All History Is Revisionist History

I suspect the reason for this piece is this bit buried in the middle:<p><i>&gt; It’s in the context of that reevaluation that we recently experienced a furor over which date to assign to the beginning of American history. There are many candidates to consider: [...] Such debates, arising from different perspectives on the same evidence and constituting classic instances of revisionist history, are unlikely ever to be fully stilled</i><p>I.e. this is probably to be read in the context of an academic (or political) dispute about that subject. I guess someone proposed to move &quot;the beginning of American history&quot;, someone else objected using the term &quot;revisionism&quot;, and James M. Banner Jr. (a venerable 87-year-old historian) decided to weigh in and remind people of old truths about the field.<p>Personally, I think he&#x27;s stretching the term a bit, at least in the modern (and negative) understanding of it; it&#x27;s obviously true that the practice of historians requires constant re-evaluation, but the point should be to keep such efforts free of clear agendas - which is what &quot;revisionist&quot; tendencies typically have.

People interested in meta-history might like to check out the idea of &quot;Whig History&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Whig_history" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Whig_history</a>

I&#x27;m curious about ancient history when the author of the history apparently wrote it 100+ years after it happened. I can&#x27;t imagine anyone alive today writing with much authority about 1922. Why should I believe someone like Herodotus could possibly report accurately about things in 50 to 100years before he was born in places he couldn&#x27;t have possibly been and with no actual proof, just decades of &quot;telephone&quot; (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Chinese_whispers" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Chinese_whispers</a>)

Yes, all has revisionism just like every judge is not fully objective.<p>But I&#x27;m afraid most people use this &quot;discovery&quot; as an excuse to use History as a tool&#x2F;weapon to achieve whatever their objectives are.

This ended up being an interesting piece by the end.<p>The headline and parts of the article suffer a bit from clickbait by conflating the two different ways “revisionist” is used—sometimes to mean revising past precedent with new knowledge, and other times to mean purposely hiding facts about the past (also called negationist history).<p>Obviously not all history is purposely hiding facts about the past…<p>But if you ignore that, the author did a good job of explaining how lots of at-one-point accepted history was originally introduced with revisionist&#x2F;negationist&#x2F;biased aims. To the point that it’s harder to cleanly separate out all the negationist history than you might think.<p>So overall an interesting point and a useful reminder of how these interpretations are always in flux. And that that’s okay and healthy.

Ancient DNA is one thing not mentioned and it has exposed a lot of those imaginary narratives about grand population invasions etc.

Article seems to be engaging in a bit of sophistry. Yes you can claim historical revisionism has been &quot;widely applied&quot; when you redefine it in the broadest possible way that mostly ignores the context in which it is being used in modern discourse. I might be assuming the worst here, could just be an instance of click bait. If you changed the title of the article it&#x27;s a fairly dry explainer piece about historiography and the reliability of sources. With the title it feels like somebody performing transparent apologetics for the politically charged historical revisionism trend.

I&#x27;d say this article is a little revisionist itself, especially when it comes to Eusebius, as in nobody really cares about his writings around these parts of the world from where I&#x27;m from (Eastern Europe), and, to be honest, I haven&#x27;t seen Late Antiquity - <i>Moyen Âge</i> French historians mentioning him that often, if at all, either (they&#x27;re way more fond of Grégoire de Tours, for example).

When we talk about &quot;revisionist history&quot;, don&#x27;t we generally think of people with less than honest intentions deliberately trying to force a narrative? Often or usually by sprinkling untruths and non-facts in?<p>What the article seems to be arguing is that historians without such dishonest intentions are necessarily reinterpreting history in light of the modern era, and are likely including their own and societal biases in their narrative. and there is no real &#x27;objective&#x27; history. Is this news? This is the sort of thing I learned in history class as a teenager (albeit in simplified form). Primary sources are valuable but should be put through the filter of partial knowledge of a situation and personal bias. Secondary sources should be looked at with knowledge of the times around them and the potential biases of the author.<p>It&#x27;s the intent that&#x27;s always defined &quot;revisionist&quot; history to me, and the willingness to include things which are not fact-based, or are counterfactual.

&quot;Emperor Kennedy Legend: A New Anthropological Debate&quot; feels very suiting here.<p>Searching for a link (in English), I discovered I already brought it up on HN about 6 years ago :) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=12652044" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=12652044</a>

It&#x27;s incredible that tax dollars go to funding the publication of this kind of material with a government seal of approval on it! Certainly much of history is a matter of interpretation, certain historical works are more trustworthy than others, and of course there are disagreements. But what I take as the thesis is essentially that truth about the past is not really something we can know.<p>Take this statement from the article:<p>&quot;The results have been profound. Historians now take it for granted that it’s impossible to understand any part of the past without taking into account the realities of all, and all kinds of, people.&quot;<p>No source cited, no names listed. A &quot;fact&quot; floating freely in midair. Pure propaganda.

A very interesting read! I&#x27;ve often thought about the different interpretations of past actions but hadn&#x27;t thoroughly considered how historians as individuals cast their own interpretation on events.

Wikipedia is about self-referential links to content developed after 1992. All those books in those stacks are lost history.<p>If you can’t provide a link, it didn’t happen.

Technically correct, the best kind of correct.