6 ms·

All History Is Revisionist History

74 points by 1sembiyan 4y ago

drewcoo 4y ago
- coldtea 4y ago
  >Presumably it's laity interested in the humanities. So wouldn't they already know this? Why would they? Did you know anything about any field and at any age? What if they're starting out with history xkcd.com/1053/ style? Not to mention that tons of people read history (historical accounts, biographies, etc.) as a hobby, and take what thet read at face value, not understanding the inherent biases. And of course, the article also gives examples, puts the issue in a general perspective, explains some issues associated with it, etc. It looks like you've only considered the title, as if the post begins and ends at that. >Which actually makes this empty virtue signaling, regardless of truth value. I think this is more true of this comment, than of the article.
ianstormtaylor 4y ago
This ended up being an interesting piece by the end. The headline and parts of the article suffer a bit from clickbait by conflating the two different ways “revisionist” is used—sometimes to mean revising past precedent with new knowledge, and other times to mean purposely hiding facts about the past (also called negationist history). Obviously not all history is purposely hiding facts about the past… But if you ignore that, the author did a good job of explaining how lots of at-one-point accepted history was originally introduced with revisionist/negationist/biased aims. To the point that it’s harder to cleanly separate out all the negationist history than you might think. So overall an interesting point and a useful reminder of how these interpretations are always in flux. And that that’s okay and healthy.
- cassepipe 4y ago
  From memory that's Pierre Vidal Naquet argument against negationnists, that they called themselves revisionists, because it is a legitimate stance in history but that what they are indeed are negationnists. Ironically, the old anti negationnist website I found the following link on is called anti-Rev : http://www.anti-rev.org/textes/VidalNaquet92c/ http://www.anti-rev.org/textes/VidalNaquet92c/
Nursie 4y ago
When we talk about "revisionist history", don't we generally think of people with less than honest intentions deliberately trying to force a narrative? Often or usually by sprinkling untruths and non-facts in? What the article seems to be arguing is that historians without such dishonest intentions are necessarily reinterpreting history in light of the modern era, and are likely including their own and societal biases in their narrative. and there is no real 'objective' history. Is this news? This is the sort of thing I learned in history class as a teenager (albeit in simplified form). Primary sources are valuable but should be put through the filter of partial knowledge of a situation and personal bias. Secondary sources should be looked at with knowledge of the times around them and the potential biases of the author. It's the intent that's always defined "revisionist" history to me, and the willingness to include things which are not fact-based, or are counterfactual.
- kelnos 4y ago
  Not just deliberately trying to force a narrative... trying to force a narrative that is contrary to what is commonly accepted to have happened, specifically because their new narrative benefits them financially, politically, socially, or in some other way. A "revisionist historian", as I understand it, is a manipulator, a con artist, a gaslighter. Someone who is trying to convince people of some history that didn't actually happen, because doing so will enrich them. This article... seems to try to revise "revisionism"?
  - fullmoon 4y ago
    One good example of such a person is Hannah-Jones and her fraudulent 1619 project, who fits all of those attributes except for historian.
- watwut 4y ago
  > This is the sort of thing I learned in history class as a teenager My observation from discussion about history (including on HN) is that most people did not learned the same thing. My own history lessons in high school definitely did not taught that. Instead, many people assume whatever they learned is definite and any new addition or emphasis on something else is bad. > Primary sources are valuable but should be put through the filter of partial knowledge of a situation and personal bias. Yes, but also to interpret primary sources, you need to understand quite a lot about that period. What they mean when they say certain words. What knowledge is assumed, what values are assumed by the orignal writer. History is foreign country, it is very easy to misunderstand their priorities or what they write about.
wakawakawaka01 4y ago
02020202 4y ago
paganel 4y ago
I'd say this article is a little revisionist itself, especially when it comes to Eusebius, as in nobody really cares about his writings around these parts of the world from where I'm from (Eastern Europe), and, to be honest, I haven't seen Late Antiquity - Moyen Âge French historians mentioning him that often, if at all, either (they're way more fond of Grégoire de Tours, for example).
- beebmam 4y ago
  What's bad about revision? Isn't that what we're supposed to do when we write?
  - paganel 4y ago
    Nothing bad per se, but as other people have mentioned in this thread, historical revisionism has been used for lots and lots of despicable things in the recent past, including genocide. Yes, we "all" (I include in here people interested in history) know that nations are "imagined communities" and we extensively like to quote Benedict Anderson on that. More exactly the "nation" as a term can be (and has been) quite easily de-constructed through revisionist means, but what do you do when the same line of thought is applied almost ad litteram by one of your powerful neighbours who happens to have one of the biggest nuclear arsenals in the world? (because that's what Putin actually said about Ukraine, that they're "not really a nation", that they're an "imagined community")
    - watwut 4y ago
