OK some folk are attempting to “Revise” history of the holocoust. (It never happened)
What other history (other than religious -was Jesus God etc.) has been attempted to be revised.
Well, within the past thirty years almost every record of the Communist Chinese occupation of North Dakota has been suppressed.
Well, one thing I can think of off the top of my head is Afrocentric history. That is, revising world history to give Africans a much greater place. Some revision of this sort is justified, but it can be taken way too far.
Michael Shermers book Why People Believe Weird Things has a good bit of info on revisionist history.
Also, one of my favorite Stalin anecdotes. After Lavrenti(?) Beria was removed as head of the NKVD, and then shot, the owners of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia were sent new and important information on the Bering Strait. They were instructed to cut out the page which contained Beria’s bio, and paste in the new pages.
(Actually '30s and '40s USSR is chock full of stuff like this. A fascinating book, The Commissar Vanishes, shows the extent of Stalins attempts to revise history)
Well, lots of dictators tried to ‘revise’ their country’s history after they took over; Stalin was probably the most successful at this, have people expunged from the record to the point of being airbrushed out of photos and written out of all documents.
In the United States, most claims of ‘revisionist’ history are applied to history texts and books that attempt to place a new and different slant upon events and their meanings. Sometimes it’s a matter of reinterpreting why certain events happened based upon new evidence or new theories. Sometimes it’s a matter of redetermining priorities in ‘what was most influential’ (the ‘economic’ theory of history replacing the ‘great men’ theory of history). And sometimes- and usually the most-fought-over times- it’s about someone bringing a personal bias or viewpoint into the text (such as the furor over the Enola Gay display at the Smithsonian several years ago).
JMCJ
Not Even Mentioned
Most Popular Poster of the 20th Century Competition
As overseen by Coldfire
Ancient Egyptians apparently did it all the time. They never recorded any battles they lost, for example. Probably the biggest revision that I learned about was their attempt to erase the memory of the pharoh Amenhotep. During his reign, he changed his name to Akenaton and apparently tried to change ancient Egyptian beliefs in a pretty radical way. Nobody liked him, so after he died, his name was erased from the official records. IIRC, we know about him from records in the tomb of his son Tutankamen, the famous “King Tut”.
–It was recently discovered that research causes cancer in rats.
There more than one kind of revisionism and the OP’s mention of the Holocaust offers opportunity to mention them. There is the politically driven revisionism such as that pursued by the nazi apologists who seek to belittle the story of mass persecution and extirmination for the sake of their political agenda. Then there’s people like the historian who is now sueing a bunch of other people (sorry, names escape me right now, it was on NPR last night) who don’t deny the Holocaust and readily concur on the abject terribleness of it, but who has interpreted the historical evidence differently to conclude that Hitler did not know of a systematic plan. I am not a scholar of that record, but I find his premise a bit hard to entertain.
Then there’s the revisionists who attempt to quantify popular history. Six million jews killed in the Holocaust - a number that was arrived at in time for the Nuremburg trials a year after the conclusion of hostilities - the number’s become an icon and present day attempts to nail down what really went on are subject to the criticism of those who hold the icon dear. Recently I’ve read that the figure probably comes in closer to 4.75 million. That upsets some, and I understand the feeling that someone might be attempting to incrementally demean one’s sufferings. OTOH, I personally feel that it makes no difference; 5 or 6 million - if someone smokes a million people (or one) solely on the basis of their ethnicity that someone’s as dirty a dog as you can get in my book. But those who quantify do feel the criticism as revisionists.
I am particularly interested in the revisionism regarding the Holocaust. As the previous poster mentioned, the number of 6 million is highly dubious (the prewar population of Jewish people in Poland was never (to my knowledge, verified by any census that I know of). However, it seems that any investigation of what the real number was, is instantly challenged-some historians stick to the 6 million as if it were cast in stone.
His name is David Irving. The BBC report of his testimony in the libel trial is here.
And don’t forget the Foundation novels by Asimov where all records of earth were removed from the library on Trantor. That’s probably the biggest case of historical revision I can think of offhand.
