How Revisionist History is a Good Thing
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- čas přidán 1. 07. 2024
- The term "revisionism" is often used in a negative way on the internet and in today's hyper-schismatic, polarised society. But its actual academic use in studying history is actually based on pretty solid principles of questioning the status quo by using new evidence, techniques, and questions to allow us to develop a broader understanding of the past.
But what actually is revisionist history? Where does the idea come from? How can we apply its principles respectfully, properly to do good work in studying the past as archaeologists or historians? Why do so many people think it's just a Bad Thing? And why do some people claim to be Revisionist Historians when they're actually conspiracy theorists and denialists?
This one might require a cup of tea and some biscuits. It's a wordy one!
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I apologise for mispronouncing DuBois, gang!
"I don't like insulting people, because I'm nice." Wonderful words.
@@SpaceGhost1701revisit the word “literally”.
Even if you were correct it doesn’t change the comment. Those are wonderful words.
Maybe you meant to comment on something else that would make more sense?
In Biology.we say;
"A beautiful theory killed by a nasty ugly little fact."
21:31 - anyone else now imagining Jimmy as an old man with a big Gandalf beard stuffed with knitting needles and balls of wool, and accidentally knitting his beard into the jumper he’s knitting? 😂
My dad works in history of medicine and science and gets so adamant about how the "stupid" things people did and believed in the past did actually make sense based on their understanding of the world at the time and was in fact quite clever and neat and led to our modern medicine and science, even if it mostly turned out to be total BS. Similarly to what you've been talking about. So the study of previous beliefs is in and of itself a valid and thriving field!
I love hearing about so called “Old Wives Tales” and folk remedies. Because even if the reason why is off, what it shows us is how acutely historical people observed their world. And often they were on the right track for treating the ailment given the technology of their day.
Years ago an anonymous commenter called my Harry Potter fanfic "revisionist history" and I have never let it go. They're WIZARDS
What did you do 😂😂😂😂
The tea on the HP fanfic world from years ago is still steaming hot, I do not understand why people got that invested in wizards 😂
It was inescapable if you knew anyone who could read.
I think it’s important to remember that “heroes” were first and foremost, just human, with human weaknesses, with good traits as well as bad ones. I think balance is important.
I was fascinated by the take on Winston Churchill. I know that he is revered in the UK - he certainly got the country working together, which is a pretty impressive accomplishment. But in Australia, we know him, first and foremost, as the author of the Gallipoli campaign, which was a disaster militarily speaking. Then there is PM John Curtin’s refusal to send all our troops to Europe at Churchill’s demand, because Singapore was about to fall to the Japanese and Australia was next in line …. Over here he’s seen as a more complex, nuanced character with some very good qualities and some very deep flaws.
Oh, and I envy you your needle storage!
As a museum professional, I LOVE this conversation. How we share and interpret history has changed so much in the last few decades and it's really great to see so many new voices entering the field of history and museology and sharing their perspectives.
In high school I had a history teacher who I very much admired. He had opinions on historical events which I strongly disagree with but he taught me how to analyse evidence and ideas and bias enough to be able to challenge his ideas, and encouraged we do so. And I will always be grateful for that.
Have been involved in WW1 reenacting and living history for over 12 years the greatest piece of revisionist history I read was Mud Blood and Poppycock bt Gordon Corrigan. He used statistical data, original and period writings by often unpublished writers, primary evidence and more. He was able to break down so many of the myths about the Great War that had been held sacrosanct by academics and ordinary people. In the years following reading this I hunted out autobiographies and diaries of ordinary soldiers and, whilst remembering that memory is never perfect, better understood what the ordinary British soldier experienced.
A time I recalled is not about historical revision, but biology. I attended a seminar at university by request. My husband was the biologist, not me. I was the nerd. Anyway, the presenter was modestly famous in the biology field and was invited to give a presentation at the university where my husband worked. (Too much intro?) So the presentation rolls along until (dum, dum, dum) a question is posed: How did you account for ? Jaw dropped. Dead silence. Response was along the lines of: I didn't. The intent was not to embarrass the presenter. Fortunately, the presenter returned to his university and proceeded to create a major redo of his life's work. And made a better case for the opposite conclusion. TL DR: Confrontation unintentional or not may bring on positive revision.
We see a lot of denialism and negating of the horrors of slavery here in the US, especially in southern states. I taught history in Texas for 18 years and in a 2016 geography textbook adoption, they adopted a book that referred to enslaved populations as “immigrants and workers” and literally said maybe some enslaved people were abused busy most did ok. The book had to be retracted and parts of it rewritten. In Florida they’re trying to say slavery had benefits to the enslaved population because they learned skills. Sure, they did, but skills they were forced to learn, they had no self determination in either the skills they learned, how that learning occurred, and what they did with that learning. It’s flabbergasting to me that people really feel confident in BS like that. I thought this was a really good video, because I agree completely most modern history and science is constantly being revised as technology makes answers from the past more clear. People who want to cling to the past so badly need to realize that these new understandings are essential to moving forward as people and changing.
Had a professor in undergrad who claimed that cw: violence and denialism
The reason you always see that picture of the enslaved man with the massive ropey scars is that that guy was unusual because slaveholders didn't usually treat their expensive property like that. If violence against the enslaved was common there would be other pictures like that.
No, dude, that guy just had keloids that made his scars really visible and prominent. You're gross.
Yes! I work in public history in Texas and challenging the Grand Myth of Texas has to be done very carefully if you don’t want certain folks in power to come down on you like a ton of bricks
If we weren't constantly looking back at history to reinterpret it in a new paradigm & integrate new information, what would even be the point of having historians?
This notion some are waving about that we've never revised history before now is absurd.
Thank you, as always.
"The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common: they don't alter their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts to fit their views."
Sadly very true
Please don't apologise for wordiness when what you have to say is nuanced and important.
Get this man his damn tedtalk
I remember my physics teacher explaining that in the late 1800's physicists thought there was no point in studying physics because everything to be discovered had already been discovered. Now the caveat was/is that it was the more arrogant physicists that were more concerned with "class" that spread this thinking they could create and elitist group. I always remember that because it was a lesson in not just the scientific method but also a great lesson for learning pretty much any subject. Question the culture and motive of the writer as well as the information.
Where were you when I was being educated? Your knowledge, enthusiasm for history and genuine concern for what we know and need to be offered would have pulled me in hook, line and sinker! I had to grow old and maybe more patient to enjoy and benefit from the lessons of the past! Thank you so much!
“God’s rewind button on the cosmic VCR is always the same” best line ever 😂😂😂
So it sounds to me like you're saying that Revisionism is not revising the past, it's revising what we know and understand about the past.
Would love to see a Ted Talk from you debunking Viking myths! Could be a good lense to talk about unpacking preconceived notions and looking complexly at the past.
I do not know if you are nice, Jimmy, but you are definitely kind. You take the time to gently explain why someone's security-blanket beliefs may be factually incorrect, without telling them they are stupid or awful for believing. Nice would be smiling and nodding and going on with your day. Nice is easy. Kind takes work.
oh my god, I was just rereading Howl's Moving Castle and only just now realized that the song at the end of your videos is the same one Sophie calls "Calcifer's silly little saucepan song."
This is fascinating, I've always regarded "revisionism" as a pejorative term for just making-up non-existent history so suit your own aims and goals. And what you describe here as revisionism, I'd considered to be "just historians doing what historians do" It's nice to have your assumptions overturned... thanks.
I thought exactly the same! Revisionalism always hat a bad taste for me. Maybe there is also a difference between countries/languages how revisionism is defined?
Just checked briefly the german wikipedia site, and here it looks like revisionism in the german language means negationism, wheras historical revisionism means what Jimmy explained.
@@scousecaraid97 I'm basing my wrong opinion on what I've heard in the media.
Revisionism does have a pejorative conotation, but not in history in general terms, but in marxism specifically. Revisionists in marxist circles are those who distort Marx's works and other marxist thinkers to justify actions and policies that are non-marxist or even anti-marxist (this is a very simpified explanation, of course).
I confess I've always used the term "historical revisionism" to mean replacing evidence-based history with a fabricated, self-serving narrative. As a non-academic, I totally accept this is not what historians typically mean, but I wonder if the popular use (or mis-use) of the term has kind of taken over. My feeling is that any academic field of study should fundamentally function as you've described and re-assess established ideas when new evidence comes to light.
That whole notion that our understanding of the history, the world, the universe is always growing and consequently changing, sometimes radically, seems like the source of such a great divide today. To your point, so many people feel the need for a kind of control of the world that doesn't allow for the admission that "Hey, we've learned something new." or worse yet "You know what? Maybe we were wrong."
Dang it, now I have to enter academia, so I can hold conferences and offer a variety of teas and biscuits
More important than being nice: You are compassionate and you are fair. You are kind and you are good.
Re-examine history and check your sources for bias and persepective and mistakes! Shifts in language use changing what they meant compared to what you read even in the same language!
:)
I took some Archaeological Methods and Materials courses in the 1990s (why no, I don’t use my cultural anthropology degree in my day to day life - why do you ask? 😂) and participated in a few digs. One thing my professors were quite keen on was the idea of leaving parts of the site undug whenever possible, so that when techniques or technology improved future archaeologists wouldn’t have access to nothing but strip mined husks.
Same here regarding using my anth degree and being taught to leave as much as possible of the sight undisturbed for future research and improved technology. We also would take additional measurements in relation to the site and datum that we ourselves were not going to use in the hope that future research would be able to use the data, because once we excavate, we can't take those measurements anymore.
I find that when talking to people who were around during WW Two, especially if they were children, really had no idea what was going on overseas. They take what was told by the media as the truth, pass those stories on, and struggle with the idea that maybe things were slanted.
In my line of work, I once had the heart breaking honour of driving two old ladies who survived childhood through ww2, one was of German orgin who recounted how she had been forcefully slapped over the face by her panicked mother for running away from her school class on the way to the bomb shelter, running and weaving from doorway to doorway through the incendiary bombs and fire storm to her familys designaged city block bomb shelter and how her neighbourhood adults had lynched the corner store NSDAP member grocer for ratting out a local jewish family to the gestapo early in the war.
The other lady was of Danish orgin and her grocer father had fled with her and the family to Sweden early on and how her father and brother had spent the war smuggling weapons, food and supplies to the Danish resistance out of Sweden in small motor boats, and downed allied pilots back from Denmark so the pilots could recover and be returned home safely.
Yeah. And I think the schooling and media of the late 40s and all the way through the 50s was very oppressive and proscriptive.
And people of that generation are loath to part with what they learned from it - a politically motivated view of history, the main point of which, I thought, was to get people idolise the military and do whatever the government told them. While nothing's perfect, I think we're moving away from all that, thank God.
My grandfather was born in Berlin in 1926. Before he died when I was 14, we had a long chat about the Hitler Jugend, and how he absolutely loved going as a child. Because, yes, it was absolutely revolutionary in that it got kids of all classes together, and out of cities, and meeting children from the other side of the country at big gatherings. Many poor city children had never been more than a few km from their homes, and had never really seen the countryside, fields and lakes. His mother put back as much as she could having to sign him up, but there came a point where she couldn't put it off any longer. Yes, it all served to create a sentiment of national unity, because it's a lot easier to understand why the Nation as a whole should be protected when you can put faces and memories of play on X or Y city on the other side of the country, and eventually that feeds into indoctrination, but it also was an amazing and very formative experience for most children. It allowed them a third space outside of family and school, without the presence of adults, as it was mostly run by the elder kids. They camped, played, sang, went to bed way too late, cooked on wood fires, learned how to swim... After the war, he worked on deconstructing many things, and while he realised how in the ends it had been a means of indoctrination, I think he made a conscious effort to not let his positive memories of it be tainted, while having that extra layer of understanding.
He went on to being a Lutheran minister, and to create an "anarcho-protestant" scouting movement, anarchist in the sense of not affiliated with a political party. The kerchief he picked for it, as fabric was scarce after the war, was the black one of the HJ, with a white border sewn on by the mothers. The white of peace, and the reclaiming of the symbol of the black kerchief. I've always found that absolutely lovely. The movement still exists today, and now the kerchiefs are manufactured that way, but I think I somewhere have his first one, which is indeed his modified HJ one.
Nuance, baby.
This is a very important and powerful video/Ted Talk. I remember quite vividly when I moved away for college (University) and some of my foundational beliefs were challenged.
I remember feeling that dig-in-your-heels reaction wanting to continue believing as I did and breaking into sobs over some things. But I learned gradually along with some peers to hold the things I believed as “just ideas” and not as core beliefs that made up my soul and identity as a person. (It sounds kinda weird, but it’s hard to put into words.) That way when I learned something new or had to change something, I just “changed that idea I had” That was a lot easier that changing a part of my identity.
Of course, I still have beliefs that make up my identity, I’m not perfect, but learning that trick early in college has allowed me to learn so much and to nearly painlessly replace out of date knowledge with new knowledge.