      > historical revisionism has been used for lots and lots of despicable things in the recent past, including genocide. Historical revisionism is also when those are uncovered later. First obviously, politically you get accusations of revisionism. And also quite literally, you are revising previous history. > More exactly the "nation" as a term can be (and has been) quite easily de-constructed through revisionist means, but what do you do when the same line of thought is applied almost ad litteram by one of your powerful neighbours who happens to have one of the biggest nuclear arsenals in the world? (because that's what Putin actually said about Ukraine, that they're "not really a nation", that they're an "imagined community") Then you are doing politics and not history. Putin is not doing history. All nations were made up at some point and that includes Russia. Maybe especially Russian nation. National movements became popular in 19th century. That is not even revisionism, that is just something most people don't think about. Nevertheless, Ukrainians have more then proven over very long period they have distinct identity and culture different from Russian one. It is much different culture and country then what you find in Russia.
seydor 4y ago
Ancient DNA is one thing not mentioned and it has exposed a lot of those imaginary narratives about grand population invasions etc.
larsrc 4y ago
Technically correct, the best kind of correct.
asiachick 4y ago
I'm curious about ancient history when the author of the history apparently wrote it 100+ years after it happened. I can't imagine anyone alive today writing with much authority about 1922. Why should I believe someone like Herodotus could possibly report accurately about things in 50 to 100years before he was born in places he couldn't have possibly been and with no actual proof, just decades of "telephone" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_whispers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_whispers)
- Veen 4y ago
  People write about earlier times by studying contemporary written sources and records and looking at archeology from the period. They also use later writers who had used and quoted contemporary sources. They also make inferences based on that material and syntheses of other material. In Herodotus's case, he used sources such as Thersander of Orchomenus, Archias of Sparta, and numerous other named and unnamed sources. He also made stuff up, but that's discouraged in modern history. There's an interesting chapter preview about his sources here: https://brill.com/view/book/edcoll/9789004217584/B9789004217584-s017.xml https://brill.com/view/book/edcoll/9789004217584/B9789004217... There's no guarantee that someone living in 1922 would be more accurate about what happened at that time than a historian writing today. They might have access to more detail, but they can lie, be mistaken, be partial, and so on. Eye witness testimony is often less reliable than a methodical examination of the available evidence, however later that happens.
- watwut 4y ago
  The answer is that you should not believe that. Herodotus was unable to accurately report on what happened 100 years before he was born. But also, the (popular) books on antiquity I seen made no secret of that. Also, blog articles by historians I have seen were careful to point the same out.
- CaptArmchair 4y ago
  > Why should I...? There's no obligation to believe or not believe a source. There are the facts and then there's the interpretation of the facts, the latter is what constitutes history. The crux is that the interpretation doesn't happen in a void. It's always driven by context in which a record first originated. Historiography isn't just about creating new narratives, it's also re-interpreting existing narratives within their context. Which interpretations of the past exist? Why did a particular narrative become dominant? What motivates historical actors to promote one narrative over another? To what extent are establish facts corroborating with an generally accepted narrative? For instance, Caesar's De Bello Galico isn't an objective, factual account of his famous campaign to pacify Gaul. It's a textbook example of a narrative of the facts that served different purposes. Here we have a roman warlord who wants to capture the story for posterity, but also leverage his report as a propaganda and finally as an apology geared towards the senate and his enemies. That doesn't mean we should dismiss De Bello Galico is a worthless account. Its value isn't in gaining a facts based perspective of the different cultures that populated Gaul some 2.000 years ago. Instead, it's an unique insight in the mind of a roman general and what motivates him to write a particular narrative. Then there are the biases and opinions of the contemporary historian interpreting De Bello Galico today. That's where it gets interesting. The art / science of history is akin to watching the past through the back mirror in your car: perspectives and interpretations change as more time and distance passes by, as well as the mirror itself warping the image over time. Ultimately, we are all slaves of the arrow of time. The idea that we can somehow capture the past in excruciating detail is almost predicated on the fact that you have to pretty much build a static, frozen version of the Universe at a particular moment in time. That's - of course - science fiction. So, when looking at the past, one has to always give countenance to the fact that you'd do so through the imperfect proxy of historical records, the fallible memory of eye witnesses and a sampling of artifacts. There's just no escaping that reality.
DEveritt 4y ago
A very interesting read! I've often thought about the different interpretations of past actions but hadn't thoroughly considered how historians as individuals cast their own interpretation on events.
toyg 4y ago
