Left Wing Historical Revisionism

That's why i don't ignore jerks like Tribesman.

Yet when your bunkervision clicks in you are just as ranting as the OP is, just as devoid of sources, and just as focused on mythical conspiracies.
In fact your blind "patriotism" on histrory and current events is pretty much the same as that of the OP.

[tater]

If social science is a science (I don't consider it one, myself (nor does anyone I know in hard science)), it's only barely there (it's about like the science of proving witchcraft scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail).

History is not at all a science. Not even a little. You need to be able to understand (and model) the mechanisms for it to be a science.

In geology, for example, you might observe that distance between places have changed, or maybe that Africa and South America look like they fit together. That is "history." Coming up with plate tectonics? That's science.

I love history, but it isn't science---that doesn't mean you don't sometimes use the scientific method, everyone uses that almost every day. Historians or archeologists just use it a little more rigorously.

[MH]

Originally Posted by Tribesman

Yet when your bunkervision clicks in you are just as ranting as the OP is, just as devoid of sources, and just as focused on mythical conspiracies.
In fact your blind "patriotism" on histrory and current events is pretty much the same as that of the OP.

Yes MH, that picture contains better information than your usual rubbish, its even got a source

[MH]

Originally Posted by Tribesman

Yes MH, that picture contains better information than your usual rubbish, its even got a source

Follow The Source then....

Follow The Source then....

But thats the media which is all part of an intellectual conspiracy because cats hate jews

[MH]

Originally Posted by Tribesman

But thats the media which is all part of an intellectual conspiracy because cats hate jews

What?
You have some sort of fixation about Jews?

Now...lets continue talking about history and would you please stop your animal farm piggish behavior toward people that express their personal views.
However they may seem contrary to your piggish norms.

[Bilge_Rat]

Originally Posted by Randomizer

"Revisionist History" is not necessarily a bad thing as new evidence emerges due to the declassification of documents, accessing previously unused sources or for any number of reasons.

All history is subjective and bias inevitable. Dig deep and most historical accounts of anything are riddled with mythology, propaganda and the apocryphal accepted as "Truth" or "Fact". Few historians have matched Thucydides for objectivity.

Here at SubSim some of the most respected historical works that are constantly referenced by respected Members of the Forum are in many respects "revisionist" in how their interpretation of event differ from the conventional account.

Shattered Sword rewrites the Battle of Midway in a manner that answered many of those nasty little logical contradictions in the mainstream narratives.

Hitler's U-Boat War changed the narrative of the Battle of the Atlantic by concentrating on the convoys that got through instead of the traditional merchant ship body-count and feasting on the Allied disasters that featured in most popular works.

Currently great work is being done on the history of World War 1 as German records believed lost in Allied bombing raids or carted off into captivity in 1945 are discovered in archives where they have laid for decades. More English language historians are using French, Belgian, Austrian and Russian documents previously ignored or unavailable and these are challenging the orthodoxy of the common accounts of the war and backing up the new narrative with some impressive evidence.

There are certainly some schools of thought that intentionally project their political or social agendas into history. Rather than raving about them, one should identify their bias, deconstruct their arguments and offer up evidence that suits your agenda. Because you know you have one: we all do somewhere.

It's a great time to have an interest in history if one can keep an open and skeptical mind.

agreed about Shattered sword and Hitler's U-Boat war, but that is a different type of revisionism where an author looks at a story from a different point of view, goes back to primary sources and can argue a different interpretation based on a solid set of facts. I have no problem with that since these are the types of works which keeps history alive.

other examples are the works of David Glantz on the eastern front and Terry Copp's two books "Fields of Fire" and "Cinderella Army" which re-examined the performance of the Canadian Army in NWE 44-45.

[flatsixes]

All history is revisionist to some extent. The historical "truth" of any great event lies hidden away for decades (or buried for eternity), and anecdotal recollections are self centered or (as often as not) self-serving. Over time dogged research can uncover many lost fragments of the story which can be pieced together to provide us with a clearer picture of events.

