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A designation in American history which includes Gabriel Kolko, William Appleman Williams, Gar Alperovitz, Walter LaFeber, Howard Zinn and others. The distinction appears to have been introduced into American historiography shortly after World War I (about 1920) to categorize American historians who questioned the alleged "war guilt" to which Germany was subjected for allegedly being responsible for starting said war.
The expression revisionist also refers to American historians of the 1960's mostly, who criticized the orthodox history of the Cold War which made the West, especially the United States, substantially blameless.
With respect to reconstruction, James McPherson says, "In the 1930s a few revisionist historians began to challenge the traditional version of Reconstruction with a more balanced and less racist interpretation. But the old orthodoxy prevailed until at least the 1950s."
It is not known whether these historians themselves produced a distinct historiography. Nevertheless, at least one scholarly work portrays them as constituting a "school."
Subsequently, a group commonly known as holocaust deniers have persisted in calling themselves also revisionists, or revisionist historians, and there is, as a result, confusion.
History of the categorization
According to Deborah Lipstadt, certain American historians were concerned over the involvement of the United States in World War I. These highly regarded scholars called themselves revisionist. The distinction was effectively drawn in 1920 when Sidney B. Fay, a Smith College professor published a collection of articles on the causes of World War I in the prestigious American Historical Review journal. Nevertheless, a connection to the discredit "revisionists" exists - according to Lipstadt - in the person of Harry Elmer Barnes.
According to Jeff Riggenbach,
... three closely interrelated "revisionist" movements that emerged in American historiography during those years.
These three movements are the "New History," whose leading practitioners later came to be called "the Progressive historians";
the rebellion of the "New Left Historians" that began creating consternation within the historical profession during the 1960s and '70s;
and the closely related revisionist movement established in the 1960s by a new group of libertarian historians
— a movement which only now, nearly half a century later, is at last gaining the adherents and generating the excitement that have long eluded it.
Civil War, Peter Novick on Harry Elmer Barnes
Novick contrasts the split among historians who are lumped together as revisionists, "Moderate revisionists on World War I, like Sidney B. Fay, or on the Civil War, like Avery O. Craven, might display a relativistic sensibility; the more zealous, like Harry Elmer Barnes, were engaged in a holy crusade to replace error with truth."
Peter Novick and James G. Randall
American Civil War revisionist James G. Randall defined the process, "The scholarly revisionist overthrows only falsehood. Revisionism is not a matter of promoting a theory. It is a matter of findings."
Peter Novick on Reconstruction and the Civil War
Another example (given by Bernard Weisberger) is the revisionist historians of Reconstruction after the U.S. Civil War who rejected the dominant Dunning School that found the blacks were tools of evil Carpetbaggers, and instead stressed economic greed on the part of northern businessmen. Indeed, in recent years a "neoabolitionist" revisionism has become standard, that uses the moral standards of the 19th century abolitionists to criticize racial policies. "Foner's book represents the mature and settled Revisionist perspective," historian Michael Perman has concluded regarding Eric Foner's Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (1988)
Revisionism also occurred in the historiography of the American Civil War. Historian Peter Novick writes:
The "revisionist" school of Civil War historiography argued that inept statecraft and irresponsible extremism had produced a "needless war." Avery O. Craven asserted that the conflict was "the work of politicians and pious cranks"; for James G. Randall it was the combination of "fanaticism" and "bogus leadership" of a "blundering generation."
American Business and the "Rubber Barons"
The role of American business and the alleged "robber barons" began to be revised in the 1930s. Given the Gabriel Kolko term "business revisionism", writers and historians such as Ida Tarbell, Allan Nevins, and Louis Hacker emphasized the positive contributions of individuals who were previously pictured as villains. Novick writes, "The argument that whatever the moral delinquencies of the robber barons, these were far outweighed by their decisive contributions to American military prowess, was frequently invoked by Allan Nevins."
Post-revisionism
Subsequent to the work of the revisionists, a new historiography, a historiography of the Cold War emerged, which criticized the work of the former. These scholars became known as post-revisionists.
Bush's criticism of revision of history
In 2003 President Bush became critical of revision of history. But that discourse involves the criticism of the wars with Iraq and Afghanistan. But these are not the subjects of the earlier "revisionists" whose concerns were focused, initially, on World War I and, subsequently, the Cold War. The Holocaust deniers source of controversy involves, substantially, World War II, particularly denying the Holocaust, and even portraying Hitler in better light. These were not the subjects with which the American revisionist historians concerned themselves.
See also
- Revisionist historians (American):
- Other relevant articles:
References
- Lynn Boyd Hinds, Theodore Otto Windt Jr., The Cold War as Rhetoric: The Beginnings, 1945-1950
- Deborah Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, Plume (The Penguin Group), 1994.
- "Reconstruction Reconsidered" (book review) The Atlantic Vol. 261 (No. 4), April, 1988, pp75-77
- Lynn Boyd Hinds, Theodore Otto Windt Jr., The Cold War as Rhetoric: The Beginnings, 1945-1950
- Deborah Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, Plume (The Penguin Group), 1994.
- Novick p. 276
- Novick p. 276
- Bernard Weisberger, "The Dark and Bloody Ground of Reconstruction Historiography," The Journal of Southern History, Vol. 25, No. 4 (Nov., 1959), pp. 427-447 in JSTOR
- Michael Perman, "Review: Eric Foner's Reconstruction: A Finished Revolution," Reviews in American History, Vol. 17, No. 1 (Mar., 1989), pp. 73-78 in JSTOR
- Novick p. 237
- Kolko, Gabriel. "The Premises of Business Revisionism" in The Business History Review, Vol. 33, No. 3 (Autumn, 1959), p. 334
- Novick p. 342. Novick describes Nevins as "the best known voice of what came to be called "business history revisionism." (p. 343)
- Deborah Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, (Plume, The Penguin Group, 1994)
Sources
- Deborah Lipstadt. Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory. (Plume, The Penguin Group, 1994)
- Lynn Boyd Hinds, Theodore Otto Windt Jr. The Cold War as Rhetoric: The Beginnings, 1945-1950
- Adrianus Arnoldus, Maria van der Linden. A revolt against liberalism: American radical historians, 1959-1976
- Peter Novick. That Noble Dream: The Objectivity Question and the American Historical profession. (1988)
American (historical) revisionist works
- The Cold War and Its Origins, 2 vols.
- (New York: Doubleday, 1961)
- The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, 2d ed., rev. and enlarged
- (New York: Delta, 1962)
- The Free World Colossus: A Critique of American Foreign Policy in the Cold War (New York: Hill and Wang, 1965)
- David Horowitz, ed.
- Corporations and the Cold War
- (New York: Modern Reader, 1969)
- Revisionist Viewpoints: Essays in a Dissident Historical Tradition
- (Ralph Myles, Colorado Springs, CO, 1971)
- The Politics of War: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1943-1945
- (New York: Random House, 1968)
- Joyce and Gabriel Kolko
- The Limits of Power, 1945-1954
- (New York: Harper and Row, 1972)
External links
- Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist:
- From the President's column column of the September 2003 Perspectives, Revisionist Historians By James McPherson
- Reconstruction Reconsidered (book review), by James McPherson, The Atlantic, Vol. 261 (No. 4), April, 1988, pp75-77:
- Introducing Revisionism by James J. Martin:
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