I suspect the reason for this piece is this bit buried in the middle: > It’s in the context of that reevaluation that we recently experienced a furor over which date to assign to the beginning of American history. There are many candidates to consider: [...] Such debates, arising from different perspectives on the same evidence and constituting classic instances of revisionist history, are unlikely ever to be fully stilled I.e. this is probably to be read in the context of an academic (or political) dispute about that subject. I guess someone proposed to move "the beginning of American history", someone else objected using the term "revisionism", and James M. Banner Jr. (a venerable 87-year-old historian) decided to weigh in and remind people of old truths about the field. Personally, I think he's stretching the term a bit, at least in the modern (and negative) understanding of it; it's obviously true that the practice of historians requires constant re-evaluation, but the point should be to keep such efforts free of clear agendas - which is what "revisionist" tendencies typically have.
- brightball 4y ago
  “History began July 4, 1776. Everything before that was a mistake.” - Ron Swanson
- rufus_foreman 4y ago
  >> this is probably to be read in the context of an academic (or political) dispute about that subject Do a search for "1619 revisionist" if you want to know the context.
  - toyg 4y ago
    Thank you, that explains a lot (and matches the political profile of the author).
  - everybodyknows 4y ago
    DDG search results are dominated by the usual right-wing cranks, but there's a bit of wheat to be found in the chaff: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/12/historians-clash-1619-project/604093/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/12/historians... https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/12/media/new-york-times-1619-project-criticism/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/12/media/new-york-times-1619-pro...
zabzonk 4y ago
People interested in meta-history might like to check out the idea of "Whig History" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whig_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whig_history
V-2 4y ago
"Emperor Kennedy Legend: A New Anthropological Debate" feels very suiting here. Searching for a link (in English), I discovered I already brought it up on HN about 6 years ago :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12652044 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12652044
PedroBatista 4y ago
Yes, all has revisionism just like every judge is not fully objective. But I'm afraid most people use this "discovery" as an excuse to use History as a tool/weapon to achieve whatever their objectives are.
- throwaway894345 4y ago
  Reminds me of how certain folks inside and outside of the media argued that media bias is impossible to completely eradicate thus the media should go all-in on its biases. According to them, the pursuits of objectivity and neutrality hold no value unless they can be perfected.
  - djbebs 4y ago
    I think you got it the other way around. Objectivity holds such value that falsely pretending to be objective causes far more harm than being clear, honest and uncompromising with one's biases. It's not that it's "not worth trying" it's that the "trying" causes far more harm than "not bothering to try"
    - macrolocal 4y ago
      In the sense that every model is implicitly a bias. But it's intellectually problematic to not actively seek out (and report on) incongruous facts.
    - throwaway894345 4y ago
      > Objectivity holds such value that falsely pretending to be objective causes far more harm than being clear, honest and uncompromising with one's biases. I agree that there is harm done when a news source fails to be objective, but again, objectivity isn't a binary which invalidates the implication that a media which is not 100% objective is as bad or worse than one which is 0% objective. I would also be less bothered if we had a diversely biased media landscape, such that various biases "cancel each other out", but instead we have (more or less) a monoculture among mainstream media. Moreover, what the "the media should be biased" people have delivered is not a media which is "honest about its biases", the new activist media still pretends to be as objective as the older ethical media had ever done, but without actually making nearly the effort. This is strictly less honest. I'm firmly of the opinion that activism in our epistemological institutions is what is driving partisanship and extremism which in turn makes our government increasingly dysfunctional.
matt3210 4y ago
antonymy 4y ago
Article seems to be engaging in a bit of sophistry. Yes you can claim historical revisionism has been "widely applied" when you redefine it in the broadest possible way that mostly ignores the context in which it is being used in modern discourse. I might be assuming the worst here, could just be an instance of click bait. If you changed the title of the article it's a fairly dry explainer piece about historiography and the reliability of sources. With the title it feels like somebody performing transparent apologetics for the politically charged historical revisionism trend.
- UncleMeat 4y ago
  This is, unfortunately, somewhat similar to the use of "crypto" today. "Revisionism" has been used in academic historian circles for decades and does not carry the negative connotation that is widespread today. That came later. You've got the changed meaning backwards.
hindsightbias 4y ago
Wikipedia is about self-referential links to content developed after 1992. All those books in those stacks are lost history. If you can’t provide a link, it didn’t happen.
powerslacker 4y ago
It's incredible that tax dollars go to funding the publication of this kind of material with a government seal of approval on it! Certainly much of history is a matter of interpretation, certain historical works are more trustworthy than others, and of course there are disagreements. But what I take as the thesis is essentially that truth about the past is not really something we can know. Take this statement from the article: "The results have been profound. Historians now take it for granted that it’s impossible to understand any part of the past without taking into account the realities of all, and all kinds of, people." No source cited, no names listed. A "fact" floating freely in midair. Pure propaganda.

74 points by 1sembiyan 4y ago

coldtea 4y ago
>Presumably it's laity interested in the humanities. So wouldn't they already know this? Why would they? Did you know anything about any field and at any age? What if they're starting out with history xkcd.com/1053/ style? Not to mention that tons of people read history (historical accounts, biographies, etc.) as a hobby, and take what thet read at face value, not understanding the inherent biases. And of course, the article also gives examples, puts the issue in a general perspective, explains some issues associated with it, etc. It looks like you've only considered the title, as if the post begins and ends at that. >Which actually makes this empty virtue signaling, regardless of truth value. I think this is more true of this comment, than of the article.

This ended up being an interesting piece by the end. The headline and parts of the article suffer a bit from clickbait by conflating the two different ways “revisionist” is used—sometimes to mean revising past precedent with new knowledge, and other times to mean purposely hiding facts about the past (also called negationist history). Obviously not all history is purposely hiding facts about the past… But if you ignore that, the author did a good job of explaining how lots of at-one-point accepted history was originally introduced with revisionist/negationist/biased aims. To the point that it’s harder to cleanly separate out all the negationist history than you might think. So overall an interesting point and a useful reminder of how these interpretations are always in flux. And that that’s okay and healthy.

cassepipe 4y ago
From memory that's Pierre Vidal Naquet argument against negationnists, that they called themselves revisionists, because it is a legitimate stance in history but that what they are indeed are negationnists. Ironically, the old anti negationnist website I found the following link on is called anti-Rev : http://www.anti-rev.org/textes/VidalNaquet92c/ http://www.anti-rev.org/textes/VidalNaquet92c/

