Historical Revisionism - Scholarly Process

Scholarly Process

Pulitzer Prize winning historian James McPherson, writing for the American Historical Association, described the importance of revisionism:

The 14,000 members of this Association, however, know that revision is the lifeblood of historical scholarship. 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 The 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. Supreme Court decisions often reflect a "revisionist" interpretation of history as well as of the Constitution.

Those historians who work within the existing establishment and who have a body of existing work from which they claim authority, often have the most to gain by maintaining the status quo. This can be called an accepted paradigm, which in some circles or societies takes the form of a denunciative stance towards revisionism of any kind. However, the historian and philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn, pointed out that in contrast to the sciences, in which there tends to be (except in times of paradigm shift) a single reigning paradigm, the social sciences are characterized by a "tradition of claims, counterclaims, and debates over fundamentals." Historian David Williams describes the resistance to the advocates of a more inclusive United States history that would include the roles of women, African Americans, and the labor movement:

These and other scholarly voices called for a more comprehensive treatment of American history, stressing that the mass of Americans, not simply the power elites, made history. Yet it was mainly white males of the power elite who had the means to attend college, become professional historians, and shape a view of history that served their own class, race, and gender interests at the expense of those not so fortunate — and quite literally to paper over aspects of history they found uncomfortable. “One is astonished in the study of history,” wrote Du Bois in 1935, “at the recurrence of the idea that evil must be forgotten, distorted, skimmed over. ... The difficulty, of course, with this philosophy is that history loses its value as an incentive and an example; it paints perfect men and noble nations, but it does not tell the truth."

After World War II “a new and more broadly based generation of scholars”, as the result of the G.I. Bill, the nationwide expansion of state universities and community colleges, and the feminist movement, civil rights movement, and American Indian Movement, expanded the scope of American history.

If there were a universally accepted view of history that never changed, there would be no need to research it further. Many historians who write revisionist exposés are motivated by a genuine desire to educate and to correct history. Many great discoveries have come as a result of the research of men and women who have been curious enough to revisit certain historical events and explore them again in depth from a new perspective. Historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., in contrasting the United States with the Soviet Union during the Cold War, wrote:

But others, especially in the United States ... represent what American historians call “revisionism” — that is a readiness to challenge official explanations. No one should be surprised by this phenomenon. Every war in American history has been followed in due course by skeptical reassessments of supposedly sacred assumptions ... for revisionism is an essential part of the process by which history, through the posing of new problems and the investigation of new possibilities, enlarges its perspectives and enriches its insights.

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. He wrote:

The result, as far as the study of history was concerned, was an awakened interest in subjects that historians had previously slighted. Indian history, black history, women’s history, family history, and a host of specializations arose. These expanded horizons enriched our understanding of the American past, but they also resulted in works of special pleading, trivialization, and downright falsification.

Historians, like all people, are inexorably influenced by the zeitgeist (the spirit of the times). Historian C. Vann Woodward sees this as a positive influence. Speaking of the changes that occurred after the end of World War II, he wrote:

These events have come with a concentration and violence for which the term "revolution" is usually reserved. It is a revolution, or perhaps a set of revolutions for which we have not yet found a name. My thesis is that these developments will and should raise new questions about the past and affect our reading of large areas of history, and my belief is that future revisions may be extensive enough to justify calling the coming age of historiography an age of reinterpretation. The first illustration happens to come mainly from American history, but this should not obscure the broader scope of the revolution, which has no national limitations.

Developments in other academic areas, and cultural and political fashions, all help to shape the currently accepted model and outlines of history (the accepted historiographical paradigm). For example, philosopher Karl Popper echoed Woodward’s sentiments regarding revisionism when he noted that “each generation has its own troubles and problems, and therefore its own interests and its own point of view” and:

It follows that each generation has a right to look upon and re-interpret history in its own way. ... After all, we study history because we are interested in it, and perhaps because we wish to learn something about our problems. But history can serve neither of these two purpose if, under the influence of an inapplicable idea of objectivity, we hesitate to present historical problems from our point of view. And we should not think that our point of view, if consciously and critically applied to the problem, will be inferior to that of a writer who naively believes ... that he has reached a level of objectivity permitting him to present “the events of the past as they actually did happen.”

As time passes and these influences change so do most historians views on the explanation of historical events. The old consensus may no longer be considered by most historians to explain how and why certain events in the past occurred, and so the accepted model is revised to fit in with the current agreed-upon version of events. For example, historian John Hope Franklin in 1986 described four specific stages in the historiography of African American that were based on different consensus models.