fridi: (Default)
[personal profile] fridi posting in [community profile] talkpolitics
Personally, I hate the term "historical revisionism" because it has the implication that history was "figured out" and "static" and it is only ideological jerks who try to "revise" or "change" it. It sort of tries to make the "orthodox" narratives of history seem like they were author-less, generated without ideological predisposition or goals, and that only the "revisionist" accounts are "biased" in some way.

But all historical narratives have some degree of bias and error in them. It is necessarily the case. They are all authored. It does not mean you have to prefer one of the other; sometimes the chronologically "older" narratives are better-supported than the chronologically "newer" ones, and sometimes vice versa.

One can engage with the merits and problems of an argument without coming up with some pejorative label for it that attempts to lump it in with a lot of different arguments that you also don't like.

I guess the above is in reference to American historiography; I am sure there are other cases of this elsewhere. The standard book on this is Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The 'Objectivity Question' and the American Historical Profession, which discussed in depth the "big arguments" in the profession during the 1950s-1980s, many of which were about slavery, the Civil War, and questions of identity.
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