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Revisionist Histories
Revision and revisionism are generally seen as standard parts of historical practice, yet they are underexplored within the growing literature on historiography. In this accessibly written volume, Marnie Hughes-Warrington discusses this paucity of work on revision in history theory and raises ethical questions about linear models and spatial metaphors that have been used to explain it. Revisionist Histories emphasises the role of the authors and audiences of histories alike as the writers and rewriters of history. Through study of digital environments, graphic novels and reader annotated texts, this book shows that the ‘sides’ of history cannot be disentangled from one another, and that they are subject to flux and even destruction over time. Incorporating diverse and controversial case studies, including the French Revolution, Holocaust Denial and European settlers’ contact with Native Americans and Indigenous Australians, Revisionist Histories offers both a detailed account of the development of revisionism and a new, more spatial vision of historiography. An essential text for students of historiography.
160 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2013
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May 29, 2025
There is a chapter in this on marginalia, and, well, in someways this review is going to be a bit like that. Notes written on the side of the page, rather than a comprehensive review of the book itself. Or let’s get that over and done with first. This is a book about revisionist histories – and the thing is that most histories are going to be revisionist in a sense. And made more likely now that if you want to get one of the few jobs available in academic history, you probably need to make a name for yourself fast, and that’s going to involve you coming up with some revisionist version of something or other. The other week I read that some people were complaining that science has been put back by years by simplistic readings of Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In that he argues that there are two types of science – normal science and revolutionary science – science conducted during normal science is bread and butter stuff, but revolutionary science isn’t just accumulative, it involves a paradigm shift. The person was arguing that since everyone wants to be the paradigm shifter, it means more and more research is directed at bloody stupid ideas, rather than stuff that might actually expand our knowledge. Revisionist history is a bit like that too. Except, of course, that history has tended to be written by pale, stale middle-aged men with a comfortable bank account and a vested interest in maintaining the fiction that we live in a meritocracy. So, revisions aren’t outrageous.
The idea that there is a single history that can be written once and for all time misses the point of history. History is like a map. If it was comprehensive, it would be as long as the historic phase was itself. A one-to-one map wouldn’t be useful. You have to leave things out to see where you are going. And that’s the same with history – but if you leave stuff out then you are being selective and being selective is based on value judgements and value judgements are located in class and race and gender and ability and sexuality and all the isms. So, of course that means that other people are going to be able to tell another story from a different perspective – because perspectives are all that there is. I can draw you a map to get from here to there, but an uber driver will probably give you a better map that will get you there quicker and a person in a wheelchair might draw one that will take longer, but have fewer hills to go up. Now, one of the things she says, and this is where the marginalia comes in, is about Foucault saying two things. One I’ve just told you – that history is heteroglossia, it is many voiced. The other is that history has been too often thought of as temporal, whereas maybe it should be thought about spatially. We struggle not to think of history as being about time. Things happen in time and if they happened recently they are likely to have a bigger impact on you now than things that happened further back in time. But that is also spatially true too. Things that happened far away are also likely to be less important to you. But history happens in places. And this is part of Foucault’s point. If I’d been writing this book I’d have compared this relationship between history and geography to women and giving birth. History is sort of seen as masculine in our society, and it happens in that most feminine of subjects, geography. Geography is like the womb that history develops in. But because we live in a patriarchy we don’t really respect that womb all that much. We just think of it as a kind of nice, tucked away place. This is from the Ancient Greeks, in a way. They thought that when a man ejaculated a little person was in that fluid and it tucked itself away in the woman’s womb until it was ready to be born. The womb was a bit irrelevant. Like a box that kept the person safe until it was grown enough to be born. But it is nothing like that at all. We still think a bit like this today – and so we think we can bring back long extinct animals by putting them in the wombs of similar-ish animals and we’ll get the extinct animal back – because wombs are nice little boxes that you can tuck things into where they can be safe and grow. And history and geography are like that too. That geography – space – plays no other role in history than as a nice place for history to grow in. But men make history and women just provide the nice place for it to develop. The turn to space is a turn to history’s feminine side.
A couple of times in this she refers to Hegel and his views on the development of history. And it made me think of how little people understand Hegel. I’ve been making my way slowly through the Phenomenology of Spirit. I’m not going to pretend it is an easy book to read. But I’ll tell you one thing. No one who has ever read it would make the mistake she makes multiple times in this book. That is, to say that Hegel is really about ‘the Hegelian method’ which is thesis, antithesis and synthesis. That is, there’s one idea and then it ends up in conflict with another idea and they fight it out for a while and eventually they resolve their differences in a kind of unity at a higher level. This is not at all what Hegel was on about. He even criticises this simplification of his work multiple times – but the thing is, because that idea is clear and easy and obviously wrong, people use it to both say that is what Hegel was on about and to reduce him to ridicule. And she quotes others who say things like progressives and conservatives are opposites, but there is no synthesis between them. Well, there you go. The perfect refutation of Hegel. How did people ever fall for that stuff when it can be swept aside so simply. Of course, Hegel said nothing of the kind. Rather, the thesis and antithesis are not resolved in the synthesis, but the development continues to contain the contradictions between them and finds itself, at a higher level of abstraction, in an even new and deeper level of contradiction. All while retaining the previous contradictions it is composed of. The contradictions are ongoing – they don’t disappear. There are parts of this book that are very challenging – not least the bits on holocaust denial, for example – and what are we to do with that sort of nonsense? Is that ‘revisionist history’ and then, if we say yes, which I guess it is hard not to, does that mean that we have to accept the ravings of anyone who is just contrary to also be revisionist history? A million years ago I was an archivist and a guy came into the archive and told me he was researching the original white race of Australia who had been here a long time before the Aboriginals. To be honest, at first, I thought he was taking the piss. But it quickly became clear he wasn’t. He told me he was one of the immortal ones. And that most of his race had been killed upon white settlement here and their bones were now mixed with the sand at Port Melbourne or something. And he was looking for evidence in the archive of this tragic event. Fortunately, I decided it would be at least as insane for me to argue with him as it was for him to believe this crazy shit. We searched for records for a while, long enough for him to convince himself that whatever records might have existed in the past had been destroyed in the huge conspiracy that both settlers and Aboriginals had perpetuated at his people’s expense. Thank god for conspiracy theories, I guess.
I enjoyed this book, more than this review probably makes clear – but I think that is mostly because I really liked the idea of writing marginalia on the side of the page of this book – and like I said, that’s more or less what this review is.
The idea that there is a single history that can be written once and for all time misses the point of history. History is like a map. If it was comprehensive, it would be as long as the historic phase was itself. A one-to-one map wouldn’t be useful. You have to leave things out to see where you are going. And that’s the same with history – but if you leave stuff out then you are being selective and being selective is based on value judgements and value judgements are located in class and race and gender and ability and sexuality and all the isms. So, of course that means that other people are going to be able to tell another story from a different perspective – because perspectives are all that there is. I can draw you a map to get from here to there, but an uber driver will probably give you a better map that will get you there quicker and a person in a wheelchair might draw one that will take longer, but have fewer hills to go up. Now, one of the things she says, and this is where the marginalia comes in, is about Foucault saying two things. One I’ve just told you – that history is heteroglossia, it is many voiced. The other is that history has been too often thought of as temporal, whereas maybe it should be thought about spatially. We struggle not to think of history as being about time. Things happen in time and if they happened recently they are likely to have a bigger impact on you now than things that happened further back in time. But that is also spatially true too. Things that happened far away are also likely to be less important to you. But history happens in places. And this is part of Foucault’s point. If I’d been writing this book I’d have compared this relationship between history and geography to women and giving birth. History is sort of seen as masculine in our society, and it happens in that most feminine of subjects, geography. Geography is like the womb that history develops in. But because we live in a patriarchy we don’t really respect that womb all that much. We just think of it as a kind of nice, tucked away place. This is from the Ancient Greeks, in a way. They thought that when a man ejaculated a little person was in that fluid and it tucked itself away in the woman’s womb until it was ready to be born. The womb was a bit irrelevant. Like a box that kept the person safe until it was grown enough to be born. But it is nothing like that at all. We still think a bit like this today – and so we think we can bring back long extinct animals by putting them in the wombs of similar-ish animals and we’ll get the extinct animal back – because wombs are nice little boxes that you can tuck things into where they can be safe and grow. And history and geography are like that too. That geography – space – plays no other role in history than as a nice place for history to grow in. But men make history and women just provide the nice place for it to develop. The turn to space is a turn to history’s feminine side.
A couple of times in this she refers to Hegel and his views on the development of history. And it made me think of how little people understand Hegel. I’ve been making my way slowly through the Phenomenology of Spirit. I’m not going to pretend it is an easy book to read. But I’ll tell you one thing. No one who has ever read it would make the mistake she makes multiple times in this book. That is, to say that Hegel is really about ‘the Hegelian method’ which is thesis, antithesis and synthesis. That is, there’s one idea and then it ends up in conflict with another idea and they fight it out for a while and eventually they resolve their differences in a kind of unity at a higher level. This is not at all what Hegel was on about. He even criticises this simplification of his work multiple times – but the thing is, because that idea is clear and easy and obviously wrong, people use it to both say that is what Hegel was on about and to reduce him to ridicule. And she quotes others who say things like progressives and conservatives are opposites, but there is no synthesis between them. Well, there you go. The perfect refutation of Hegel. How did people ever fall for that stuff when it can be swept aside so simply. Of course, Hegel said nothing of the kind. Rather, the thesis and antithesis are not resolved in the synthesis, but the development continues to contain the contradictions between them and finds itself, at a higher level of abstraction, in an even new and deeper level of contradiction. All while retaining the previous contradictions it is composed of. The contradictions are ongoing – they don’t disappear. There are parts of this book that are very challenging – not least the bits on holocaust denial, for example – and what are we to do with that sort of nonsense? Is that ‘revisionist history’ and then, if we say yes, which I guess it is hard not to, does that mean that we have to accept the ravings of anyone who is just contrary to also be revisionist history? A million years ago I was an archivist and a guy came into the archive and told me he was researching the original white race of Australia who had been here a long time before the Aboriginals. To be honest, at first, I thought he was taking the piss. But it quickly became clear he wasn’t. He told me he was one of the immortal ones. And that most of his race had been killed upon white settlement here and their bones were now mixed with the sand at Port Melbourne or something. And he was looking for evidence in the archive of this tragic event. Fortunately, I decided it would be at least as insane for me to argue with him as it was for him to believe this crazy shit. We searched for records for a while, long enough for him to convince himself that whatever records might have existed in the past had been destroyed in the huge conspiracy that both settlers and Aboriginals had perpetuated at his people’s expense. Thank god for conspiracy theories, I guess.
I enjoyed this book, more than this review probably makes clear – but I think that is mostly because I really liked the idea of writing marginalia on the side of the page of this book – and like I said, that’s more or less what this review is.
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