“Rewriting History” Is Not Inherently a Bad Thing

There seems to be something of a trend going on right now in politics where people have developed a habit of accusing their opponents of wanting to “rewrite history.” I’ve mostly seen conservatives accusing progressives of this, but I’ve also seen a few cases of progressives accusing conservatives of it without further clarification. In all cases, people who accuse other people of wanting to “rewrite history” portray this as something unambiguously bad.

The problem is that “rewriting history” is not inherently a bad thing. In fact, “rewriting history” is literally a historian’s job description. It is inevitable that each generation will rewrite history and there is really nothing anyone can do to stop it. It is, however, extremely important that the people who rewrite history do so honestly, using correct evidence and correct methods of interpretation. When we talk about “rewriting history,” what matters is not whether people are doing it, but how they are doing it.

What historians do

Unfortunately, when most people think about “history,” they assume that it is simply all about memorizing “facts” from a history textbook. This assumption, however, is deeply inaccurate and naïve. A history textbook is not an infallible authority on everything that happened in the past, but rather, ideally, a summary of the current consensus among historians about what happened, based on primary evidence that was produced at the time of the events or relatively soon afterwards and that has survived in some form to the present day.

Contrary to popular belief, professional historians generally spend very little time memorizing names and dates. Obviously, there is some extremely basic information involving names and dates that any professional historian who studies a specific period needs to know. For instance, a professional historian who studies the history of classical Greece needs to know that an alliance of Greek city-states defeated the naval forces of the Achaemenid Empire under Xerxes I in the Battle of Salamis in September 480 BCE. Similarly, a historian who studies the history of the Byzantine Roman Empire needs to know that the empire came to an end when the forces of the Ottoman Empire under the leadership of the twenty-one-year-old Sultan Mehmed II captured the city of Constantinople on 29 May 1453.

These names and dates, however, are merely background information; they are not what historians actually study. Fundamentally speaking, the study of history is not the study of names and dates, but rather the study of primary sources. Historians spend the vast majority of their time finding and analyzing primary sources that reveal information about the past.

ABOVE: Painting by the Greek painter Theofilos Chatzimichail of the final battle for the city of Constantinople on 29 May 1453

A primary source is, under a broad definition, any kind of source that was produced in the time period that a historian is studying that has survived to the present day in some form or another. This includes written sources of all kinds, including historical accounts written by authors who were alive at the time or had access to sources written by people at the time that have since been lost, works of drama and poetry, letters, inscriptions, travel guides, maps, paintings, and drawings.

This also, however, includes all kinds of other, non-written sources, including the physical remains of buildings and other structures, coins, seals, pottery fragments, human and animal remains, and sculptures. For more recent history, primary sources may also include photographs, oral traditions, video and audio recordings, and even, for very recent history, eyewitness testimony.

Historians who study relatively recent history have an extraordinary wealth of primary sources available to them thanks to the existence of vast historical archives filled with primary documents. Historians who study ancient history, on the other hand, are at a much greater disadvantage in this regard, since, unfortunately, so little evidence has survived from the ancient world in comparison to what modern historians have to work with.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the Charles Sturt University Regional Archives, an example of a historical archive

Changing perspectives

The historical consensus is not static. Over time, as society changes and new people enter the historical discipline, new perspectives inevitably arise. Historians begin to interpret old evidence in new ways, applying new methods and paying attention to details that previous historians may have overlooked or ignored.

There are many examples of this in United States history. A hundred years ago, nearly all the historians studying United States history at the academic level were white men from elite, English-speaking, Protestant families who had ancestors who had lived in North America since the colonial era. Many of these historians also held deeply racist, sexist, and xenophobic views.

For instance, at the beginning of the twentieth century, Woodrow Wilson, who later went on to become the twenty-eighth president of the United States, was one of the most respected academic historians in the entire country. He wrote a monumental history of the United States titled The History of the American People, which was published in five volumes between 1901 and 1902.

Partly as a result of his status as a white man from an elite family in Virginia, he was also an avowed white supremacist and a hardened supporter of both Segregation and Jim Crow laws. He did not regard Black people as fully human and this greatly influences how he writes about their role in United States history.