I was just lucky to learn it so soon. It becomes much more difficult to adjust later in life as I understand.
Welsh cakes! Imagine if conferences had tea and proper welsh cakes.
Many much tea and biscuits are needed. History is brutal and painful. Humans treat each other horribly everyday and have since the first man roamed the planet. It's why I prefer domestic history more so than greater History. Give me a good how to on weaving or household skills and I am down for it.
I'm curious how we innovated livestock care, what grains we ate, who or how did they decide to invent the loom or the dishwasher.
That last clip of the video made me smile, by the way. Those particular sticks are magical and can produce great things. 👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻
Whilst I it wasn't properly revisionist history, I did do a paper in 4th year uni on the Historiography related to Economic and Industrial Development in Lower Canada (i.e. Quebec) between British Conquest and 1850. Which sounds like an eye-blisteringly dry subject, but it was by extension the historiography of the intellectual roots of Separatism.
Plus I got the added bonus to be able to call out a published historian for a claim that was just patently bullshit.
A bit on my own experience of challenging the preconceptions I grew up with, as someone with an Israeli parent and a whole half of my family deeply involved in Israeli history (for instance, my grandparents were part of the founding nucleus of a Kibbutz, my grandfather was a military man and diplomat who knew Ben Gurion and many other later PMs and Presidents as well as Moshe Dayan). Learning that the simplistic and heroic story I learned about the founding and building of the State of Israel was basically a fictional retelling of the real events, that places I grew up visiting and exploring every year used to be bustling Palestinian villages that had been ethnically cleansed, amd that some of my relatives may well have been complicit in war crimes, was all quite difficult to come to terms with. While it was challenged by people I knew, I mostly did the research myself and thankfully that prevented those issues of getting defensive and doubling down that often happens when you contradict the beliefs that someone builds their identity on. I find that if you do challenge those sorts of deeply held but deeply harmful historical beliefs, you need to be gentle and guide people in doing their own research, or else they'll just shut themselves down to any new information.
A bit more rambly than I meant to write but good video, really interesting take on the topic!
*the comment is rambly, not the video
@@SaszaDerRoyt Excellent comment, regardless of level of ramblyness...? Rambleness? Ramblicity...? Ramble...🤷👍
Fully agree with what you're saying in the later part of this! I met a girl on exchange from China when I was in high school and we were hanging out and talking for the day and she at one point mentioned how Mao is on their money and a few people had mentioned now that she was here how he was a really horrible person but she'd only known of him as a great leader and heroic figure but hmm dunno.... So I took the approach you are saying here and just affirmed that I knew of him as a horrible person and yeah that might be worth looking into more. Hopefully she did.
@The Welsh Viking Just an FYI, Du Bois didn't pronounce his name as 'Duboa'. He saw it as French collonial, so insisted on pronouncing all the letters properly: 'DuBoys'. Learnt that from F.D. Signifier who (other than being an AWESOME channel in general) has studied Du Bois and I believe he studied at the same university where Du Bois worked...? Something like that. And he mentioned it in a video because EVERYONE was correcting his pronunciation whenever he spoke of 'Du Boys', so he felt that he needed to explain WHY he was pronouncing it the 'non-French' way. Just an FYI for next time.😉👍
Although I believe that changing names of historical methods can be confusing, I think that "Revisionism" and "Post-Revisionism" should be changed to something like "Constant Assesment" to reflect a more nuanced approach. The rate of historical re-appraisal has accelerated, especially in certain archaeological research such as ancient DNA. This means that soon we will talking about Post Post Post-Revisionist".
Thank you for this video! I studied history and am now studying to become a primary school teacher. I always get the question from students (and even colleagues!) 'Why do we need to learn history?' And I tell them we do not need to learn history, we need to study it. To question our own ideas and beliefs to better understand the society we live in and ultimately, people as a whole. Learning dates and events is like the grammar needed to speak the language of history, and not the goal. I always find it hard to explain al this to Ppeople, and you did it marvelously. Thanks for that!
BTW, one of my best friends is a professor of Black History, Black Experience, and education. He's written several books on the subject of W.E.B. DuBois and it is pronounce Doo - Boyz. (There's also a small city in my home state pronounced the same way.)
This was very helpful! I never learned about what revisionism actually means, but it has usually been implied to me that it involves a misinterpretation of the past using contemporary values and beliefs. I'm starting to realize that "revisionism" is possibly being used like the phrase "politically correct" where certain people are being hateful and speak disparagingly about something that is usually quite good.
I think I've only ever heard of revisionism used in place of denialism so I've had a negative impression of the word. Thank you for correcting the definition for me.
Personally I love it when we learn something new about the past and now we can see it with a whole new level of understanding ❤
This, absolutely!
I actually was starting tea and a biscuit as the notification popped up.... Must be a Cymru thing. 🏴
Someone invite Jimmy to do a TED talk!
You should totally have a TED talk! This is a compassionate and very well communicated explanation of revisionism and one which I'll be using with my students. Thanks so much for sharing. :)
One of the problems with historical re-interpretation (as I might prefer to call it), is that it can get politicized, and thus result in one generation's "progressive" re-evaluation get wrongly condemned as bigotry by the next. For example, when I was a young American in the 1990s, there was a lot of publicity given, for the first time, to the role of disease in decimating the Amerindian population and paving the way for Euro-American settlement, as much as military force if not more so. The point was to disabuse us of the notion that we Americans had "won" this continent in any way, even unfairly . . . and also to deliver a backhanded point about how unsanitary we were. it was expressly intended as an antiracist development in scholarship.
But in the past generation, a few have claimed that accepting this idea WAS racist, and that it was intended to "absolve" Americans of genocide, which clearly was not true. That's just one example of how the honorable principle of historical re-interpretation can get abused or misconstrued, because people are more interested in scoring points than setting the record straight.
Came for the✨️NUANCE✨️
Stayed for term definitions
(Laura Mellin) I have painfully close experience with this; my maternal grandfather was an officer in the Raj. He and my grandmother were in India from 1925-ish to the start of WWII. He was in charge of the southern half of India. My mother and her siblings lived there until 1934-ish (my mother doesn’t talk much about it). I watch RRR, and turn to my husband, and say, “that’s what my grandparents were doing”. They weren’t evil people, but they participated in an evil system. Sometimes revisionism is just listening to the other people’s voices. And sometimes it’s pointing out unconscious bias on the part of the researcher. I do (amateur) historic stuff, too - late 16th-early 17thC England - and I’m AuDHD, so my interpretations are sometimes at odds with the majority opinion, but detail and pattern recognition is my thing.
Yes, conferences definitely need more tea and biscuits
It's crazy to me that some people have a hard time understanding that revisionism isn't the same as denying something. Because when it comes to other fields, like tech or the medicine, people seem to accept that we exchange older views for newer, better ones.
Take bloodletting, for example. I think most people agree that this doesn't do much for most illnesses. Or that it's super convenient to have several dozends of GB storage in a tiny USB stick instead of needing an entire room to set up a PC. Then why not believe in revising history?
The question here is: should we consider the study of history to be a science and to treat it as such? A good scientist strives for new answers, and revises their concusions as evidence is discovered.
Isn't it already a science?
Some people would say so! Some people would say that art and science are outdated binaristic terms!
Really interesting point - as a baby environmental scientist, I watched this video and drew so many parallels with scientific research.
Absolutely love that the conclusion is 'more tea and biscuits'! But seriously, I appreciate the point that you should be kind, and nuanced, and understanding of people's hurt in the re-examination of history. I think if more people considered this, the common understanding of history might be a little less fraught.
I'd love to know more about the role of propaganda in the creation of an accepted 'history' and how historians can break through all the lies and myths.
I think maybe some of the bad rap around revisionism is because people assume (because of revising done poorly) that you’re totally erasing the way things “used to be”, going in and changing all the books and insisting the old theories never existed. Rather than saying, ok, this is how we believe it was, but we used to believe this, and here’s why we did, and here’s why we don’t. Editing the provenance, as it were, along with the current understanding. I tend to think good historians don’t, we *want* to see where we were, any why we aren’t there anymore. But some people don’t, soo…..
And I didn’t feel this was too wordy, it was correctly wordy, and used very good words. You done good Jimmy. Though your framing always makes me feel like you’re drowning at the bottom of the frame and you need to be hoisted clear, I find myself regularly tipping my chin up while I watch 😂
I think that’s exactly it. People, even if they are well intentioned about their motives or end goals, have this view of history as immutable facts and that any narrative interpretation of it is because “they” are trying to decieve you for some insidious political end. I’m in the USA, and we have built up such a national mythology around our history and especially the founding of the country that people take it extremely personally when the conception of our sacred and noble god-founders is challenged. To challenge our narrative of history is to attack our national identity. I’m talking about the founding fathers because it operates similarly to the narrative surrounding Churchill in Britain, but you can see this in many more places throughout the world.