Nursie 4y ago

When we talk about "revisionist history", don't we generally think of people with less than honest intentions deliberately trying to force a narrative? Often or usually by sprinkling untruths and non-facts in? What the article seems to be arguing is that historians without such dishonest intentions are necessarily reinterpreting history in light of the modern era, and are likely including their own and societal biases in their narrative. and there is no real 'objective' history. Is this news? This is the sort of thing I learned in history class as a teenager (albeit in simplified form). Primary sources are valuable but should be put through the filter of partial knowledge of a situation and personal bias. Secondary sources should be looked at with knowledge of the times around them and the potential biases of the author. It's the intent that's always defined "revisionist" history to me, and the willingness to include things which are not fact-based, or are counterfactual.

kelnos 4y ago
Not just deliberately trying to force a narrative... trying to force a narrative that is contrary to what is commonly accepted to have happened, specifically because their new narrative benefits them financially, politically, socially, or in some other way. A "revisionist historian", as I understand it, is a manipulator, a con artist, a gaslighter. Someone who is trying to convince people of some history that didn't actually happen, because doing so will enrich them. This article... seems to try to revise "revisionism"?
- fullmoon 4y ago
  One good example of such a person is Hannah-Jones and her fraudulent 1619 project, who fits all of those attributes except for historian.
watwut 4y ago
> This is the sort of thing I learned in history class as a teenager My observation from discussion about history (including on HN) is that most people did not learned the same thing. My own history lessons in high school definitely did not taught that. Instead, many people assume whatever they learned is definite and any new addition or emphasis on something else is bad. > Primary sources are valuable but should be put through the filter of partial knowledge of a situation and personal bias. Yes, but also to interpret primary sources, you need to understand quite a lot about that period. What they mean when they say certain words. What knowledge is assumed, what values are assumed by the orignal writer. History is foreign country, it is very easy to misunderstand their priorities or what they write about.

wakawakawaka01 4y ago

02020202 4y ago

paganel 4y ago

I'd say this article is a little revisionist itself, especially when it comes to Eusebius, as in nobody really cares about his writings around these parts of the world from where I'm from (Eastern Europe), and, to be honest, I haven't seen Late Antiquity - Moyen Âge French historians mentioning him that often, if at all, either (they're way more fond of Grégoire de Tours, for example).

beebmam 4y ago
What's bad about revision? Isn't that what we're supposed to do when we write?
- paganel 4y ago
  Nothing bad per se, but as other people have mentioned in this thread, historical revisionism has been used for lots and lots of despicable things in the recent past, including genocide. Yes, we "all" (I include in here people interested in history) know that nations are "imagined communities" and we extensively like to quote Benedict Anderson on that. More exactly the "nation" as a term can be (and has been) quite easily de-constructed through revisionist means, but what do you do when the same line of thought is applied almost ad litteram by one of your powerful neighbours who happens to have one of the biggest nuclear arsenals in the world? (because that's what Putin actually said about Ukraine, that they're "not really a nation", that they're an "imagined community")
  - watwut 4y ago
    > historical revisionism has been used for lots and lots of despicable things in the recent past, including genocide. Historical revisionism is also when those are uncovered later. First obviously, politically you get accusations of revisionism. And also quite literally, you are revising previous history. > More exactly the "nation" as a term can be (and has been) quite easily de-constructed through revisionist means, but what do you do when the same line of thought is applied almost ad litteram by one of your powerful neighbours who happens to have one of the biggest nuclear arsenals in the world? (because that's what Putin actually said about Ukraine, that they're "not really a nation", that they're an "imagined community") Then you are doing politics and not history. Putin is not doing history. All nations were made up at some point and that includes Russia. Maybe especially Russian nation. National movements became popular in 19th century. That is not even revisionism, that is just something most people don't think about. Nevertheless, Ukrainians have more then proven over very long period they have distinct identity and culture different from Russian one. It is much different culture and country then what you find in Russia.

seydor 4y ago

Ancient DNA is one thing not mentioned and it has exposed a lot of those imaginary narratives about grand population invasions etc.

larsrc 4y ago

Technically correct, the best kind of correct.

asiachick 4y ago

I'm curious about ancient history when the author of the history apparently wrote it 100+ years after it happened. I can't imagine anyone alive today writing with much authority about 1922. Why should I believe someone like Herodotus could possibly report accurately about things in 50 to 100years before he was born in places he couldn't have possibly been and with no actual proof, just decades of "telephone" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_whispers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_whispers)

