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 Historical

CONTROVERSIES
Current
Revisionism
The Current Controversies series examines today’s most
important social and political issues. Each volume

H istorical R evisionism
presents a diverse selection of primary sources
representing all sides of the debate in question.

“These are excellent resources for research or debate

that will rouse students interested in contemporary
and controversial topics.”—Booklist
Historical Revisionism
Other Books in the Current
Controversies Series
Antifa and the Radical Left
Cryptocurrencies and Blockchain Technology
The Economics of Clean Energy
Globalization
The Industrial Food Complex
Interference in Elections
Learned Helplessness, Welfare, and the Poverty Cycle
Soft Power and Diplomacy
Tariffs and the Future of Trade
The Two-Party System in the United States
Whistleblowers
Historical Revisionism
Barbara Krasner, Book Editor
Published in 2020 by Greenhaven Publishing, LLC
353 3rd Avenue, Suite 255, New York, NY 10010

Copyright © 2020 by Greenhaven Publishing, LLC

First Edition

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form
without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer.

Articles in Greenhaven Publishing anthologies are often edited for length to meet page
requirements. In addition, original titles of these works are changed to clearly present
the main thesis and to explicitly indicate the author’s opinion. Every effort is made to
ensure that Greenhaven Publishing accurately reflects the original intent of the authors.
Every effort has been made to trace the owners of the copyrighted material.

Cover image: Suzanne C. Grim/Shutterstock.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-­Publication Data

Names: Krasner, Barbara, editor.

Title: Historical revisionism / Barbara Krasner, book editor.
Description: New York : Greenhaven Publishing, 2020. | Series: Current
controversies series | Audience: Grades 9–12. | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019000148 | ISBN 9781534505360 (library bound) | ISBN
9781534505377 (pbk.)
Subjects: LCSH: Historiography—Juvenile literature. |
History—Methodology—Juvenile literature. | History—Study and
teaching—Juvenile literature. | History—Moral and ethical
aspects—Juvenile literature.
Classification: LCC D13 .H5514 2020 | DDC 907.2—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019000148

Manufactured in the United States of America

Website: http://greenhavenpublishing.com
Contents
Foreword 11
Introduction 14

Chapter 1: Is Historical Revisionism Useful?

Overview: Historical Thinking Must Address Change, 19
Causality, Context, Complexity, and Contingency
Thomas Andrews and Flannery Burke
The five Cs—change, causality, context, complexity, and
contingency—represent the areas historians and historians-in-
training must embrace to effectively engage in historical thinking.
Yes: Revision Is the Lifeblood of Historical Scholarship
Holocaust Education Retools the Encyclopedia for 27
Today’s Learners
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
The museum’s online Holocaust encyclopedia applies new
interactive methodologies to keep pace with today’s technological
users, changing the very nature of Holocaust education to make it
relevant to today’s learners.
Revisionism Effectively Challenges Hegemonic Ideas 31
Harry Targ
Revisionist challenges to international relations theory brought a
new and innovative interdisciplinary approach to the study of the
Cold War.
No: Revision Is Manipulated by Political Interests and Denial
Revisionism Has Negative Connotations 41
James McPherson
While trained historians value historical revisionism, others view
it in a negative light because they equate it with the denial of
historical tragedies and atrocities.
David Irving Crossed the Line from Revisionism 45
to Denial
Roni Stauber
By insisting gas chambers did not exist at Auschwitz, historian
David Irving became the case study for going beyond healthy
revisionism to the extreme version of pure denial.
National Amnesia Results from National Revisionism 59
Ronald Suny
In Japan, Ukraine, and Turkey, governments attempt to revise
their histories in order to erase atrocities, which may result in
nationwide forgetting instead of national memory and apology.