*@skloak* I think part of the reason revisionism gets a bad rap is what Jimmy touched on at the end of the video. It's possibly one too many instances of bad communication, where someone comes along with their new findings and understandings and treating people as foolish or horrible for having believed the old version instead. It's not erasure of the past but calling the person dumb and attacking their core beliefs as something immoral.
@@evilwelshman Oh for sure, badmouthing people who were just doing the best they could with the information they had isn’t going to go very far in fostering patience and understanding.
Thank you for mentioning how difficult, even painful for people who have devoted lives and careers to particular views n theories to have it change or fall apart or become obsolete. I have seen professors go through this. 😞
Being able to admit you're wrong is such a hard skill.
What a fascinating discussion of terms I have to confess I was only half aware of. This really makes me miss academia! And when I still thought I would go into academia, I really hoped I wouldn´t turn into one of these scholars who couldn´t let go of a theory in the light of new evidence, even if it´s hard to do so.
Also: oh god, the difficulty about accepting that your not-so-recent ancestors did horrible stuff is really something. (My great-grandfather was in the SA and spied for the Gestapo, a fact I found out at 25. I have rarely been so disturbed and upset in my life.)
As a fiber art enthusiast without facial hair, I'd never considered the practical use of a beard as knitting needle storage. It looks like it sure beats loosing them between the couch cushions when you set them down for half a second.
I'm not sure what your "hair on the top of the head" situation is, but I find that either the French braid going down the back of my head, or at the base of a ponytail (between my head and the elastic) are also excellent places to store a dpn. (I say this, and have used them, but the last time I was switching needle sizes on a sock it lead to a "mom, why do you have needles in your sock?" question, which I'm sure you can parse correctly.)
@@1One2Three5Eight13 having prehensile hair (curls), I don't even need an elastic or braid, lol.
Another engaging, thoughtful musing! I appreciate the defense of a gentle touch; kindness is not a weakness nor a waste of time - some folks tend to write it off until they don't receive it themselves.
Thank you for the nuanced chat, I"ll sign the petition for more snacks for our historians!
Jimmy always comes in with bangers, and this is one of your best. Thank you so much for this video! Every person on earth should watch it imo
I loved this video! As a public historian this video filled my heart with glee! Thank you! I don't comment a lot but I love your channel!
Unfortunately, many people think of "nice" as meaning "weak". Nowadays people want to disrupt paradigms for their own self-aggrandizement. They forget that tact can be a useful technique, and insist on "brutal honesty". Next person who tells me they are brutally honest, I may ask them if they want a brutal pat on the back.
I've come to the point where I just assume anybody who claims to be "Brutally honest" or who "doesn't sugarcoat things" is just saying "I want to be an asshole to people but I don't want to be called out as a bad person".
As a person who often tends towards brutal honesty with facts in internet arguments, I beg you, please consider the fact some of us are just neurodivergent, get excited by facts, and forget the niceties. 😅
(That said, I certainly don't pride myself on being brutally honest above all; I just genuinely do it in pursuit of learning and truth and getting annoyed by inaccuracies.)
Yes plase do a Ted Talk :D
Also and more importantly, THANK YOU again for your kindness, consideration ... it's sort of healing to hear you talk about complicated issues in that way!
First, more tea a biscuits, mwy o de a bisgedi!
Second, I associated revisionism with denialism. Now i understand that my own schtick is essentially revisionism, but musical history revisionism. I put bagpipes back into Welsh music, I'm not the only one, there is plenty of evidence to say it was true, but we don't know what pipes were actually like, how many different types over what time periods etc etc. Or what the music actually sounded like. We have clues of course. But we make a lot of it up too.
Yes, Jimmy, you're nice.
Just wanted to say, I have the utmost respect for the education work you're doing here. You have a real talent for making this kind of information accessible and fun, and that is such an important thing to be doing. Thank you.
