Quotes About Revisionism

Most academic historians accept that historians' own circumstances demand that they tell the story in a particular way, of course. While people wring their hands about 'revisionist' historians; on some level, the correction and amplification of various parts of the past is not 'revisionism' as it is simply the process of any historical writing.

With many important exceptions, the tone of much American historical writing turned deeply negative during the early twenty-first century. It remained so as these words were written, in 2021.

Communists liked history very much. It just had to be the right history. They liked to remember it selectively.

FALLACY I—The first fallacy of Communism is its attempt to over-simplify history.

Gypsy [Rose Lee ] was a masterful storyteller, and her memoir and by extension, the musical weren't only Gypsy's monument; they were also her chance for monumental revisionism.

History is always written by the winners. When two cultures clash, the loser is obliterated, and the winner writes the history books-books which glorify their own cause and disparage the conquered foe. As Napoleon once said, 'What is history, but a fable agreed upon?

History is politics projected into the past.

Any kind of history you read is basically the winning side telling you the others were bad.

Another hundred years were ground up and churned, and what had happened was all muddied by the way folks wanted it to be -- more rich and meaningful the farther back it was.

If any era should be aware of the temptations to rewrite history, it is our own.

Two-thirds of a century after [The Road to Serfdom] got written, hindsight confirms how inaccurate its innuendo about the future turned out to be.

Some say history is made by the winners. Sometimes, it's rewritten by an author.

they play fast and loose with both historical fact and traditional religious interpretation in order to understand their past as they believe it must be understood

Giving them 'junk food for thought,' and rewriting history and law.

Historical mythmaking is made possible only by forgetting.

The compression of history, the winnowing of history, may seem natural and neutral, but it is decidedly not. It is the means by which grade schools history becomes our standard adult history.

History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.

There are still some people who think that we have Stalin to thank for all our progress, who quake before Stalin's dirty underdrawers, who stand at attention and salute them.

Some people want the past repeated and have an interest in making sure we don't remember it.

Trotski describió en una ocasión a los perdedores como los consignados «al cubo de la basura de la historia» y no es un dato desdeñable que las ediciones sucesivas de la Bolshaya sovietskaya entsiklopediya (Gran Enciclopedia soviética) omitiera a personas, ideas y cosas que el Partido Comunista consideraba políticamente incorrectas, especialmente Trotski después de su ruptura con Stalin.