pg/documents/spanam/BSSJH/Shbrt-BSSJH.htm for the full story.
Well, there’s a difference between revising interpretations of history, and revising history itself. There’s nothing wrong with revisionist history in the sense of “hey, there’s some new information, we should incorporate this into our history”, the problem is reviosinst history in the sense of photographs with people airbrushed out, forged documents, hearsay presented as fact, etc.
Article from a Harvard professor that concludes: “The suppression of revisionist history has generally been a mark of dictatorships – from Hitler to Stalin to Saddam Hussein himself. Or have we forgotten that?”
In explaining why she uses the term Holocaust deniers throughout her Denying the Holocaust (1993; Penguin, 1994), Deborah Lipstadt discusses (p20-1) various schools of historians who have called themselves revisionists and then concludes: