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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