Historical revisionism

In historiography, the term historical revisionism identifies the re-interpretation of the historical record. It usually means challenging the orthodox (established, accepted or traditional) views held by professional scholars about a historical event, introducing contrary evidence, or reinterpreting the motivations and decisions of the people involved. The revision of the historical record can reflect new discoveries of fact, evidence, and interpretation, which then provokes a revised history. In dramatic cases, revisionism involves a reversal of older moral judgments. At a basic level, legitimate historical revisionism is a common and not especially controversial process of developing and refining the writing of history. Much more controversial is the reversal of moral findings, in which what had been considered to be positive forces are depicted as being negative. This revisionism is then challenged by the supporters of the previous view, often in heated terms, and becomes an illegitimate form of historical revisionism known as historical negationism if it involves inappropriate methods such as the use of forged documents or implausible distrust of genuine documents, attributing false conclusions to books and sources, manipulating statistical data and deliberately mis-translating texts. This type of historical revisionism presents a re-interpretation of the moral meaning of the historical record. The term 'revisionism' is used pejoratively by those who claim that revisionists are distorting the historical record. This is especially the case when it is applied to Holocaust denial. Historical revisionism is the means by which the historical record – the history of a society, as understood in its collective memory – continually integrates new facts and interpretations of the events commonly understood as history, about which the historian and American Historical Association member James M. McPherson, said: In the field of historiography, the historian who works within the existing establishment of society, and who has produced a body of history books, from which he or she can claim authority, usually benefits from the status quo. As such, the professional-historian paradigm is manifested as a denunciative stance towards any form of historical revisionism – either of fact or interpretation, or both. In contrast to the single-paradigm form of writing history, the philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn, said, in contrast to the quantifiable hard sciences, characterized by a single paradigm, the social sciences are characterized by several paradigms that derive from a 'tradition of claims, counterclaims, and debates over fundamentals' of research. About resistance against the works of revised history that present a culturally comprehensive historical narrative of the U.S. – the perspectives of black people, women, and the labour movement – the historian David Williams said: After the Second World War, the study and production of history in the U.S. was expanded by the G.I. Bill, which funding allowed 'a new and more broadly-based generation of scholars' with perspectives and interpretations drawn from the feminist movement, the civil rights movement, and the American Indian Movement. That expansion and deepening of the pool of historians voided the existence of a definitive and universally accepted history, therefore, the revisionist historian presents the national public with a history that has been corrected and augmented with new facts, evidence, and interpretations of the historical record. In The Cycles of American History (1986), in contrasting and comparing the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. during the Russo–American Cold War (1945–91), the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. said: Revisionist historians contest the mainstream or traditional view of historical events, they raise views at odds with traditionalists, which must be freshly judged. Revisionist history is often practiced by those who are in the minority, such as feminist historians, ethnic minority historians, those working outside of mainstream academia in smaller and less known universities, or the youngest scholars, essentially historians who have the most to gain and the least to lose in challenging the status quo. In the friction between the mainstream of accepted beliefs and the new perspectives of historical revisionism, received historical ideas are either changed, solidified, or clarified. If over a period of time the revisionist ideas become the new establishment status quo a paradigm shift is said to have occurred. Historian Forrest McDonald is often critical of the turn that revisionism has taken, but he nevertheless admits that the turmoil of the 1960s in the United States changed the way history was written: Historians are influenced by the zeitgeist (spirit of the time), and the usually progressive changes to society, politics, and culture, which occurred after the Second World War (1939–45); in The Future of the Past (1989), the historian C. Vann Woodward said: