In last week’s column I mentioned, among other things, that I thought David Barton was a practitioner of revisionist history. I wrote that “all history is revisionist” and added that “revisionism is the lifeblood of history.” Several readers thought I was wrong about this and they did not hesitate to tell me so in the comments section, on Facebook, on my blog, and via personal e-mails. It seems that the word “revisionism” continues to carry a negative connotation.
Yet, despite my detractors, I continue to believe that revisionism is absolutely essential to the study of history. In fact, there would be no history without it. In his book Who Owns History?, Columbia University history professor Eric Foner recalls a conversation with a Newsweek reporter who asked him, “When did historians stop relating facts and start all this revising of interpretations of the past?” Foner responded: “Around the time of Thucydides.” (Thucydides, who lived in the 5th century B.C. and was the author of the History of the Peloponnesian War, is considered by many to be the first “historian.”)
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