Is Revisionist History Actually Bad?
While sitting through my PhD defense one of my examiners set a question to me: "is your dissertation a work of revisionist history?" I hadn't really thought about it before, partially because of the negative connotations associated with "revisionism." As I began answering the question, however, I realized that what I had written was in fact a work of revisionist history.
Yet in common popular usage revisionist history is used to mean something like "a work of history that distorts the truth for a particular agenda." In this regard it has been used to critique the 1619 Project and its counter, Donald Trump's 1776 Advisory Commission, but also even Aaron Rodgers' return to the Pittsburgh Steelers for the 2026 NFL season. This is not a new conception of the term, but was used in Marxist theory to denigrate those who reinterpreted Marx in the early 20th century.[1] Nowadays it is also predominantly associated with Holocaust denial, in that "revisionist" scholars distort the past to deny or downplay its horrors. Holocaust deniers intentionally claimed they were simply doing standard historical revisionism as a way of concealing their actual distortions and agenda. The French historian Henry Rousso, writing in 1987, refers to this, illegitimate, method not as revisionism, but as "negationism." Revisionism, as he writes, "usually refers to a normal phase in the evolution of historical scholarship."[2] Gabriele Spiegel likewise views revisionism ("negationism") as a phenomenon occurring well outside the precincts of normal historical activity.[3] That is, popular usage of "revisionist history" doesn't correspond to what historians actually do in their work. Why?
At its core this is a debate over the fundamental meaning of writing history. To some, the job of the historian is to find the one true "correct" narrative and so "revisionism" is what not to do. James Banner, provocatively perhaps, writes in The Ever-Changing Past that all history is by definition revisionist.[4] Constant questioning and critique are central to the historical enterprise, and thus in Banner's view means that history must necessarily be revisionist. This is because historians are always writing as individuals embedded within their own circumstances. For Banner this is not a problem as long as the analysis is grounded in the use of evidence and subject to further scrutiny by other historians. Even the earliest "historians" Herodotus and Thucydides were not immune to the pull of revision, and Thucydides in particular set the stage for how history was practiced for long after his work.[5] Jonathan Gorman writes that "historians might be engaging, and long have engaged, in "revising," without anyone thinking about what they are and were doing."[6] What is new, perhaps, is that we have a term for it.
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What separates the popular meaning of revisionism from historical practice is the implicit assumption that believes set historical truth. The revisionists thus destabilize historical consensus for pre-determined political reasons. That is, critiques of new historical theories that claim they are "revisionist" stem from an assumption that the past is settled, and new ideas are simply stirring the pot arbitrarily or with sinister intent. However even the supposedly neutral historians of the nineteenth century saw the study of the past in relation to themselves: Ernst Dümmler, who was one of Leopold von Ranke's students, could write how Arnulf of Carinthia was important "in the place of the history of our people", meaning the Germans.[7]
A person's position in relation to their scholarship, however, does not mean that their conclusions are automatically wrong. I often would counsel my students that "bias" doesn't mean the same thing as "wrong." Working historians know that the past is not settled, and our knowledge of it is being driven in new directions because historians themselves are asking new questions of the past. Historians find a flaw in an argument, a missing piece of evidence, or new evidence/approaches come to light that necessitate reviewing or revising our interpretations of the past. This is also not the same as saying all views of the past are equally valid, or there is a pure relativism at work. Most historians admit that recovering the exact past is impossible, but that we can use evidence and analysis to come as close as we can. That is very different from not knowing about the past (on which you can read my other post)!
Jon Dell Isola
In case it isn't clear: I don't think any historian can fully extricate themselves from their own circumstances when writing, including myself! Yet there is a difference between being shaped by one's beliefs and circumstances and writing history for a specific political aim. Certainly, my political beliefs shape my interest in power, but I don't write about the early middle ages to argue that billionaires deserve to be taxed more. There is already plenty of evidence for the dangers of writing history within this explicitly politicized lens from the 1940s when Nazi historians co-opted the middle ages for their own purposes. Or Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States which was critiqued for recasting the history of the US in a decidedly class-based framework. What ends up happening is that the past serves as a foil, or predecessor, to the present. In reality, the categories of the past, the debates and conflicts, rarely map easily onto our present concerns.
So the next time you see a criticism of a "revisionist" history, think about what that critique really means. Professional historians constantly revise the past, but they don't do so for arbitrary reasons. Often the label "revisionist" is applied to works that don't agree with the political beliefs of the reviewer. This can, of course, mean that the actual work is shoddy, but it can also be because the (good) scholarship is challenging something previously seen as stable. Especially when the topic is something essential to modern culture, this can generate intense disagreement. What I've hope I convinced you of is to see "revising" the past as something to be encouraged and not necessarily a problem. The past is not settled because we aren't settled, we ask new questions of the past because our own experiences change. Our new positions help us look at the past from new perspectives, in doing so building on and changing what we know about history.
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- See, from 1908, V.I. Lenin, "Marxism and Revisionism," Karl Marx - 1818-1883. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1908/apr/03.htm. ↩︎
- H. Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944, translated by A. Goldhammer, Second Revised Edition (Harvard University Press, 1991), pp. 151-157 at p. 151.↩︎
- G. Spiegel, "Revising the Past/Revisiting the Present: How Change Happens in Historiography," History and Theory 46, no. 4 (2007): 1-19 at 2. ↩︎
- James M. Banner, The Ever-Changing Past: Why All History is Revisionist History (Yale University Press, 2021).↩︎
- Banner, The Ever-Changing Past, pp. 66-99.↩︎
- J. Gorman, "The Commonplaces of "Revision" and Their Implications for Historiographical Understanding," History and Theory 46, no. 4 (2007): 20-44 at 25.↩︎
- E. Dümmler, De Arnulfo, p. 170: locum Arnulfus in historia populi nostri. Ranke famously claimed that historians were meant to uncover history "as it actually was" although this may be a mistranslation of what he meant, further showing that the idea of perfect neutrality has always been something of a myth!↩︎