Chapter 2: Does Historical Revisionism

Impact the Study of History?
Overview: The Author’s Purpose Drives the 70
Historical Account
Michael Dunn
If an author’s intent is anything other than to tell the truth, the
historical account becomes biased. The historian must take
evidence and social, cultural, and political changes into account
for revision.
Yes: Historical Revisionism Is an Inextricable
Part of History Scholarship
Revisionism Allows Voices Other than the Victors’ 77
to Be Heard
Historyplex.com
Many believe history is written by the winners, but revisionism
gives voice to those who did not win. Special attention is given to
Stalinist Russia, the Holocaust, and the Napoleonic Wars.
Prizewinning Historical Writing Can Still Be Speculative 82
M. Andrew Holowchak
Holowchak pokes holes in Annette Gordon-Reed’s assertions
about the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and slave
Sally Hemings. Despite being speculative, this new approach
to historical events succeeds in encouraging reconsideration.
Nonetheless, the author argues that certain conditions should be
met in revisionism.
No: Bias Has No Place in History
Citizens Lap Up Fake News and Fake History 87
Natalie Nougayrède
Even today’s democracies spew fake news and distort history.
When people are unable to tell the difference between fake and
actual history, they unknowingly believe what leaders tell them. It
is better not to mess with the historical record.
Leaders in Power Offer Biased Versions of History 91
Nick Sacco
History is written by the victors, as the saying goes, and this is
particularly evident when examining how politicians and leaders
utilize it. Social and governmental leaders influence history with
the victor in mind, but the historical record should take the
“losers” into account as well.

Chapter 3: Is New Evidence Necessary

for Historical Revisionism?
Overview: Facts Don’t Stand Alone: They Need 95
Historians to Interpret Them
Kenneth Andres
Yes: Historical Revisionism Depends on New
Evidence for Fresh Interpretation
Evidence Is the Heart of Discussion Between Historians 100
John Shaw
The selection and interpretation of evidence forms the basis of
historical discourses, making it vital to the historian’s craft.
Historical Writing Without Evidence Can 106
Be Fraudulent
Michael Nelson
Popular historians Joseph Ellis and Edmund Morris fictionalized
facts in their writing and faced serious consequences. These
examples demonstrate the risks of historical revision without a
factual basis.
No: Time and Cultural Change Are
Sufficient for New Interpretations
Princeton University Acknowledges President Wilson’s 113
Racism but Keeps His Name on School Buildings
Scott Jaschik
Princeton University decided to keep President Woodrow Wilson’s
name on the School of Public Policy and a residential college but
puts his legacy of racism in the context of the times.
Removing the Names of Racist Historical Figures 118
from Public Buildings Should Not Erase History
Ben Shapiro
If a university decides to remove a name from a public building,
as Yale University did with Confederate General John C. Calhoun,
that act should not erase that person’s contribution to history.
Correcting the Historical Record Is a Matter for the 121
Textbooks
Grace Russo Bullaro
Monuments of controversial figures, including Christopher
Columbus, should stand to remind us of the past and its context.

Chapter 4: Does Nationalism Drive

Historical Revisionism?
Overview: Today’s Educators Challenge Nationalistic 128
and Patriotic Approaches to Teaching History
Lumen Learning
Although the Enlightenment tried to make history objective, history
remains biased. Still, teachers challenge exceptionalist textbooks to
encourage a more well-rounded view of historical events.
Yes: National Agenda Dictates Changes
in Historical Perspectives
National Narratives Persist Through Holistic Methods 132
Maria Grever and Tina van der Vlies
Using holistic approaches, textbooks can encourage acceptance of
enduring national perspectives when combined with digital tools
and other assets.
Historical Memory Chooses Which Nationalist 137
Narrative to Favor
Andy Yee
Japan has at least two different nationalist historical narratives,
each with its own merits and faults. Which will win out?
A New Polish Nationalist Law Strives to Create a 141
Revisionist Narrative
Geneviève Zubrzycki
Poland has signed a new bill into action that makes it illegal to
accuse Poles of complicity with Nazi atrocities during World War
II, thus outlawing any versions of the historical record that are not
the accepted one.
No: Revisionism Does Not Judge the Past, but
Reevaluates In Light of New Information
National Identity Needs to Break Its Connection with 145
National History
Stefan Berger
Although national identity has long been linked to a country’s
national narrative, it needs to break that link through
transnational and comparative approaches.
History Textbooks Need More Well-Rounded 153
Perspectives
Michael H. Romanowski
An examination of several secondary education high-school
history textbooks reveals minority discrimination that skews
national narratives. Students should be encouraged to challenge
what they read and the nationalist messages textbooks
occasionally promote.

