Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped.
History hasn't stopped, history, as in our chronological description of past events, has always been constantly edited, with the telling of the same events differing depending upon who is telling the story (and their motivations), and subject to interpretation based on current zeitgeist. There is a stream of immutable events in the past but "history" is not a stale recording of these events, it is a living process.
> our chronological description of past events, has always been constantly edited
No, it has been constantly retold. New people have written new histories. They haven't edited other people's histories while continuing to label those histories as the work of the original authors.
What's happening here isn't "our views are changing, so we are producing new material based on those changed views". They are altering existing works written by people who are long dead, without making it clear to the reader/viewer what has been changed.
The archive absolutely changes. Sometimes intentionally, sometimes unintentionally.
My wife is a historian. "Oh, those records were destroyed in 1920 when a new archivist took over and changed the recordkeeping methods" and "oh, the boxes with the stuff between years X and Y were destroyed by bombs in WW2" are common occurrences. Historians understand this and develop methods for dealing with this but we should also understand that the archive is never going to be immutable.
This is not to say that deliberately editing the archive is good, only that it is inevitable for reasons much more banal than what is described in TFA.
(posted this a couple of times and it doesn't seem to be visible. Reposting without a piece that might be causing me to be censored, lol.)
Anne Frank's diary was published in 1947. It is a historical document very important to the history of the 20th century, critically important if we consider documents accessible to high-school students and widely taught to them. The original version, and all subsequent versions until 1995 (when a reasonably complete version was first made available) as well as the vast majority of current editions, omit certain material.
This includes Anne discussing [the part I removed so as not to hit HN's word filter!]. It also includes material removed by the original editor, Otto Frank (Anne's father) where Anne is critical of her father and discusses her parents' marriage.
In fact, the 1995 edition didn't include all the missing material (some pages removed by Otto were not available, even to scholars. Nor did the 2001 edition which added the pages Otto removed. There was still some censorship of material. Only in 2018 (deep into the "woke era"!) was the full text of Anne's diaries published after 70 years of the diaries being renowned, widely discussed and taught, and quasi-universally regarded as historically important.
One interesting example is Josephus. A Jewish-Roman historian, he provides almost the only roughly contemporary mention of Jesus outside of biblical ones (and biblical apocrypha). He simply describes the existence of a 'superstition' (non-officially accepted religion) around Jesus, that he was crucified, and that his followers still venerated him.
Sometime in the last 2000 years, probably the Early Middle Ages, Christian scholars doctored this passage to have Josephus suggest that Jesus was a god, or at least superhuman (even though Josephus was not a Christian believer).
Modern scholarship, including religious scholars, almost unanimously accept the passage as fake. But Christian proselytizers still use it very frequently as extra-biblical confirmation of the divinity of Christ.
Please provide an example of an culturally important large-scale work of history or literature, at least 1,000 years old, which hasn't been abridged, extracted, expurgated, euphemized, hidden, bowdlerized, etc.
Of course now that the colonisers have reached the lands the sites are under threat from gas plants and industrial development .. but several thousand years was a good run.
I don't think that is true. There is lots of rock art which either can't be shown to outsiders (or to members of certain genders or moieties), or can be shown, but the significance behind the art is not allowed to be explained to outsiders. Some rock art can be copied for wider consumption, but the copies have to leave out certain details.
I don't think it is true that this rock art is an example of significant culture that has never been censored or expurgated. The taboos and rules which apply to viewing this art and/or reproducing it or the linked stories are surely analogous to a form of censorship. The fact that people have broken those rules does not change this.
It's true that various sites are considered the stories of particular groups ( men V. women, these people V those people) .. but aside from that specific consideration they haven't been censored in the sense of ( painted over | black barred | altered ) or hidden (cave | over hang moved or draped with a false rock).
The major thrust of this sub thread has been about line of original purity more than an obligation for [some group] to openly share to all regardless so forgive me if I still consider these a good example of unaltered works painted on and carved into stone.
I think you are splitting hairs. Control of certain forms of art or literature so that they can't be revealed to all is what we're talking about. The culture in question is very different from ours so we can't expect their taboos or censorship to have exactly the same forms that we might associate with censorship (mean-looking guy with eyeshade and red pencil, hooded monks chained to desks in candlelight, omnipresent super-computer says no, etc).
For example, some stories are not just 'the stories of particular groups' but are not allowed to be told by, or in some cases told to, other groups.
Besides this, how do you know that none of these works have been painted over or hidden?
For most works 1000 years or older, we don't know the full textual provenance, so providing an example in either direction is essentially impossible. But if the phenomenon is as widespread as you claim, it should be easy to find much more recent examples.
In my comment I didn't actually refer to the editing of documents, it was more a meta comment on the definition of history.
> They are altering existing works written by people who are long dead, without making it clear to the reader/viewer what has been changed.
Have you heard of this thing called "the bible"? It's been regularly altered for almost 2000 years without making it clear to the reader/viewer how and why. Yes, that's a hyperbolic point but it's to show that editing of past works is not new. Writings, paintings, stories, etc... have long been edited and referred to as the original.
> It's been regularly altered for almost 2000 years without making it clear to the reader/viewer how and why.
... in an era where scientific rigor, proper editorial practices, literary science, and indeed the entire humanities in the modern sense didn't exist. That's a laughable comparison.
If anyone tried to publish an "edited" Bible like that today, they would get publicly crucified by scholars.
Yes, but there are huge qualitative difference and they are important. Even among historians there is mission creep to adapt the past to fit a certain perspective.
Of course the Zeitgeist is an influence, but to say that deliberate re-interprations are just like any other reassesment is a lie.
But a lot of that is actually good thing. The past stories were also told to fit a certain perspective. People were intentionally left out, acts of other people were intentionally left out, all that to conform to past ideologies.
There is a reason history ignored certain people, minorities or genders. And adding their point of view is a good thing.
Yes, but that was not bias. That was done deliberately and falsified history. It comparable to attempts to adapt history for the sensibilities of today.
Except that what you call "adapt history for the sensibilities of today" is in 95% of cases "actually telling something negative about celebrated past historical figure". It is "not pretending that the rape described here in euphemisms was something different then just rape".
The whole divisive concepts bruhaha is all about returning to the way past was mythologized and made sound better then it actually was.
All these attempts at banning and censorship tend to focus on the wrong things.
We should all put as much pressure as possible on elected leaders to ban references to 1984 on the Internet every time there’s government overreach or censorship. It’s a great book and the references are often apt, but they’re incredibly overused and cliché.
Such a law would do a great deal to force people to read or talk about other pertinent books. Call it The BRADBURY Act (Bringing a Reasonable Amount of Different Books… um… Under Review… uh… every Year).
> It’s a great book and the references are often apt, but they’re incredibly overused and cliché.
No that overused, it appears. Look at how man replies didn't know what the source material was.
If 1984 and Animal Farm was still required reading in HS, we'd have a very different population. One, I expect, that would be more critical of thoughtcrime and revisionist history than of imaginary boogeymen.
Certainly now that history can be rewritten literally in an instant by something like chatgpt means that we are indeed no longer going to know what happened in the past. Granted we haven't ever really known with much certainty, but now complete rewrites are a keypress away.
Sounds like the people saying "evolution has stopped" for humans, the fact that your living it (by definition) in slow motion because your part of it doesn't mean it has stopped.