Nuance is a lost art in modern society. So few people want to have a conversation and consider other perspectives. In the US cognitive dissonance has become an epidemic. You are a breath of fresh air and I thank you for this “Ted talk”.
denialism is happening alot right now
The point you make about ancient Egypt is a good one; I think sometimes people forget the scale of "ancient Egyptian" history. The pyramids were really old by the time Cleopatra was around. Which brings me to the point that a lot of Roman and Ptolomeic statuary would likely have been of higher class/ruling class people who would likely have been of Greek or Roman origin (including Cleopatra, who was decidedly not dark-skinned at all) which then anachronistically shaped understandings of much older periods of history. I think also the present focus on social history as opposed to great figures history has meant that our common understandings have changed a lot in a short period of time, which is important to remember as well when dealing with how people think about history. What we think is important and worth studying has expanded, and the methodology/approach is different, and different can be hard
Denialism: alcohol is good for you because I want it to.
Negateisum: alcohol is good for you because I won't tell you about tomorrow morning.
Revisionism: new evidence shows that alcohol is bad for you if you consume to much to often.
Legitimate revisionism is getting history correct. Which leads to a far better understanding. Every culture, religion... needs it. Love the vid. As a historian myself, I agree COMPLETELY!
Revisionism has a dirty reputation because nearly any point of view can be underscored by a "reinterpretation" of evidence -- bringing some forward, leaving some in the background. Politicians do this all the time. You don't have to deny, just rearrange items in a different order of importance. As an American, and retired researcher and teacher of history, I see attempts of positive revisionism met with such prejudice that the backlash encourages negative re-writes. You only have to look at Florida and how it has reacted to attempts to teach factual history of slavery.
@@whatgoesaroundcomesaround920 That's why I stated "Legitimate revisionism"
"Revisionism" is more about adding to history and asking questions. We shouldn't be surprised that heroes turn out to be human and villains too.
Not being from Britain, Churchill always was an alcoholic in my mind 😂
Learning what happened in Bangladesh (as it wasn't part of curriculum) WAS a bit surprising
Yeah, people seem to get really defensive over Cleopatra's skin color 😮
Wasn't she greek?
Macedonian
@@sagahagstrom3795her father’s ethnic group was, his family had settled in Egypt several generations before. If you push historians they suspect who her mother was but don’t actually know and they don’t know who her grandmother was. Given the practices of the times they may both have been random unknown concubines.
Which is the other side of the Egyptian argument than Jimmy mentioned, isn't it? The absolute majority of Egyptians through millenia were of course African with all it entails, while the one ancient Egyptian most people have heard of came from a foreign dynasty. Many white people apparently (I didn't really know) deny the former, people of colour refuse to accept the latter because of the former and because she's probably the only ancient Egyptian person they themselves know of.
Nuance...
@@francesconicoletti2547exactly. We might not know these women's names but they had genes which they passed to their children. So like, if we're being accurate her skin tone was probably somewhere in the middle. We can safely say she didn't look conventionally Roman because they described her as being exotically beautiful, but obviously their way of looking at beauty was vastly different from ours. And like, she definitely wasn't Arab lol, so all those Arab Egyptians cosplaying on Twitter were being very silly.
It’s like the original meaning of ret-con. It often gets used to describe writers changing what happened in the past, but as originally intended it was meant to add new perspectives to existing events, sometimes radically shifting the underlying meaning of things, but not altering any of the things that were previously established
Is there any chance to have a series of videos to explain concepts of history like this? I would watch the hell of them. Also, now I want a Ted Talk with you 😆
Love, love, love it! Nuance is life. If you are not for me, you are against me is total bollocks and very damaging to society and thinking deeply about anything.
Thank you for the rewind button on God's VCR. Your visit today was unexpectedly different and fantastic.
It's great till you learn uncomfortable truths about your own country. History might be 'written by the victors' but that does not mean it tells the whole story.
I remember one course at Uni (majored in History and Political Thought) where we looked at perspective and the importance of leaving your own ideals and predjudices in a box whilst tackling historical sources. It's amazing how hard that is to do.
Long Welsh good! 👍
Edit: needle storage 🤣
I mean... Winston Churchill WAS hammered on champagne pretty much constantly. But wartime leaders tend to garner a kind of admiration that excuses both their mistakes and character flaws. In times of crisis, people look to their leaders. I'm willing to wager that most countries (maybe excluding the core axis powers) continue to admire whoever was in charge during WW2, or rose to prominence as a leader during that time.
Being Czech, I think our WW2 leaders didn't come out of it very well, either. Some had to collaborate with the Nazis, others collaborated with the Soviets, neither are particularly smiled on by history. Our WW2 heroes are largely the smaller men furter down the chain of command (if involved in it at all).