In his work, Wilson aggressively promotes the racist pseudohistory of the “Lost Cause.” He portrays slavery in Antebellum South as a more-or-less benign institution, the Confederacy as fighting for a just cause, and Reconstruction as a time when white Southerners supposedly lived in terror and oppression under the tyrannical rule of newly emancipated Black people, “scalawags” (i.e., white Southerners who supported Reconstruction), and “carpetbaggers” (i.e., opportunistic Northerners who came to the South to exploit the defeated Southerners).

Most nauseating of all, although Wilson does admit that the Ku Klux Klan committed heinous acts of violent terrorism, he nonetheless attempts to portray it as an organization that originally arose with good intentions in response to white Southerners being genuinely oppressed.

ABOVE: Photograph taken in 1911, showing Woodrow Wilson sitting at his desk while he was the governor of New Jersey

Over the past century, however, more women, Black people, Native American people, Asian American people, Latin American people, and people from lower-class, non-English-speaking, non-Protestant, and immigrant backgrounds have entered the field of academic history. Although white men from elite backgrounds still make up a disproportionately large part of the discipline overall, a greater percentage of these men nowadays are at least willing to listen to what other people from other backgrounds have to say.

As a result, historians have gradually discarded many of the white supremacist narratives that their predecessors have told about United States history. Most professional historians today rightly recognize the notion of the “Lost Cause” that early twentieth-century Southern white male historians like Wilson so vehemently supported as nothing but white supremacist pseudohistory.

Instead, most contemporary historians recognize that slavery in the Antebellum South was generally horrific, brutal, and dehumanizing, that the Confederate states seceded because they wanted to preserve slavery, that white Southerners were not genuinely “oppressed” during Reconstruction to the degree which historians like Wilson claimed, and that the Ku Klux Klan was a violent terrorist organization from the very beginning.

ABOVE: Photograph taken on 2 April 1863 depicting a formerly enslaved Black man from Mississippi named Gordon, with scars all over his back from the many times his overseer whipped him while he was enslaved

Changing evidence

Perspectives are not the only things that change. Sometimes the evidence itself can change. Historians are constantly searching for previously unknown evidence that can reveal new information about the past. In many cases, uncovering new evidence can lead historians to abandon old narratives and support new ones.

An example of this is Thomas Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemings, a young Black woman whom he enslaved. As I discuss in this article I wrote in September 2020, as early as 1802, there were widespread rumors accusing Jefferson of having had sexual relations with Hemings. Jefferson himself never confirmed or denied these rumors.

After his death, Jefferson’s acknowledged family insisted that the rumors were false and that Jefferson never had sex with Hemings, but the descendants of Sally Hemings insisted with equal vehemence that they were indeed Jefferson’s offspring. Although some historians accepted that Jefferson did have sexual relations with Hemings, for nearly two hundred years, many historians insisted that the rumors were simply made up by his political enemies in order to vilify him for their own political gain.

Then, in 1998, a DNA study published in the scientific journal Nature confirmed that Eston Hemings—Sally Hemings’s youngest son, who vehemently maintained throughout his life that Thomas Jefferson was his father—was indeed a member of the Jefferson patrilineal line. In January 2000, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation published a report which concluded that Jefferson did indeed have sex with Sally Hemings and that he was most likely the father of all six of her known children. The conclusions of this report are now generally accepted by historians.

ABOVE: A lewd political cartoon from c. 1804, mocking Thomas Jefferson’s affair with Sally Hemings, a young Black woman whom he enslaved

Major, relatively recent discoveries from the ancient world

Even when it comes to very ancient history, new discoveries are still reshaping how historians interpret the past. For instance, Sappho (lived c. 630 – c. 570 BCE) was an ancient Greek lyric poet who lived on the island of Lesbos. In antiquity, she was widely revered as one of the greatest of all lyric poets. In around the third or second century BCE, scholars working at the Library of Alexandria in Egypt compiled a critical edition of her poems that was divided into at least eight scrolls.

