History is revised all the time and that's okay

The term "historical revisionism" is too often misused. Revising history is why historians exist. When most people talk about "historical revisionism" what they really mean is denialism, negationism, or distortion. Denialism and negationism are essentially the same things. Denialists say historical facts did not actually happen. For instance, there is a growing number of people who adhere to the negationist belief that the Holocaust did not take place.

Often kissing cousins to denialism/negationism is historical distortionism. Distortionists take well-known events, people, and places and change them and their history to fit a philosophical agenda. A mild example of this, using the Holocaust as an example once again, would be those who say, "Well, yeah, the Nazis did kill six million Jews, but they killed a lot of other people too," in an attempt to minimize the effect the Holocaust had on Jews as a people.

A more common type of distortionism happens when advocates of a specific philosophical agenda pick and choose which facts to believe, teach, or emphasize when teaching history. In history and especially Latin American history, we refer to this as either the White Legend or the Black Legend.

The White Legend is a version of history that focuses on a specific group of people as heroes of history. They were all great, they were all godly, they were all brilliant, and their lives should be emulated. In the study of Western Civilization, that would be like focusing on the fact that Greeks developed democracy while ignoring the fact that most of the population of Greece were slaves and were completely disfranchised. Scholarly adherents of the White Legend might concede the existence of slavery while qualifying that concession with "yeah but."

The Black Legend, on the other hand, vilifies the heroes of the White Legend and even when talking about their achievements, they do it in a way that shines the brightest lights on their flaws and misdeeds. The Black Legend also will focus on oppressed peoples as the heroes of the story, often ignoring the flaws of the oppressed that they criticized in the oppressors. An example would be the growing narrative of the colonization of the New World as the worst thing to ever happen in the history of mankind and the Old World, especially Europe should be apologizing for ever setting foot in the New World. Black Legend historians also frequently commit the historian's fallacy, that is they judge the past and the people of the past by today's standards, rather than judging them based on the standards of the past and recognizing that those people were products of their environment and upbringing in that society and culture of the past.

The reality, where good history is involved, lies between the two. We can look at the achievements of people of the past and say, "Wow! That's really something." We can also look at their flaws and the things that we would consider evil in our time and say, "Wow. That's really bad." The trick is to be both unbiased and nuanced. Something that is woefully missing from the public narrative and the teaching of history in too many schools. Frankly, I think I was lucky in college to have a majority of professors who at least attempted to remain unbiased and present a nuanced version of history. That said, one of my favorite professors was openly biased about some things in history. He and I disagreed on how Thomas Jefferson should be approached on day one of the first class I had with him. I took that professor twice and loved his class both times and even got As without sacrificing my approach to history.

The worst kind of distortionism, albeit also the rarest, is when "historians" just make up history.

A few years ago, Virginia came out with a new history textbook for elementary school. In the 4th grade text in the section on the Civil War, there was a claim that free blacks in the South and slaves actually served as soldiers in the Confederacy. No such thing happened. When the author, Joy Masoff was asked why she included the section, she said she wanted to "add a little something extra."

A few months ago, I read an article on the website, We Are the Mighty, titled, “5 cringeworthy military slang terms (that we should actually retire),” that suggested the term "in country" was a shortened form of “Indian Country,” and was used in the military to mean enemy territory. Having been in the military, the only use of the term "in country" I have ever heard referred to actually being in a country while deployed. The author of the article, Blake Stilwell was suggesting that the term, “in country” no longer be used because of its racist heritage. The author of the article provided a link to order Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's book, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States where the article's author found the claim. I had never heard this claim before, so first, I searched to see if this claim had been made by anyone else. It had not. Second, I looked up the etymology of the phrase "in country" to see its history. The phrase "in country," according to the Oxford English Dictionary was first used in 1560 in England and was actually the shortening of the phrase "interior country" meaning the interior regions of any country. The phrase’s first use in the 20^th century was in 1953, in a book of poetry by Dylan Thomas called, A Prospect of the Sea and meant being in a specific country. So, then, I got a hold of Dunbar-Ortiz's book and looked up the sections where she refers to "in country." One section claims that the phrase “in country” was a shortening of the phrase "Indian Country" and originated in the Vietnam War, which according to the Oxford English Dictionary is incorrect. So, I then looked up her sources in the footnotes and bibliography. She had one footnote for both times she made her claim, but that footnote just describes what qualifies as “Indian Country” according to political scientist Sharon O’Brien in her 1993 book, American Indian Tribal Governments. The term “in country” does not appear anywhere in O’Brien’s work either. Without a source to back up her claim and with scholarly sources that actually counter Dunbar-Ortiz’s claim, one can only assume that she made it up.

