CAMPUS

Revisionist History Revisited

One of the growing fads in academia, particularly in American history, is the idea of revisionist history. Revisionist history is an attempt to take an objective view of widely accepted historical norms, review the evidence upon which they are based, and draw a different conclusion. Almost every presidency of modern times has seen some sort of revisionist movement in the historical community as new documents become declassified and as new information becomes available. The problem with revisionist history is that it creates a tendency to advocate change in historical norms for the mere sake of challenging the status quo.

Revisionist history, even though it is implicitly written well after the historical events it concerns, is not necessarily better than the original consensus of historians. For example, although revisionist historians in the late 1990s challenged the impression that the Carter Administration’s foreign policy was an utter failure, much of this was based upon pre-existing evidence that was available soon after Carter left office (memoirs of his staff, press conferences, and personal statements). On the flip side of this issue, some revisionist history has corrected terrible historical inaccuracies. Although Eisenhower seemed to be a novice in foreign policy, revisionist history challenged this widely held view once documents became declassified that showed Eisenhower to have a very real presence in the making of foreign policy during his administration.

How the academic community should separate revisionist history that provides needed change to historical inaccuracies and revisionist history that simply exists for the sake of challenging the status quo is difficult to determine. Looking at the evidence revisionist history is based upon is an excellent way of determining whether or not it is work reading. If it is based upon newly found or newly presented evidence, then chances are good that it has something worth while to offer the academic community. If it is merely an attempt to rehash old evidence in order to draw different conclusions, chances are good that it is more wishful history than useful.