What do I believe in? Not much that isn’t explained by logic and scientific experiment. And, you better believe, I want to see the logic and the laboratory equipment.
–P.J. O’Rourke–
In the US, that the War between the States was about slavery instead of states rights.
Depends on who you ask…
Uh, starfish, you seem to have reversed a couple of words in that sentence. 
Tom~
Under ideal conditions, Revisionism is an honest attempt to reveal what really happened–by utilizing new data (social histories, etc.), by sifting through previous biases, etc.
It has, instead, become a pejorative term. When a revisionist goes after an icon (e.g., “What really happened at the Alamo?”, “How many Jews were really killed during the Holocaust?”), then the hoi polloi really doesn’t want to know the truth–if it seems to diminish the significance of their icon. Additionally, many revisionists are just as biased as the historians they’re attempting to revise, and thus the original intent of telling the singular, whole truth is thrown out the window and all revisionists are given a bad name.
Any real historian is technically a revisionist. If he/she can’t shed new light on (or revise) an aspect of History, he is simply a conduit for knowledge that is already available.
My issue is with historians who seek only evidence that conforms to their personal (political, religious, ethnic, etc) agenda. Most Holocaust deniers fit into this class. The slavery/state’s rights debate is really a political argument; not an historical one. Some Historians just like to tear down revered historical icons. Lincoln, Columbus, Jefferson and Kennedy are frequent targets. The problem is that these revisionists give more weight to the personal morality and hypocracy of the subject than they do on the way they influenced the rest of the world.
My favorites are doctors and psychologists (whith little training as historians) who go in search of historical figures who might have suffered from whatever malady they specialize in. I think Mozart can be found mentioned in every other chapter of most books on abnormal psychology. I wish, just once, I could read an article or book about reading disorders (and I’ve read them all) without Einstein, Churchill, and Disney being set up as the patron saints of dyslexia.
One of the strongest revisions seems to have been in Washington Irving’s (where have I heard that name before?) biography of Columbus. Irving started the myth that Columbus was arguing that the world was round while everyone else believed it to be flat.
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Tomndebb
Exactly. We weren’t around then so can not say for sure. There are many “views” of history. The one that is currently most popular is considered to be currently “right”.
All history is revisionist, or they could not sell new books. As usual, its about money.
It was. Slavery was the issue from start to finish. Read the speeches of the Confederate leaders, before and after secession.
{Secession was the formal casus belli, but that’s not the same thing. The rebellion started because fanatical slaveholders couldn’t stand the thought of a President who was opposed to letting slavery expand into new states – and there is even some evidence that they deliberately scuttled the Democratic party to force the issue.)
John W. Kennedy
“Compact is becoming contract; man only earns and pays.”
– Charles Williams
Can we explain 75 years of history (the period between the 1770’s and the civil war) with more than 16 words…(or one concept)?
i.e., The civil war was about the state’s right to be a slave states. From the Constituion’s writing, slavery was a contentious issue, one of many that pitted the Feds against the Southern states (most prominently overy slavery, but other issues as well). The original map of the US was carefully drawn to keep balance, and states were admitted more or less freely, depending on how they would tip the balance of power - at the discretion of a congress that kept close tabs on that balance.
The hallmark of any revisionism is the attempt to reduce thousands of collected facts, legal judgements, debates, elections, etc. TO A SOUND BITE, like "The civil war was about (fill in the blank - one word only, please).
These silly either/or debates are the meat and potatoes of this board. Sorry, it must be EITHER meat OR potatoes, can’t be both!
History never happened (except in my K-12 classes). Some people just get an impression that it did by running time in fast reverse. . .and selecting their favorite parallel universe.
Ray (Avanti! Get there first and those other ones be history. [present subjunctive, not past indicative])
LIFE: Those sparse nanoseconds between downloads of software upgrades.
I wonder why the 14 million people that died at the hands of Stalin is not given as much attention as Hitler’s attrocities.