Editing Historical revisionism (section)

==Historical scholarship==
{{Globalize|article|USA|2name=the United States|date=August 2018}}
Historical revisionism is the means by which the [[historical record]], the history of a society, as understood in its [[collective memory]], continually accounts for new facts and interpretations of the events that are commonly understood as history. The historian and [[American Historical Association]] member [[James M. McPherson]] has said:

{{Blockquote|The fourteen-thousand members of this [[American Historical Association|association]], however, know that revision is the lifeblood of historical scholarship. History is a continuing [[Discourse|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 Era|Reconstruction]] [1865–77] after the [[American Civil War]] [1861–65] that were conveyed by [[D. W. Griffith]]'s ''[[The Birth of a Nation]]'' [1915] and [[Claude Bowers]]'s ''The Tragic Era'' [1929]. Were the [[Gilded Age]] [1870s–1900] entrepreneurs "[[Captain of industry|Captains of Industry]]" or "[[Robber baron (industrialist)|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.<ref>{{Cite web |url=https://www.historians.org/perspectives/issues/2003/0309/0309pre1.cfm |title=Revisionist Historians |access-date=February 17, 2022 |archive-date=August 23, 2013 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130823033432/http://www.historians.org/Perspectives/Issues/2003/0309/0309pre1.cfm |url-status=live }}</ref>}}

In the field of [[historiography]], the historian who works within the existing [[The Establishment|establishment]] of society and has produced a body of [[history books]] from which he or she can claim [[Authority (sociology)|authority]], usually benefits from the ''status quo''. As such, the professional-historian [[paradigm]] is manifested as a [[reflex reaction|denunciative stance]] towards any form of historical revisionism of fact, 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 [the] fundamentals" of research.<ref>{{Cite book|last=Kuhn|first=Thomas N.|author-link=Thomas Kuhn|editor1-last=Lakatos|editor1-first=Imre|editor2-last=Musgrave|editor2-first=Alan|editor1-link=Imre Lakatos|editor2-link=Alan Musgrave|title=Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge|edition=second|orig-year=1970|year=1972|publisher=Cambridge University Press|location=Cambridge|isbn=0-521-09623-5|page=[https://archive.org/details/criticismgrowth00laka/page/6 6]|chapter=Logic of Discovery or Psychology of Research|chapter-url=https://archive.org/details/criticismgrowth00laka/page/6}}</ref> On resistance to the works of revised history that present a [[postcolonialism|culturally-comprehensive]] historical narrative of the US, the perspectives of [[black people]], [[feminism|women]], and the [[labour movement]], the historian David Williams said:

{{Blockquote|These, and other, scholarly voices, called for a more comprehensive treatment of American history, stressing that the mass of Americans, not simply the power élites, made history. Yet, it was mainly white males of the power élite 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 [[W. E. B. Du Bois|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 [as] an example; it paints perfect men and noble nations, but it does not tell the truth".<ref>Williams, David. ''A People's History of the Civil War: Struggles for the Meaning of Freedom.''(2005) pp. 10–11.</ref>}}

After the Second World War, the study and production of history in the US 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]].<ref>Williams p. 11</ref> That expansion and deepening of the pool of historians voided the existence of a definitive and universally-accepted history, therefore, is presented by the revisionist historian to the national public with an 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 US and the Soviet Union during the [[Cold War]] (1945–1991), the historian [[Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.]] said:

{{Blockquote|... but others, especially in the United States.... represent what American historians call ''revisionism'' – that is 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 [historical] 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.<ref>Schlesinger, Arthur M. Jr. ''The Cycles of American History.''(1986) p. 165.</ref>}}

Revisionist historians contest the mainstream or traditional view of historical events and 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. The historian [[Forrest McDonald]] is often critical of the turn that revisionism has taken but admits that the turmoil of the 1960s America has changed the way history was written:

{{Blockquote|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.<ref>McDonald, Forest. ''Recovering the Past: A Historian's Memoir.'' (2004) p. 114</ref>}}

Historians are influenced by the ''[[zeitgeist]]'' (spirit of the time), and the usually progressive changes to society, politics, and culture, such as occurred after the [[Second World War]] (1939–1945); in ''The Future of the Past'' (1989), the historian [[C. Vann Woodward]] said:

{{Blockquote|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 [the absence from U.S. history of external threats, because of geography] happens to come mainly from American history, but this should not obscure the broader scope of the revolution, which has no national limitations.<ref>{{cite book |last=Woodward |first=C. Vann |title=The Future of the Past |year=1989 |publisher=Oxford University Press |isbn=978-0195057447 |page=[https://archive.org/details/futureofpast00cvan/page/76 76] |url=https://archive.org/details/futureofpast00cvan/page/76 }}</ref>}}

Developments in the academy, culture, and politics shaped the contemporary model of writing history, the accepted paradigm of [[historiography]]. The philosopher [[Karl Popper]] said that "each generation has its own troubles and problems, and, therefore, its own interests and its own point of view".

{{Blockquote|sign=|source=|it follows that each generation has a right to look upon and re-interpret history in [their] own way.... After all, we study history because we are interested in it, and perhaps because we desire to learn something about our [contemporary] problems. But history can serve neither of these two purposes 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 naïvely believes... that he has reached a level of objectivity permitting him to present "the events of the past as they actually did happen".<ref>{{cite book |last=Novick |first=Peter |title=That Noble Dream: The Objectivity Question and the American Historical Profession |url=https://archive.org/details/isbn_9780521357456 |url-access=registration |year=1988 |publisher=Cambridge University Press |isbn=978-0521357456 |page=[https://archive.org/details/isbn_9780521357456/page/395 395]}}</ref>}}

As the social, political, and cultural influences change a society, most historians revise and update their explanation of historical events. The old consensus, based upon limited evidence, might no longer be considered historically valid in explaining the particulars: of cause and effect, of motivation and self-interest – that tell ''How?'' and ''Why?'' the past occurred as it occurred; therefore, the historical revisionism of the factual record is revised to concord with the contemporary understanding of history. As such, in 1986, the historian John Hope Franklin described four stages in the historiography of the African experience of life in the US, which were based upon different models of historical consensus.<ref>African-American History: Origins, Development, and Current State of the Field | Joe W. Trotter | [[Organization of American Historians]] Magazine of History</ref>