As I discuss in this article I wrote back in December 2019, Sappho’s work has fared much better than the work of the vast majority of other archaic Greek lyric poets, since we actually have around a dozen poems by her that have survived in substantial portions; whereas, for the vast majority of other archaic Greek lyric poets, all we have is maybe a name and a couple of lines at the very most. This does not, however, ameliorate the fact that nearly everything Sappho wrote has been lost.

Fortunately, however, new fragments of previously lost poems by Sappho keep turning up. In 2004, the scholars Martin Gronewald and Robert Daniel identified Papyrus Köln XI 429, a papyrus discovered in Egypt dating to around the third century BCE, which is currently held in the Cologne Papyrus Collection, as containing the remaining portion of the “Tithonos Poem,” a poem by Sappho about old age that had previously only been known in fragments from a papyrus that had been identified back in 1922.

A decade later, in 2014, the scholars Dirk Obbink, Simon Burris, and Jeffrey Fish published five papyrus fragments containing substantial portions of multiple poems by Sappho, including one fragment containing the majority of a poem previously only known from a small fragment published in 1951 by Edgar Lobel. Scholars have dubbed this poem the “Brothers Poem,” because it is the only surviving poem of Sappho in which she mentions her brothers, Charaxos and Larichos, by name.

As Theo Nash discusses in this article on his blog from May 2020, there are serious problems with the provenance of the papyrus containing the “Brothers Poem.” The papyrus and the poem it contains are most likely authentically ancient, but it is extremely likely that the papyrus was illegally looted from a site somewhere in Egypt, that it was traded on the illegal antiquities market, and that publishing it violated academic rules of ethics. All the same, since the papyrus has already been published, it is now impossible to unpublish it.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of Papyrus Köln XI 429, which was published in 2004 and completed the text of the “Tithonos Poem” by Sappho

Another example of how new discoveries are changing our understanding of the ancient past comes from China. Liú Hè (lived c. 92 – 59 BCE), commonly known as the “Marquis of Hǎihūn” or “Hǎihūnhóu,” was the grandson of Emperor Wǔ of the Han Dynasty. The minister Huò Guāng elevated him to the position of emperor in around July 74 BCE, believing that he would be able to control him and use him as a puppet.

Liú Hè, however, proved impossible to control. He refused to abide by the traditional period of mourning for his predecessor and instead spent all his time feasting, having sex, and partying lavishly. After Liú Hè had only been emperor for twenty-seven days, Huò Guāng deposed him and stripped him of all titles. He eventually installed Liú Bìngyǐ, who adopted the name Emperor Xuān, as the new emperor.

In 63 BCE, Emperor Xuān granted Liú Hè the title of “Marquis of Hǎihūn.” Upon his death in 59 BCE, Liú Hè was buried in a tomb in what is now Jiangxi Province. This tomb was discovered in 2011 and is still being excavated. The tomb was relatively unlooted and archaeologists have found vast riches contained within, rivalling the riches of Tutankhamun (which I wrote about in this article from November 2019). Perhaps the most exciting discovery within the tomb was a set of bamboo slips that are now believed to be a handwritten manuscript copy of the “Qi version” of the Analects of Confucius, which had previously been thought lost.

These are just a few examples of how new discoveries continue to increase historians’ understanding of the ancient world.

ABOVE: Photograph from this article from China Daily depicting the bamboo slips believed to contain the previously lost Qi version of the Analects of Confucius

Two different kinds of “rewriting history”

This does not, however, mean that anyone who says anything about history that goes against what it said in your high school history textbook is necessarily correct. When revising historical narratives, it is absolutely paramount that people follow proper historical methods and treat the evidence honestly. Unfortunately, many of the people who have published books on historical subjects trying to revise the historical narrative are misinformed, draw inaccurate conclusions based on poor evidence, or are flat-out dishonest.

After I signed up to be a history major at Indiana University Bloomington, I was required to take a class called “What Is History?” One of the books we were required to read in that class was the book Lying about Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial, written by the British historian Richard J. Evans, who was the Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge from 2008 until 2014.