Organizations to Contact 162

Bibliography 167
Index 171
Foreword

C ontroversy” is a word that has an undeniably unpleasant

connotation. It carries a definite negative charge. Controversy
can spoil family gatherings, spread a chill around classroom and
campus discussion, inflame public discourse, open raw civic
wounds, and lead to the ouster of public officials. We often feel that
controversy is almost akin to bad manners, a rude and shocking
eruption of that which must not be spoken or thought of in polite,
tightly guarded society. To avoid controversy, to quell controversy,
is often seen as a public good, a victory for etiquette, perhaps even
a moral or ethical imperative.
Yet the studious, deliberate avoidance of controversy is also
a whitewashing, a denial, a death threat to democracy. It is a
false sterilizing and sanitizing and superficial ordering of the
messy, ragged, chaotic, and at times ugly processes by which a
healthy democracy identifies and confronts challenges, engages
in passionate debate about appropriate approaches and solutions,
and arrives at something like a consensus and a broadly accepted
and supported way forward. Controversy is the megaphone, the
speaker’s corner, the public square through which the citizenry finds
and uses its voice. Controversy is the life’s blood of our democracy
and absolutely essential to the vibrant health of our society.
Our present age is certainly no stranger to controversy.
We are consumed by fierce debates about technology, privacy,
political correctness, poverty, violence, crime and policing, guns,
immigration, civil and human rights, terrorism, militarism,
environmental protection, and gender and racial equality. Loudly
competing voices are raised every day, shouting opposing opinions,
putting forth competing agendas, and summoning starkly different
visions of a utopian or dystopian future. Often these voices attempt
to shout the others down; there is precious little listening and
considering among the cacophonous din. Yet listening and

11 x
Historical Revisionism

considering, too, are essential to the health of a democracy. If

controversy is democracy’s lusty lifeblood, respectful listening and
careful thought are its higher faculties, its brain, its conscience.
Current Controversies does not shy away from or attempt to
hush the loudly competing voices. It seeks to provide readers with
as wide and representative as possible a range of articulate voices
on any given controversy of the day, separates each one out to allow
it to be heard clearly and fairly, and encourages careful listening
to each of these well-crafted, thoughtfully expressed opinions,
supplied by some of today’s leading academics, thinkers, analysts,
politicians, policy makers, economists, activists, change agents, and
advocates. Only after listening to a wide range of opinions on an
issue, evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of each argument,
assessing how well the facts and available evidence mesh with the
stated opinions and conclusions, and thoughtfully and critically
examining one’s own beliefs and conscience can the reader begin
to arrive at his or her own conclusions and articulate his or her
own stance on the spotlighted controversy.
This process is facilitated and supported in each Current
Controversies volume by an introduction and chapter overviews
that provide readers with the essential context they need to begin
engaging with the spotlighted controversies, with the debates
surrounding them, and with their own perhaps shifting or nascent
opinions on them. Chapters are organized around several key
questions that are answered with diverse opinions representing all
points on the political spectrum. In its content, organization, and
methodology, readers are encouraged to determine the authors’
point of view and purpose; interrogate and analyze the various
arguments and their rhetoric and structure; evaluate the arguments’
strengths and weaknesses; test their claims against available facts
and evidence; judge the validity of the reasoning; and bring into
clearer, sharper focus the reader’s own beliefs and conclusions and
how they may differ from or align with those in the collection or
those of classmates.