Veen 4y ago
People write about earlier times by studying contemporary written sources and records and looking at archeology from the period. They also use later writers who had used and quoted contemporary sources. They also make inferences based on that material and syntheses of other material. In Herodotus's case, he used sources such as Thersander of Orchomenus, Archias of Sparta, and numerous other named and unnamed sources. He also made stuff up, but that's discouraged in modern history. There's an interesting chapter preview about his sources here: https://brill.com/view/book/edcoll/9789004217584/B9789004217584-s017.xml https://brill.com/view/book/edcoll/9789004217584/B9789004217... There's no guarantee that someone living in 1922 would be more accurate about what happened at that time than a historian writing today. They might have access to more detail, but they can lie, be mistaken, be partial, and so on. Eye witness testimony is often less reliable than a methodical examination of the available evidence, however later that happens.
watwut 4y ago
The answer is that you should not believe that. Herodotus was unable to accurately report on what happened 100 years before he was born. But also, the (popular) books on antiquity I seen made no secret of that. Also, blog articles by historians I have seen were careful to point the same out.
CaptArmchair 4y ago
> Why should I...? There's no obligation to believe or not believe a source. There are the facts and then there's the interpretation of the facts, the latter is what constitutes history. The crux is that the interpretation doesn't happen in a void. It's always driven by context in which a record first originated. Historiography isn't just about creating new narratives, it's also re-interpreting existing narratives within their context. Which interpretations of the past exist? Why did a particular narrative become dominant? What motivates historical actors to promote one narrative over another? To what extent are establish facts corroborating with an generally accepted narrative? For instance, Caesar's De Bello Galico isn't an objective, factual account of his famous campaign to pacify Gaul. It's a textbook example of a narrative of the facts that served different purposes. Here we have a roman warlord who wants to capture the story for posterity, but also leverage his report as a propaganda and finally as an apology geared towards the senate and his enemies. That doesn't mean we should dismiss De Bello Galico is a worthless account. Its value isn't in gaining a facts based perspective of the different cultures that populated Gaul some 2.000 years ago. Instead, it's an unique insight in the mind of a roman general and what motivates him to write a particular narrative. Then there are the biases and opinions of the contemporary historian interpreting De Bello Galico today. That's where it gets interesting. The art / science of history is akin to watching the past through the back mirror in your car: perspectives and interpretations change as more time and distance passes by, as well as the mirror itself warping the image over time. Ultimately, we are all slaves of the arrow of time. The idea that we can somehow capture the past in excruciating detail is almost predicated on the fact that you have to pretty much build a static, frozen version of the Universe at a particular moment in time. That's - of course - science fiction. So, when looking at the past, one has to always give countenance to the fact that you'd do so through the imperfect proxy of historical records, the fallible memory of eye witnesses and a sampling of artifacts. There's just no escaping that reality.

DEveritt 4y ago

A very interesting read! I've often thought about the different interpretations of past actions but hadn't thoroughly considered how historians as individuals cast their own interpretation on events.

toyg 4y ago

I suspect the reason for this piece is this bit buried in the middle: > It’s in the context of that reevaluation that we recently experienced a furor over which date to assign to the beginning of American history. There are many candidates to consider: [...] Such debates, arising from different perspectives on the same evidence and constituting classic instances of revisionist history, are unlikely ever to be fully stilled I.e. this is probably to be read in the context of an academic (or political) dispute about that subject. I guess someone proposed to move "the beginning of American history", someone else objected using the term "revisionism", and James M. Banner Jr. (a venerable 87-year-old historian) decided to weigh in and remind people of old truths about the field. Personally, I think he's stretching the term a bit, at least in the modern (and negative) understanding of it; it's obviously true that the practice of historians requires constant re-evaluation, but the point should be to keep such efforts free of clear agendas - which is what "revisionist" tendencies typically have.

