I want to make a case: The expression revisionist history is redundant. It's like tooth dentist.
The origin of the phrase seems clear enough. It's come along as part of the history front of the culture wars in the United States, and perhaps in other parts of the world, too. In my experience, the expression is used in the following imaginary statement:
When I was a kid, we learned basic history. You know, Ben Franklin, George Washington, the American Revolution, and the U.S. Constitution. But today, the schools are teaching revisionist history. They've changed things.
There is no doubt that standard or typical narratives of American history are different now than they were forty and fifty years ago. For example, today, compared to decades ago, it is much more common for American historians to include in their narratives information about Native Americans, women, African-Americans, Hispanics, and all sorts of minority or outsider groups.
Of course, those people were there all along. But in previous generations, the contributions of those people to our collective past were not often acknowledged or even noticed. That is a big part of what has changed, which is mainly why some complain about revisionist history.
My point is not that recent changes in the way historians investigate and write about the past are either good or bad. (It's a mixed bag, I think. Pluses and minuses). My point is that what people sometimes call revisionism is just another name for the next generation of people writing about and teaching the subject of history. In the Introduction to his 1972 book, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution, historian Christopher Hill captured the idea:
History has to be rewritten in every generation, because although the past does not change the present does; each generation asks new questions, and finds new areas of sympathy as it re-lives different aspects of the experiences of its predecessors (13).
In other words, revision is the essence of writing history. It is not the case that an older generation of historians was right and the current generation is wrong. It is not that an earlier approach, necessarily superior, has been abandoned for a new approach, which is obviously inferior. Nor is the difference the result of current historians fudging on the facts. Again, Hill: "No amount of detailed working over the evidence is going to change the factual essentials of the story." The difference stems from the fact that every generation is, in at least some ways, unique, like the uniqueness of every individual no matter how much she might look like her grandmother. "But," says Hill, "the interpretation will vary with our attitudes, with our lives in the present. So reinterpretation is not only possible but necessary" (13).
Much more recently Ned Blackhawk, in his book The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History, has expressed the same ideas:
Revising interpretations of the past is an inherent part of the study of history, and as each generation reinterprets, it does so in response to new circumstances, ideas, and conditions (4).
And that is why revisionist history is redundant. If someone's interpretation is just wrong, then we should say so, and say why. But it will never do to dismiss someone's interpretation of the past simply because it is different from something one has heard and believed before.
Sources:
Ned Blackhawk, The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2023.
Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution. New York: Viking Press, 1972.