In the book, Evans describes how he was called as an expert witness in the court case Irving v. Penguin Books and Deborah Lipstadt. In this case, the British Holocaust denier and Nazi sympathizer David Irving attempted to sue the American historian Deborah Lipstadt for libel because she had written in her 1993 book Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory that Irving was a Holocaust denier and that he had greatly distorted evidence to support his claims.

ABOVE: Photograph of the writer and Holocaust denier David Irving (left) and the historian Richard J. Evans (right)

In the United Kingdom, in cases of libel, the defendant is assumed guilty until proven innocent, meaning the defense team needed to prove to the judge that Lipstadt’s statements about Irving in her book were “substantially true” and therefore not libelous. Evans goes on to describe in great detail how he and fellow members of the defense team managed to do this.

Evans analyzes in depth how Irving persistently and deliberately misrepresented evidence to support his claims. For instance, in Chapter Five, “The Bombing of Dresden” (pages 149–184), Evans describes how Irving deliberately and persistently exaggerated the death toll of the Allied bombing of the German city of Dresden in February 1945 without any solid evidence.

Mainstream historians conclude that the Allied bombing of Dresden killed somewhere between 22,700 and 25,000 people. Irving, however, repeatedly tried to claim that the bombing actually killed somewhere between 100,000 and 250,000 people, citing a forged document which claimed to be Tagesbefehl 47 (also known as Daily Order 47 or TB 47) as almost his only piece of evidence, ignoring obvious signs that the document was a forgery.

After the document was finally proven to be a forgery beyond a reasonable doubt, Irving admitted that it was indeed a forgery, but he continued to claim that the bombing of Dresden killed unrealistically high numbers of people.

ABOVE: Photograph taken shortly after the bombing of Dresden by the Allies in February 1945 from the city Rathaus, showing the devastation, which all historians agree was genuinely terrible

David Barton’s pseudohistory

Ironically, the people whom I have most often heard accusing their opponents of wanting to “rewrite history” are American conservatives—who, of all people, also happen to be the ones who are most likely to believe the claims of some of the most influential authors who are genuinely using dishonest tactics to distort and misrepresent history. A prime example of this is the far-right, Evangelical Protestant author and “Christian nationalist” David Barton.

Mainstream historians have almost universally agreed for the past two hundred years that the Founding Fathers of the United States were fairly diverse in their personal political and religious views. Although they disagreed on many things, however, most of them agreed that church and state generally needed to be kept separate for the good of the nation. They did not all express their views in precisely those words, but most of them shared the general sentiment.

Barton, by sharp contrast, has been claiming for at least the past thirty years that the Founding Fathers were all devout Evangelical Protestants who explicitly intended the United States to be a “Christian nation” and who explicitly wanted the government to be guided by specific “Christian principles” that are supposedly outlined in the Bible.

ABOVE: Photograph of the “Christian nationalist” David Barton

Barton’s claims reach the apogee of absurdity when it comes to Thomas Jefferson in particular. Mainstream historians agree, based on Jefferson’s own writings, that he had secular rationalist sympathies, that he questioned most of the basic theological tenets of mainstream Christianity, and that he believed church and state needed to be kept separate. Jefferson actually coined the exact phrase “separation between church and state” in a famous letter he wrote to the Danbury Baptist Association in Connecticut on 1 January 1802, in which he writes:

“Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church & State. Adhering to this expression of the supreme will of the nation in behalf of the rights of conscience, I shall see with sincere satisfaction the progress of those sentiments which tend to restore to man all his natural rights, convinced he has no natural right in opposition to his social duties.”

Jefferson’s personal religious skepticism is also extremely well documented. Although Jefferson was certainly not an atheist in the modern sense, he was not an orthodox Christian by any means either.

Notably, in 1820, he created his own version of the gospel, in which he omitted all the parts that he thought were unbelievable and only included the parts he thought were historically true. The resulting work, titled The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth: Extracted Textually from the Gospels in Greek, Latin, French, and English, included only Jesus’s moral teachings and a rough outline of his life. It did not include any miracle stories.

ABOVE: Photograph of the handwritten title page of Thomas Jefferson’s original copy of his book The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth: Extracted Textually from the Gospels in Greek, Latin, French, and English

David Barton, however, has repeatedly tried to claim that Jefferson was actually a deeply devout, theologically orthodox Protestant Christian who believed that the government must always be based on Christian teachings. On 10 April 2012, the Christian books publisher Thomas Nelson published Barton’s book The Jefferson Lies: Exposing the Myths You’ve Always Believed About Thomas Jefferson, in which Barton attempts to argue precisely this point, relying entirely on misrepresentations, glaring omissions, and out-of-context quotations.

Barton’s book about Jefferson immediately received intense criticism from historical experts of all political inclinations. Users of the History News Network (HNN) website voted it “the least credible history book in print” and even conservative Christian historians lambasted it as completely untrustworthy.

In August 2012, after the book had been in print for only a few months, the publisher, Thomas Nelson, withdrew the book from publication, releasing a statement in which they declared:

“[We were] contacted by a number of people expressing concerns about The Jefferson Lies. We took all of those concerns seriously, tried to sort out matters of opinion or interpretation, and in the course of our review learned that there were some historical details included in the book that were not adequately supported.”

Unfortunately, although Thomas Nelson dropped the book from production, the right-wing political commentator, radio host, and conspiracy theorist Glenn Beck announced that his own media company Mercury Radio Arts would be publishing the book from then on under its publishing imprint Mercury Ink.

ABOVE: Front cover of the book The Jefferson Lies: Exposing the Myths You’ve Always Believed About Thomas Jefferson, a work of blatant pseudohistory written by David Barton

The 1776 Report

Another example of right-wingers falling for dishonest revisionist pseudohistory is the 1776 Commission, a presidential advisory commission composed entirely of right-wing pundits with no formal background or expertise in United States history that was created by President Donald Trump on 17 September 2020 with the explicit purpose to promote “patriotic education.” As I discuss in this article I wrote right after the commission was announced, it was a complete sham from the very beginning with no purpose other than to lend legitimacy to blatant nationalist propaganda.

On 18 January 2021, the Trump administration published a pseudohistorical tract written by members of the 1776 Commission, titled The 1776 Report. Rather predictably, this tract contains absolutely no citations or references to any primary sources or any works of secondary scholarship whatsoever.

The only evidence the report uses at all are quotations that it attributes to famous historical figures, without giving any information whatsoever about when, where, why, to whom, or in what context the historical figure in question supposedly said these things. Even worse, the report never at any point cites even a single source to support that the historical figure in question said the things it claims they said in the first place! Finally, if you do the leg work yourself and actually track down the sources that the report itself does not cite, you’ll find that the quotations are almost invariably taken out of context in misrepresentative ways.

For instance, as I discuss in my article I wrote about the report right after it came out, the report at one point gives a quotation from near the beginning of Frederick Douglass’s speech “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” where Douglass speaks approvingly of the ideals outlined in the Declaration of Independence. They omit all mention of the fact that, later in the exact same speech, Douglass goes on to argue that the Founding Fathers never truly believed that those ideals applied to all people and that the United States has consistently failed to live up to any of its promises to Black Americans.

Unfortunately, The 1776 Report serves its true purpose, which is to give the official stamp of government approval to nationalist propaganda.

ABOVE: Image of The 1776 Report, a wildly inaccurate, pseudohistorical tract published by the Trump administration in January 2021

Conclusion

It is an inescapable fact that every generation will inevitably reinterpret the past in light of present circumstances. This cannot be avoided. Even if we all intentionally try our hardest not to reinterpret the past, we will find ourselves doing it by accident. We therefore should not be concerned over the mere fact that some people are “rewriting history.” Instead, we should be concerned over how they are trying to “rewrite history,” whether they are using evidence honestly, and whether they are using appropriate methods.

If someone is rewriting history to incorporate perspectives from previously marginalized groups or to incorporate new evidence that has only recently come to light, that’s probably a good thing. If, on the other hand, someone is rewriting history using misrepresented or fabricated evidence to deny something that definitely happened or to portray a nation’s history in a misleadingly positive light, that’s a very bad thing.