On this Columbus Day, let me state my opposition to Revisionist History
Revisionist history is problematic because it seeks to interpret an event or historical topic based on a narrative rather than on the facts of that event and other historical aspects related to it.
For example:
On Columbus, instead of teaching that he arrived in the Americas, quickly enslaved and harmed the native peoples there, we teach that it was a "good" moment in history because it somehow helped people who are in America now. The problem with revisionism here is that the need to convince or teach people that this was a "good" thing means that we have to discount the bad things associated with the event, including the near disappearance of the great civilizations that were here prior to America's "discovery".
On the Constitution and Founding Fathers, the need to make these people and their decisions seem positive means that the compromises that were made, to keep slavery legal, to establish an inequality in terms of voters in one state versus another, to make it incredibly hard to change the constitution were not "good" things, and in some ways were "bad things...in other words to make it hard to end slavery a century later which almost led to the end of the Constitution, it did lead to war --in fact, at the greatest constitutional crisis in our history, it wasn't the constitution that saved us, but the military, and guns, and soldiers.
On something like the Electoral College: Revisionist history leads many people to extol the virtues of this peculiarity of our election system. In fact, it gets so ridiculous that people, even here on DU, often elevate the "fairness" of the Electoral College above even what the Founders thought --it was after all a compromise and a distasteful one to some.
And the list goes on. The problem with Revisionist History is that often in this country the emphasis is not on communicating what happened, but that what happened was a good thing and the best of all possible outcomes. They weren't.
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