Why History Needs to be Revised

Posted on September 27, 2003 in Crosstalk Occupation of Iraq Thinking

An excellent article — found by Rob of Conniption — on the use of the phrase “revisionist historian” appears in the President’s Column of Perspectives Online. James McPherson writes:

History is a continuing dialogue between the present and the past. Interpretations of the past are subject to change in response to new evidence, new questions asked of the evidence, new perspectives gained by the passage of time. There is no single, eternal, and immutable “truth” about past events and their meaning. The unending quest of historians for understanding the past—that is, “revisionism”—is what makes history vital and meaningful. Without revisionism, we might be stuck with the images of Reconstruction after the American Civil War that were conveyed by D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation and Claude Bowers’s The Tragic Era. Were the Gilded Age entrepreneurs “Captains of Industry” or “Robber Barons”? Without revisionist historians who have done research in new sources and asked new and nuanced questions, we would remain mired in one or another of these stereotypes.

Aside from the remark about “truth” (it invites us to the sort of intellectual quagmire that leads people to promote downright bogus points of view and insist that they are of equal value to those based on well-researched facts), McPherson drives home a major point: we’re constantly revising history because new information comes to light. Sometimes that information means a change in a footnote or a description, sometimes it overwrites the understandings of previous generations.

Last weekend I attended a book signing where the authors revealed that women participated in parallel panhellenic games. Why had they been left out of history? It wasn’t for want of written material because archaeologists had found plenty of inscriptions attesting to their athletic achievements and a few telling art objects, too. Eminent Victorian scholars simply ignored these records, passed them over and wrote only about the male Olympians. Women disappeared from history as if they had never been there. The authors of Athletries: The Untold History of Ancient Greek Women Athletes
had not invented this past: they’d found it and told others what they’d found.

The Bush Adminstration — which recently used the term to deride those who expressed their outrage about the war in Iraq — does not want historians or the public finding out that its sales campaign for the Iraq Occupation is based upon distortions and outright fabrications. As McPherson observes “by misusing the term “revisionist historians” to derisively deflect criticism, Condoleeza Rice and her cohorts are denigrating a legitimate and essential activity of historians.”

There’s a dangerous myth here: that what is said once must only be repeated, never tested. It’s the technique of conservative talk-show hosts who invent factoids and endlessly parrot them. It’s not history, it’s not truth-seeking, and it’s not honest.

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My parting question is this: why do we wait for historians to do this democratically vital work? It’s the job of the Fourth Estate to keep current and from Day 1 of this illegitimacy they have failed to investigate and report the facts behind today’s decisions.