Say 'yes' to revisionist history

Several years ago Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was preparing to meet teachers to discuss the origins of constitutional government in the United States. After reading about the American South and slavery, he noted to two historians that he read only books by well-known established scholars — but nothing by "revisionists." Such works were not worth his time, he added. History, once written, was largely factual and static; little of significance remained to be said. The Justice could hardly have been more mistaken. James Banner, Jr., cofounder of the National History Center, last year published "The Ever-Changing Past," which contends that most ("all," he said) history is revisionist history. Works that add to our knowledge of the past, or offer fresh interpretations, or employ new methods of inquiry, unavoidably revise previous historical accounts. Revisionism comes in several varieties. Transformational histories substantially alter our interpretations of the past, such as that achieved by fourth-century bishop Eusebius. His "Ecclesiastical History" provided a more stable chronology of events and developed a story line of the Roman world that utilized Christian beliefs (in quite partisan ways), rather than previous pagan ones. In short, he envisioned a conquering Christianity moving forward, justified by a divine plan for humanity. In the nineteenth century German philosopher Karl Marx famously posited: ''The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." Economics, not religion or ideology, propelled historical development. His interpretation was deterministic, though economic historians need not be deterministic or even socialist. It's sufficient for them to analyze powerful economic groups and institutions that profoundly shaped historical development, as during the Civil War, Gilded Age capitalism, and the Depression Thirties. A classic example of evidence-based revisionism developed after a Bedouin boy in 1947 threw a stone into a cave and heard the sound of breaking pottery. When retrieved, the ancient Dead Sea Scrolls enlarged our knowledge of Israel before the Common Era and sharpened our insights on its Messiah. The aforementioned Banner discusses another example of evidence-based revisionism by devoting several pages to the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, his domestic slave. For more than a century observers had known that the slave population on Jefferson's plantation was becoming steadily lighter in color, but few believed that the president himself had enjoyed a special relationship with Hemings; as late as mid-twentieth century, distinguished historians such as Merrill Peterson (a Jefferson biographer) soft-pedaled or dismissed indirect evidence. Then in 1998 came scientific validation: DNA results from a descendant of Jefferson and Hemings matched so closely that few historians any longer deny Jefferson-Hemings intimacy. That discovery dramatically shed new light on black-white relationships during our early history. Examining the causes of the Civil War provided my first introduction to historical revisionism. For a century and a half, observers and historians offered various interpretations, ranging from southern rebellious intransigence to states' rights, the power of the cotton industry, economic conflict between North and South, and a moral struggle between North and South braced by differing social systems and doctrines. By the time I took his course in graduate school, Henry Harrison Simms, a southern gentleman and historian, had published a book titled, "Emotion at High Tide: Abolition as a Controversial Factor, 1830-1845." The title suggests what he considered an indispensable ingredient in the coming of war. During the past century and a half the dispute over causes has modified, with analyses incorporating a number of factors, yet agreeing that Lincoln had been largely right: slavery "was, somehow, the cause of the war." More recently an explosion of social history during the 1960s and thereafter powerfully enlarged the scope of historical studies. In books, articles, museum exhibits, and college courses, the lives of long-ignored ordinary people, black and white, women and minorities, moved toward the center of historical examination. College faculties, once the prerogative of white males, now added to their ranks Blacks and women who brought new perspectives and analytical techniques, decidedly enriching the American story. Even though historians cannot write stories about the past as it "actually" was, they can over time provide accounts of what "essentially" happened. No longer is it possible to earn a Pulitzer Prize in history as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., did in 1945 with his "Age of Jackson," which ignored the seventh president's personal slaveholding and failed even to mention his brutal policy of Indian Removal. Contra Justice Thomas, we say "yes" to revisionist history. It widens our horizons and educates us about who we Americans are as a people, not least what we may see as our place and responsibilities in the flow of time. Lora, of Bluffton, is professor emeritus of American history at the University of Toledo and co-editor of "The Conservative Press in Twentieth-Century America."