brightball 4y ago
“History began July 4, 1776. Everything before that was a mistake.” - Ron Swanson
rufus_foreman 4y ago
>> this is probably to be read in the context of an academic (or political) dispute about that subject Do a search for "1619 revisionist" if you want to know the context.
- toyg 4y ago
  Thank you, that explains a lot (and matches the political profile of the author).
- everybodyknows 4y ago
  DDG search results are dominated by the usual right-wing cranks, but there's a bit of wheat to be found in the chaff: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/12/historians-clash-1619-project/604093/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/12/historians... https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/12/media/new-york-times-1619-project-criticism/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/12/media/new-york-times-1619-pro...

zabzonk 4y ago

People interested in meta-history might like to check out the idea of "Whig History" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whig_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whig_history

V-2 4y ago

"Emperor Kennedy Legend: A New Anthropological Debate" feels very suiting here. Searching for a link (in English), I discovered I already brought it up on HN about 6 years ago :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12652044 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12652044

PedroBatista 4y ago

Yes, all has revisionism just like every judge is not fully objective. But I'm afraid most people use this "discovery" as an excuse to use History as a tool/weapon to achieve whatever their objectives are.

throwaway894345 4y ago
Reminds me of how certain folks inside and outside of the media argued that media bias is impossible to completely eradicate thus the media should go all-in on its biases. According to them, the pursuits of objectivity and neutrality hold no value unless they can be perfected.
- djbebs 4y ago
  I think you got it the other way around. Objectivity holds such value that falsely pretending to be objective causes far more harm than being clear, honest and uncompromising with one's biases. It's not that it's "not worth trying" it's that the "trying" causes far more harm than "not bothering to try"
  - macrolocal 4y ago
    In the sense that every model is implicitly a bias. But it's intellectually problematic to not actively seek out (and report on) incongruous facts.
  - throwaway894345 4y ago
    > Objectivity holds such value that falsely pretending to be objective causes far more harm than being clear, honest and uncompromising with one's biases. I agree that there is harm done when a news source fails to be objective, but again, objectivity isn't a binary which invalidates the implication that a media which is not 100% objective is as bad or worse than one which is 0% objective. I would also be less bothered if we had a diversely biased media landscape, such that various biases "cancel each other out", but instead we have (more or less) a monoculture among mainstream media. Moreover, what the "the media should be biased" people have delivered is not a media which is "honest about its biases", the new activist media still pretends to be as objective as the older ethical media had ever done, but without actually making nearly the effort. This is strictly less honest. I'm firmly of the opinion that activism in our epistemological institutions is what is driving partisanship and extremism which in turn makes our government increasingly dysfunctional.

matt3210 4y ago

antonymy 4y ago

Article seems to be engaging in a bit of sophistry. Yes you can claim historical revisionism has been "widely applied" when you redefine it in the broadest possible way that mostly ignores the context in which it is being used in modern discourse. I might be assuming the worst here, could just be an instance of click bait. If you changed the title of the article it's a fairly dry explainer piece about historiography and the reliability of sources. With the title it feels like somebody performing transparent apologetics for the politically charged historical revisionism trend.

UncleMeat 4y ago
This is, unfortunately, somewhat similar to the use of "crypto" today. "Revisionism" has been used in academic historian circles for decades and does not carry the negative connotation that is widespread today. That came later. You've got the changed meaning backwards.

hindsightbias 4y ago

Wikipedia is about self-referential links to content developed after 1992. All those books in those stacks are lost history. If you can’t provide a link, it didn’t happen.

powerslacker 4y ago

It's incredible that tax dollars go to funding the publication of this kind of material with a government seal of approval on it! Certainly much of history is a matter of interpretation, certain historical works are more trustworthy than others, and of course there are disagreements. But what I take as the thesis is essentially that truth about the past is not really something we can know. Take this statement from the article: "The results have been profound. Historians now take it for granted that it’s impossible to understand any part of the past without taking into account the realities of all, and all kinds of, people." No source cited, no names listed. A "fact" floating freely in midair. Pure propaganda.