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Mailbag What Is Revisionist History? By Erin Bartram | August 8, 2019 LikeTweet EmailPrint More More on Mailbag Subscribe to Mailbag It’s another mailbag! Folks ask us questions about the wherefores and what-have-yous of history, we try to answer them. This one came from Twitter a while back. What is revisionist history? If you read history or engage with historians on social media, you may have seen the phrase “revisionist history” in replies or comments. Much of the time, this is meant as a criticism of the history being presented and the historians and organizations presenting it. But what does it mean? And is it a problem?1 When used as a criticism in everyday conversation, “revisionist history” refers to conscious, intentional misstatements about things in the past, whether distant or recent. It can be used in the context of personal lives and relationships—the cause of an argument, for instance—or in political and cultural discussions. At the time I was writing this, for instance, it was being used in Twitter conversations about Tom Brady, Obama’s 2008 campaign strategy, and the Iran nuclear deal. Unlike saying someone is being forgetful or getting confused about what happened, accusing them of practicing “revisionist history” is accusing them of being a bad actor—a liar—by playing fast and loose with the past. In most cases, accusing a historian of practicing revisionist history is accusing them of framing a historical figure, event, or narrative in a distorted and dishonest way in order to advance a particular social or political agenda. They’re accused of minimizing or even ignoring evidence that would disprove their argument—or prove the argument of those who disagree with them. Those invested in the term and its use often claim they are defending history from people who are trying to warp it or use it as a weapon. Often these complaints boil down to the belief that the historical interpretation that an individual knows, whether commonly-held or niche, is the correct one, which means other interpretations offered by historians are incorrect. Those historians, it follows, must be very bad at thinking, intentionally distorting the process and product of historical inquiry, or both. But for some who use “revisionist history” as a pejorative, the idea that history involves inquiry and interpretation is the problem itself. They’ll argue that they’re just looking at the evidence, not interpreting or “spinning” it like academic historians. History, for them, is just What Happened, its meaning easily accessed and understood by looking at a set of True and Complete Facts that has been assembled without human intervention.2 If such a history existed, someone trying to change it in this way would be doing something dishonest. But I’ve never met a historian who thinks about history—either the process or the product—in this way. It’s just not what we believe about the past or how and why we study it. The problem, of course, is that the accusers in both of these situations are often doing exactly what they accuse historians of doing—ignoring evidence that complicates their preferred narrative or embracing a historical narrative that’s clearly based on the interpretation of evidence but declaring that it’s just What Happened—and therefore can’t be questioned. None of this matters, or even makes sense, unless we talk about why people accuse historians of practicing revisionist history. So I’d like to add one more thing to the definition I offered earlier. To accuse historians of practicing revisionist history is to accuse them of making conscious, intentional misstatements about things in the past, whether distant or recent, in order to make a point about how things are or should be in the present. The criticism is that historians are being “political” or “presentist,” distorting our understanding of the past in order to distort our understanding of the present. Consider the following situations where you often see accusations of revisionist history leveled against historians: A historian making the argument that slavery was the cause of the U.S. Civil War—or rejecting the argument that there were black Confederates A textbook that emphasizes the role of women and non-white people in significant historical change A museum exhibit that reassesses the behaviors and beliefs of Richard Nixon or chooses to consider the effects of the nuclear bomb when exhibiting the Enola Gay A history department that requires majors to take courses covering a broad range of time periods and geographic regions A book that considers the competing intentions and goals of those who wrote, revised, and ratified the U.S. Constitution—and those excluded from the process It’s not that historians are distorting the past to make a point about the present. The discomfort comes from the fact that historians are often disrupting or destroying connections people have already made between the past and the present, connections that may be based on n...