x 12
 Foreword

Research has shown that reading comprehension skills

improve dramatically when students are provided with compelling,
intriguing, and relevant “discussable” texts. The subject matter of
these collections could not be more compelling, intriguing, or
urgently relevant to today’s students and the world they are poised
to inherit. The anthologized articles also provide the basis for
stimulating, lively, and passionate classroom debates. Students who
are compelled to anticipate objections to their own argument and
identify the flaws in those of an opponent read more carefully, think
more critically, and steep themselves in relevant context, facts, and
information more thoroughly. In short, using discussable text of the
kind provided by every single volume in the Current Controversies
series encourages close reading, facilitates reading comprehension,
fosters research, strengthens critical thinking, and greatly enlivens
and energizes classroom discussion and participation. The entire
learning process is deepened, extended, and strengthened.
If we are to foster a knowledgeable, responsible, active, and
engaged citizenry, we must provide readers with the intellectual,
interpretive, and critical-thinking tools and experience necessary
to make sense of the world around them and of the all-important
debates and arguments that inform it. We must encourage them not
to run away from or attempt to quell controversy but to embrace
it in a responsible, conscientious, and thoughtful way, to sharpen
and strengthen their own informed opinions by listening to
and critically analyzing those of others. This series encourages
respectful engagement with and analysis of current controversies
and competing opinions and fosters a resulting increase in the
strength and rigor of one’s own opinions and stances. As such, it
helps readers assume their rightful place in the public square and
provides them with the skills necessary to uphold their awesome
responsibility—guaranteeing the continued and future health of
a vital, vibrant, and free democracy.

13 x
Introduction

“[We need to use] history as a

genuine way of learning, not simply
as a convenient platform from
which we hold forth, either in self-
condemnation or self-congratulation.
It means, in the most fundamental
sense, meeting our obligations as
historians, which involve being
honest not only about ourselves but
about the environment in which we
have had to live.”
—John Lewis Gaddis1

H istorians have long studied and interpreted the past in an

effort to help understand the present and the future. They
ply new evidence or reinterpretation of existing evidence to test
existing historical theories, resulting in either confirmation or
repudiation and update. The dissolution of the Soviet Union,
for example, opened the doors to previously inaccessible
documentation. Analysis of newly available Soviet documents
resulted in many revelatory interpretations, including the extensive
massacres ordered by Joseph Stalin, leader of the Soviet Union
from 1922 to 1953. This resulted in extensive updates to historical
theory and analysis. In the twenty-first century, new digital tools
like the Geographic Information Systems—software that enables
the capture, collection, manipulation, and analysis of geographic
data—may also be used to shed light on historical events such as
the Civil War and the Holocaust. These new sources and analytical

x 14
 Introduction

tools, however, also present new challenges to the historian. On

the one hand, according to the American Historical Association,
revision is the lifeblood of historical scholarship.2 Historical “facts”
shouldn’t be accepted without inquiry. The ability to revise and
update historical narrative—historical revisionism—is necessary,
as historians must always review current theories and ensure they
are supported by evidence. For instance, legal scholar Annette
Gordon-Reed’s groundbreaking work on the relationship between
Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings impacted how these historical
figures and historical events are perceived and taught. Similarly,
exploration of new lands and colonialism are being reconsidered
to take into account the experiences of indigenous populations
and the impact these events had on them. Historical revisionism
allows different (and often subjugated) perspectives to be heard
and considered.
But on the other hand, as uncovered Soviet documentation has
revealed, historical revisionism can open the door to manipulation
by regional and national political agendas and the reinterpretation
of facts to suit that agenda. As he rose to power, Soviet leader
Joseph Stalin changed city names and Tsarist history to suit the
political needs of the nation’s Communist system, modifying the
historical narrative in the process. Unscrupulous politicians and
leaders may have an agenda to rewrite history to support their
own initiatives and beliefs even today. For example, in early 2018,
Poland combined patriotism and nationalism by passing a law that
absolved itself from complicity in Nazi atrocities and extermination
camps. By the summer, it backpedaled on that stance due to intense
reaction from Holocaust survivors and survivor advocates. The
Polish government modified the law to eliminate criminal penalties
for those who accused Poles of Nazi collaborators. New national
narratives have also given rise to revisions in Irish, Spanish,
Japanese, and Chinese history to excuse bad behavior. For example,
Japan has made moves to re-slant its imperialistic occupation of
China in the late 1930s to make it appear to be an occupation to
protect Asia from Western colonization. Our educational systems,