Often, fabrications, like Masoff’s claim about black Confederate soldiers, are easy to spot and debunk. Fabrications like Dunbar-Ortiz’s claim are more insidious because she has a Ph.D. in History from a respected university and most people will simply take her claim at face value and then repeat it, even in academic settings. I took a humanities course in college and the professor with a Ph.D. repeated the “rule of thumb” urban legend as fact. This particular urban legend states that English Common Law stipulated that a man could beat his wife as long as the rod he used was no wider than the width of his thumb. This urban legend is easily disprovable, but because it is often repeated as factual in feminist academic circles, it continues to be treated as fact in many places in the rest of academia.

Teaching history is difficult enough as it is because there is a lot of it. History teachers and curriculum developers have to balance teaching good history along with trying to determine the most important topics to cover in the time allotted. On top of that, there are political forces at work, pulling from all directions that demand their important topics are covered as well. When the curriculum is finalized and shows up in school districts, teachers have to figure out how to teach the curriculum in a way that also meets the demands placed on them by standardized testing objectives created at the state and federal levels.

Primary school teachers are rarely history majors and get an awful lot wrong. I first learned about Christopher Columbus in second grade and was taught that Columbus set out on his 1492 voyage to prove that the world is round when most of the people of his day still believed that the world was flat. Neither of those claims is true. Most people in 15^th century Europe believed the world was spherical and had for centuries. Aristotle is often credited with being the first to claim the earth was a sphere, but people for centuries before Aristotle—Egyptians, Greeks, Hebrews, Mesopotamians, and Phoenicians—had an understanding of a spherical earth, especially mariners. I was also taught that Columbus discovered America, but the fact that there were humans in the Americas for thousands of years makes that claim clearly incorrect. Even the claim that he was the first European to set foot in the New World is wrong because the Vikings accomplished that hundreds of years before Columbus.

In secondary schools (middle schools and high schools) history teachers are just as often history majors as they majors of other social sciences. A teacher I had the opportunity to observe who teaches history was a political science major and has a J.D. She told me that she knew a lot about history and the facts behind most of the laws she teaches in her government classes, but she was at a loss on how to teach straight history. She still sends me notes from time-to-time for advice on certain subjects.

The point I am trying to make is that teachers in public schools, regardless of what their biases may be—and yes they have biases and yes they sneak them into their curriculum—have an incredibly demanding job just trying to meet the standards. People often tell me, “So much has been erased from history books.” I have to respond, “False.” The information is still there, but there is not enough time to teach everything that everyone wants to teach. In Western Civilization, when teaching about the development of democracy in Greece, I really wish more time was spent on Cleisthenes, the man who essentially invented democracy, how he came up with the idea, why he came up with the idea, and a little more of his background to really give a context for his invention of democracy. Yet, I never heard of Cleisthenes before I graduated from high school. In my Western Civilization course in college, Cleisthenes was mentioned one time in one sentence in the one chapter on Greece that covered Greece’s pre-history through Hellenistic Greece. My professor, who spent three lectures on Greece never mentioned Cleisthenes one time. I watched a documentary on Ancient Greece last week, a documentary I thought was fabulous by the way, yet Cleisthenes was only mentioned in passing at the end of the second episode. I think Cleisthenes is the biggest hero of Greece’s Golden Age, but to most historians, he’s a footnote.

Some people cry, “I can’t stand the way history has been changed.” History is going to change. It has to. I mean, if we have all the documentation on a person, place, or event, history may not change much, if at all. However, because of human nature, historical evidence gets lost, destroyed, misplaced, or hidden and it takes years, sometimes, for that evidence to come to light. Sometimes, when that evidence comes to light, it completely changes the way historians understand and interpret history and history has to change. I’m writing this essay because of the way so many people recently have been making this very complaint.

