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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