JUST WHEN YOU thought it was safe to study American history again ... the revisionists are back!
You know, those relativists who distort or simply fabricate the past to make it fit their present-day biases. For instance, shortly after the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, President Bush attacked "revisionist historians" who questioned his justifications for using force against Saddam Hussein. He did it again on Veterans Day in 2005. "It is deeply irresponsible," he declared, "to rewrite the history of how the war began."
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Tuesday June 13, 2006 Home Edition California Part B Page 13 Editorial Pages Desk 1 inches; 38 words Type of Material: Correction
History: A June 7 article about interpreting history said Florida passed a law banning the teaching of "revisionist" and "postmodernist" history in public schools. Those words appeared in a draft of the bill, not in the final version.
And just last week, in an unprecedented move, the president's brother approved a law barring revisionist history in Florida public schools. "The history of the United States shall be taught as genuine history and shall not follow the revisionist or postmodernist viewpoints of relative truth," declares Florida's Education Omnibus Bill, signed by Gov. Jeb Bush. "American history shall be viewed as factual, not as constructed."
Ironically, the Florida law is itself revisionist history. Once upon a time, it theorizes, history -- especially about the founding of the country -- was based on facts. But sometime during the 1960s, all that changed. American historians supposedly started embracing newfangled theories of moral relativism and French postmodernism, abandoning their traditional quest for facts, truth and certainty.
The result was a flurry of new interpretations, casting doubt on the entire past as we had previously understood it. Because one theory was as good as another, then nothing could be true or false. God, nation, family and school: It was all up for grabs.
There's just one problem with this history-of-our-history: It's wrong.
Hardly a brainchild of the flower-power '60s, the concept of historical interpretation has been at the heart of our profession from the 1920s onward. Before that time, to be sure, some historians believed that they could render a purely factual and objective account of the past. But most of them had given up on what historian Charles Beard called the "noble dream" by the interwar period, when scholars came to realize that the very selection of facts was an act of interpretation.
That's why Cornell's Carl Becker chose the title "Everyman His Own Historian" for his 1931 address to the American Historical Assn., probably the most famous short piece of writing in our profession. In it, Becker explained why "Everyman" -- that is, the average layperson -- inevitably interpreted the facts of his or her own life, remembering certain elements and forgetting (or distorting) others.