But scholarship isn't simply providing the reader an after-action report; it's interpreting a picture of the past for the present, in the present. That's is a hell of a lot easier to say than it is to do, or at least to do without bias because, after all, the present has the benefit of knowing how the past turns out. But because we can never get an absolute fix on historical "truth" we speculate about the missing pieces. Why did the Japanese bother attacking Pearl Harbor when they could have just swept down the coast and snapped up British and Dutch colonial possessions? Why did 2/3 of the IJA remain garrisoned in China and Manchuria even as the Empire's eastern defensive perimeter collapsed? As a parlor game, this can be great fun (see, e.g., The History Channel), but as history it's unfair. The players made their decisions based upon the facts as they understood them at the time. We have the luxury of pronouncing which decisions were "brilliant" and which "mistakes." How noble we are.

Anyway, I recall in introducing his history of the closing days of the Pacific War ("Retribution") Max Hastings wrote about how that war was an event so large, so widespread, so violent, and touching so many peoples and cultures, that any "history" of it would necessarily be too curtailed or too overwhelming. Instead, he said he wanted to write about (paraphrasing) "what was done and why, how it was done, who did it, and how doing it felt to those who did it."

That's a pretty good description of historical writing, and a laudable goal for historians.

[August]

Originally Posted by Hottentot

History, as in the research of the past, is an academic discipline taught in (Western) universities since the 19th century. It has formed its methods of systematically gaining knowledge of the unknown. It is as dedicated to this goal as any science should be. It changes when new discoveries are made and discussion is based on new interpretations of old theories. It aspires for knowledge of the past, while it may not ever be completely possible.

How is that not scientific?

Sorry, I replied before you edited. You are right, there is a clear difference between social sciences and natural sciences. It is much more easy (at least according to my layman knowledge of natural sciences) to prove that 1 + 1 is 2, than to prove what Julius Caesar thought when the invaded Britain. History can also use more definitive methods such as statistics, but it's still often based on the best material we can work with and in the end is always subject to interpretation because we can't ask Caesar directly.

I would consider history a science more because of the things I wrote in the first paragraph. Especially if you compare what "history" and writing it were before evolving into a more scientific direction.

I'd say the main difference between history and sociology and the natural sciences is repeatability. One of the forum academics can probably explain this better but as I understand it is in order to validate a theory you see if you can repeat the result in a controlled situation.

Now you can perhaps repeat some parts of a historical event to see if something was even possible, Thor Heyerdahl's Kon-Tiki expedition for example but that doesn't prove whether ancient South Americans peopled Polynesia.

[CCIP]

Originally Posted by August

Now you can perhaps repeat some parts of a historical event to see if something was even possible, Thor Heyerdahl's Kon-Tiki expedition for example but that doesn't prove whether ancient South Americans peopled Polynesia.

Ah, but here you're mistaking repeatability and proof - and therein lies the issue. In this sense natural sciences aren't THAT different - they also build theories based on the best recurring evidence, but repeatability can never be 'proof' unless you have a very narrow positivist mindset. Rather, it can be used to build theories - more or less credible based on accepted methods and observations - but you have to be careful about viewing them as absolute. They are not. Recent advances in theoretical physics alone should be enough of a reminder as to why even the best theories are just that - theories.

So, in that sense, history does much the same, and theorizes based on observed patterns - just that it usually can't be done through experimental methods. However experimental methods are not inherently more 'scientific' and in themselves present a whole slew of methodological issues. Historiography is no less methodical, in that sense, than any other science's approach to gnosiology and epistemology. The emerging methods may be different, but in the end - any science produces theory, not absolute truth.

[MH]

Originally Posted by August

Now you can perhaps repeat some parts of a historical event to see if something was even possible, Thor Heyerdahl's Kon-Tiki expedition for example but that doesn't prove whether ancient South Americans peopled Polynesia.

