All History is Revisionist History

The collective noun for a group of historians is an “argumentation,” and for good reason. At the very dawn of historical inquiry in the West, historians were already wrestling over the past, attacking each other, debating the purposes and uses of historical knowledge, choosing different subjects to pursue, and arguing about how to pursue them. That is, in the infancy of their intellectual pursuit, historians were engaged in what we know as “revisionist history”—writing coexisting, diverse, and sometimes sharply clashing accounts of various subjects, accounts that challenged and sought to alter what had been written about them before.