Kevin:
Thank you very much for your most thoughtful response. Well said,
and very helpful to me. It really sums it all up. I suppose I get
confused when people start throwing out terms "revisionist" as either
an insult or an accolade. I guess it all depends on who is
*revising" what. I guess my first encounter with the term was with
the holocaust deniers, particularly starting with David Hoggan who
ruined his career when he published "The Forced War: When Diplomacy
Failed" in the early 1960s, in which he placed a good deal of blame
for WWII on Poland's foreign policy and Britain's determination to
give Hitler just enough rope to hang him with when they caught up
with armaments production.
I don't know that Hoggan was himself of holocaust-denier, but he gave
rise to that whole train of thought. (This is not a topic I am
greatly versed in. I don't know that Hoggan was any sort of Hitler
apologist. Maybe he was. Goes straight back to your point, of
course--it all does evolve around one's political slant.)
I have spent most of my professional life in real estate and
politics. I thought THOSE were vicious occupations. History takes
the cake in that regard.
I love your definition and explanation. Again, thanks.
Craig Kilby
On Sep 30, 2008, at 5:58 PM, [log in to unmask] wrote:
> Herb--
>
> *All* history is revisionist.
>
> Every attempt to create knowledge about the past starts with two
> things: a question, and a body of sources that allows the
> historian to frame a tentative answer.
>
> New sources are found all the time. But on the whole, it is not
> the development of new sources that ensures that history is
> revisionist. Rather, it is the development of new questions.
>
> The questions that historians ask are deeply informed by their
> understanding of the present. Thus, for example, it would not
> strike me as at all surprising if in the next few years we see a
> spate of dissertations on terrorism, across all reaches of
> history. Indeed, to some extent this has already happened--look,
> for example, at the recent studies of terrorist violence during
> Reconstruction.
>
> As historians shape their questions in response to the main
> concerns of their lives in the present, they ask new and different
> kinds of questions. This *is* revisionism. In the process of
> asking new questions, we modify our understanding of the old answers.
>
> Put another way, history as always a dialogue between the present
> and the past. As the present changes, so too does our
> understanding of the past.
>
> Whether this is good or bad is moot. It is inevitable.
>
> All best,
> Kevin
> Kevin R. Hardwick, Ph.D.
> Department of History
> James Madison University
>
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