Assuming that most logically or simplest explanation for Polynesia to be populated is that somehow S.American got there by sea, the experiment enforces the claim as technically possible.
Question is what other viable options are there?

[tater]

Any use of theory with "just" is usually a misuse of the scientific term. "Just a theory" is what we see when religious people talk about theories. (I know you aren't doing this, but it's a pet peeve)

A theory is a model that explains known observations, and can predict new observations.

History has no real "model" (I won't hold my breath for Asimovian psychohistory), and cannot really make decent predictions.

Theoretical physics is absolutely predictive. Particle accelerators looking for predicted particles, or watching eclipses to check on general relativity. When first proposed, they are hypotheses. "Theory" is actually a high bar compared to the common english meaning (relativity is now called a theory, but when written it was the "principle" of relativity).

Originally Posted by Bilge_Rat

agreed about Shattered sword and Hitler's U-Boat war, but that is a different type of revisionism where an author looks at a story from a different point of view, goes back to primary sources and can argue a different interpretation based on a solid set of facts. I have no problem with that since these are the types of works which keeps history alive.

other examples are the works of David Glantz on the eastern front and Terry Copp's two books "Fields of Fire" and "Cinderella Army" which re-examined the performance of the Canadian Army in NWE 44-45.

I tend to respectfully disagree somewhat and think that any history that contradicts the received wisdom is by definition, revisionist. Types of revisionism and whether a new account is accepted or not is entirely in the mind of the readers. New data is not always necessary, often the conventional version is chock full of inconsistencies that have always been there but passed off or ignored as their existence might effect any propaganda, heroic legends or political spin that have gained the status of "Fact."

Shattered Sword and Hitler's U-Boat War gained acceptance in many (but not all) quarters because they are superbly researched and also address many unspoken logical contradictions in the accepted narratives of their respective subjects. Clay Blair's contention that the U-Boat war was never really the decisive threat that 50-years of historical works had made it out to be was not received with unanimous agreement in all quarters however. It should be recalled as well that Blair built upon the research of Jurgen Rohwer's seminal statistical studies on the U-Boat war that brought at least some of the inconsistencies to light.

Ironically, the data had been there all along but nobody used it...

Haven't read Shattered Sword recently enough to comment but other "revisionist" works like Andrew Gordon's reassessment of the Jutland controversy in The Rules of the Game and Terrence Zuber's Battle of the Frontiers have also met with mixed reactions because they are so creditably effective in slaughtering some person's sacred cows.

On the opposite end of the spectrum we have Thomas B. Marquis' version of the Battle of the Little Bighorn entitled Keep the Last Bullet for Yourself: The True Story of Custer's Last Stand. Despite having an impressive bibliography Marquis' conclusions that Custer's men committed mass suicide when the ammunition ran low is full of inconsistencies, contradictions and questionable inferences that to my mind, is a fine example of why revisionism is scoffed at in many quarters.

Seeing any book that contains the words True, Truth, Facts or the Real Story Of in the title should be cause to fire up the BS detector so the author had better done their homework scrupulously.

Haven't read Copp, the Western Front in WW2 is not high on my interest list but will probably take a break from my Great War studies and borrow them from the library. He post dates LCol John English's damning indictment of Harry Crerar and the General Staff in his Failure in High Command; The Canadian Army and the Normandy Campaign. This book was not well received in segments of the Army at the time because it assaulted many of our cherished wartime myths so many wrote it off as "revisionist tripe". Now I understand it's a text book at RMC.

Wow, my 2000th post and it contains no Cat picture...

What?
You have some sort of fixation about Jews?

No, thats one of the mindless rants which you spout.

Now...lets continue talking about history and would you please stop your animal farm piggish behavior toward people that express their personal views.

Animal farm??????It is you that is always spouting the "party line" like a good sheep.
As it happens it is spot on topic, sources.
You are an example of why it is important to use Israeli sources(especially official ones) to knock down the rubbish you post when your bunkervision clicks in.
It does leave you floundering all the time doesn't it.