Just the other day, I saw a meme on Facebook that claimed that the Pyramids of Giza were built by slaves. I made a simple response challenging that idea since archaeologists and historians no longer believe this. Between finding no slave burials at or near the site, the care in which the people who worked on the pyramids were treated when they died, the records the workers left behind, and numerous other archaeological findings, it became clear to archaeologists, historians, and Egyptologists that slaves were not involved. My response was intended as a light-hearted comment that I hoped would direct people to look up the information. I even included a line in my response that the pyramids were also not built by aliens or with spaceships and ended it with a “winking” emoji. My claim was met with abuse. I’m not easily offended, but I figured the replies I had received were just based on ignorance, so I responded by posting an article by Zahi Hawass, who is the world’s leading Egyptologist. It was not a scholarly peer-reviewed work, but I made the mistake of believing that Hawass was well-enough known to be respected. I was wrong. Hawass was accused by one commenter of being a racist elitist and that the article I posted was merely his opinion. I gave up, because willful ignorance is hard to overcome. Many people came to my defense and Hawass’ article replying with comments about archaeological findings and mentioning articles and books to read, but at some point, you’re just feeding trolls. It’s best to just let them starve.

“They’re not teaching history the way I was taught history.” The way history is taught is going to change over time. It has to. Too many people contributed to history that have been left out of the story. American history, for instance, is usually taught as a line of progress, led by white men. Yes, white men enslaved Africans, but who freed the slaves? Abraham Lincoln who was white. Women fought for the right to vote, but who gave them the right to vote? The mostly white, male Congress when they passed the 19^th amendment. African-Americans fought for their very Civil Rights, but who gave it to them? The white President Lyndon Baines Johnson.

I must concede that my statement in the above paragraph was slightly hyperbolic. Obviously, there are some non-white, non-male people who have been included in the teaching of history, but has history really been all that inclusive? Let me use the Revolutionary era and the Revolutionary War as one example. Most Americans are familiar with the Boston Massacre which took place on March 5, 1770. Many Americans might even be familiar with the fact that the first man to die in the event was Crispus Attucks. However, most people don’t know that he was black, and fewer still know that he also was part Native American. How about the famous Midnight Ride of Paul Revere? Most people don’t know that there was another midnight rider that night. While Revere rode west, another man, Wentworth Cheswell rode north to warn other communities. Wentworth Cheswell’s mother was white. His father was black. There were other midnight riders as well, one of them was a woman, Sybil Ludington who made her midnight ride April 26^th, 1777. She rode 40 miles (twice the distance of Paul Revere) to warn militiamen in Putnam County, New York that the British were going to attack a Continental Army supply depot in Danbury, Connecticut. Deborah Sampson was a woman who dressed up like a man to fight in the Revolutionary War and received a pension after the war, even after her secret was discovered and in spite of her having broken the law concerning women in military service.

There are even more stories of brave men and women of all ethnicities who fought and died for what would become the United States of America. We can’t tell all their stories in a single curriculum, but we can tell more than we have, which is why history isn’t taught the way I was taught or you were taught, nor should it be. When we do bump up the untold stories up the list of priority, someone who previously had their story told gets bumped off the curriculum. Their stories still exist, but people who are generally interested and concerned about history will have to do some extra reading.

While most historians attempt to remain unbiased, history is still a subject of some interpretation. I don’t mean that historians interpret something to have happened or not, because the evidence provides us with the answers to the questions of who, what, and where. Historians often have to answer the questions of why and how and it is absolutely impossible to prevent any biases from slipping in. Even so, historians can still come to a consensus about some interpretations simply because the subjects of history often leave the answers to all the questions.

History is going to change and that’s okay. It changes every day. As long as people exist in places and do things, more and more will be added to history, which makes it change. History also changes as new evidence is discovered, which also happens every day. Those discoveries affect not only our knowledge of history but our interpretations as well. Attitudes, ideas, and cultures change, and as long as they continue to change, interpretations of history, where there is room for interpretation, will change along with them. If history doesn’t change, there is no purpose for historians. It’s also important for non-historians to know history, though, because as George Santayana is often quoted as correctly observed, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” If remembering the past were not important, then that would be the final nail in the coffin for historians. Knowing history also means knowing that change happens not only in history but how history is done. That's what revision is and that's why revision is actually a good thing.