I still remember when I learned that history books could be wrong. It was such a fundamental shift in thinking
What a great video, just after i started reading Howard Zinn!
Another home run from Jimmy!
I may be wrong on this, but isn't W.E.B. Du Bois, supposed to be pronounced "Due Boyss", IE not the "correct" French way
This is correct.
Ah well, you live and learn!
@@TheWelshViking Just wanted to clarify, it wasn't meant as criticism, I only know because I made the same mispronunciation 😅
Excellent vid. People need to watch this, not just for the insight into what revisionism should be, but how it is done and how anyone could really look into the records and do it themselves. Something other than conspiracy theory for internet ppl to 'do their own research' on.
GET THAT MAN A TED TALK!!!!!
I think there is a significant moral difference between saying that a previous interpretation of an event was incorrect and saying that someone’s beliefs about an event are wrong.
Honestly, a massive part of the backlash against historical revisionism has to do with the emotional weight of the words. Nobody likes being told that they’re wrong.
“Wrong” has an emotional, moral weight to it. It’s quite easily weaponized. “Right” and “Wrong” are often seen as polar opposites, especially by those who are prone to black and white thinking.
“Correct” and “Incorrect” have significantly less emotional weight to them. Furthermore they allow for more nuance in a discussion. There can totally be a spectrum in between “Correct” and “Incorrect”.
I'm 100% on board.
I discovered a year ago that my mother's family history was basically a lie (possibly strong word). I had always been told our family was from Ukraine, which is factually true given the borders of that country, but my ancestors were actually Rusine ppl from the western Carpathian mts and left to the US during an extermination of our ppl in the 1880's.
There's good and bad to everything.
Revisionism can be used for good, or for bad.
But great video as always man, hope you're doing well.
Three cheers for a nice cuppa tea and a sit-down!
Brilliant video, Jimmy. I really appreciate the deep dive into historical theory!
BISCUITS!!!!
Actually, that was very quite surprising. The stashiness was very stashy, but I didn't expect it to hold a knitting needle!!!
Stashiness HUZZAH!!!!
I did Early English and some Classics in the 90s through to PhD level (didn't finish, doesn't matter). My youngest is now doing Classics and History. It is fascinating seeing how some interpretations have grown or changed even in that time. Love discussing revisionism and historiographie in general with him.
The problem I have with some revisionist histories is applying of motive without proof as if it’s fact. The use of small samples as the norm, media then taking this as the fact. As you say nuance is the thing we lack 2 things can be true was Churchill a man created by his class and time yes. The view on race having changed enormously since his birth and even the time he was in power, change being the hardest thing for anyone to do. He followed the ideas of Marshall races one of the very things the 2 world war finally put in a coffin..Was he good for morale during the war did he lead well probably. Did he drink a lot yes . I’m reminded of measurements how long is a piece of string the more accurate you try to be the more numbers you can add to the number at some point you have to choose your point of accuracy. For a person hero’s are great for example or role models, for someone interested in the study of history we have to realise that no one stands up to scrutiny the hero who saves 1000 of Jews during the holocaust is the same person who had multiple failed marriages and perhaps committed fraud. Famous revolutionary who helped liberate a country was also a massive homophobe.
Honestly you can't make blanket statments about Churchill without spending a decent amout of time checking your facts. How he is viewed has changed dramatically over time and the modern view of him likes to forget how contentious a figure he was even in his lifetime.
Its also worth examining how Britian actually dealt with the war - cause that who 'we all pulled together' & 'blitz spirit' is not acurate.
ngl, when I saw the title pop up in my feed, I side eyed it reeeeeeeeal hard. But I'm glad I watched it, always a treat to see what you're up to
Educate the children 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼
Lay people have a naive view of history. They believe that their ancestors left some kind of clearly documented account of the past that is uncontroversial and unproblematic but what we have from the past is snippits that have to interpreted and arrange in some kind of cohesive narrative. It is a literary endeavour more than a science. Rearranging these snippits to retel or "revise" the account we have of the past is not only valid but it is often necessary when we know that previous accounts downplayed some evidence due to bias or if some evidence were not known.
Either that, or they believe everything is equally unreliable and the facts are up for grabs.
Iirc DuBois went by an Americanized pronunciation of his surname, but I'm not 100% certain about that.