15 x
Historical Revisionism

particularly textbooks, tend to reflect national agendas, ensuring

these interpretations are passed on to future generations.
Ethical and moral issues also surround historical revisionism.
Specific historians have been highly criticized for unethical
historical revisionist work. For instance, former Emory University
history professor Michael Bellesiles falsified his research findings
about the scarcity of guns in early America, which sparked a
controversy with gun enthusiasts. Pulitzer Prize–winning historian
and author Joseph Ellis fabricated facts about his own involvement
in the Vietnam War. In Bellesiles’s case, his university held an
investigation into his research methods. Judged by a panel of his
peers, he was found guilty of falsification, and he resigned his post.
Through such downfalls spurred by credibility concerns, historians
demonstrate that historical information and records should not be
impacted and manipulated by historians’ biases. When the facts are
skewed in this way, revisionism can be strategically perpetuated for
individual gain. In the field of Holocaust studies, David Irving had
another agenda: to deny the Holocaust, giving rise to a case study
of unhelpful revisionism that has sparked passionate controversy.
As a discipline, historical revisionism is necessary to correct
previous mistakes. These corrections may occur through new
translations, new discoveries of primary documents, the opening
of previously unattainable archives and documents, or cultural
changes. Historical revisionism relies on the discovery of new
evidence for fresh interpretation and analysis. Revisionism that is
not based on new evidence is dependent on subjective opinions and
biased, manipulated evidence. Revisionism unsupported by new
evidence is often just casting contemporary moral judgments on
past events, which is known as historical negationism and generally
does not serve a useful purpose.
Often, the passage of time and evolution of cultural norms
may produce new perceptions. For example, existing monuments
and building names may cause controversy because their subjects
are no longer held in high esteem. It is not a matter of evidence
but of interpretation by modern standards. A recent case in point

x 16
 Introduction

involves the naming of a Yale University building after John C.

Calhoun and the naming of Princeton University’s Woodrow
Wilson School of International and Public Affairs, both figures
that have been reevaluated to account for changing perspectives
on race and racism.
Historians, researchers, scholars, and professional associations
debate the ethical motivation and need for historical revisionism
in Current Controversies: Historical Revisionism. They examine
definitional, evidentiary, professional, nationalistic, political, and
moral issues. In our era of fake news, it becomes imperative to
separate the wheat from the chaff and to develop good investigative
skills to find and hold onto the truth.

Notes
1. John Lewis Gaddis, “The Tragedy of Cold War History: Reflections on
Revisionism,” Foreign Affairs 73, no. 1 (Jan–Feb 1994), 154.
2. James McPherson, “From the President: Revisionist Historians,” American
Historical Association, September 1, 2003, accessed September 23, 2018, https://
www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/
september-2003/revisionist-historians.

17 x
 Chapter
1
Is Historical
Revisionism Useful?

x 18
Historical Thinking Must Address
Change, Causality, Context,
Complexity, and Contingency
Thomas Andrews and Flannery Burke
Thomas Andrews is a professor of US history at the University of
Colorado at Boulder. Flannery Burke is an associate professor of
history at Saint Louis University in Missouri. They are both former
Teachers for a New Era faculty members of California State University
at Northridge.

W hen we started working on Teachers for a New Era, a

Carnegie-sponsored initiative designed to strengthen
teacher training, we thought we knew a thing or two about our
discipline. As we began reading such works as Sam Wineburg’s
Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts, however, we
encountered an unexpected challenge.1 If our understandings
of the past constituted a sort of craft knowledge, how could we
distill and communicate habits of mind we and our colleagues had
developed through years of apprenticeship, guild membership, and
daily practice to university students so that they, in turn, could
impart these habits in K–12 classrooms?
In response, we developed an approach we call the “five C’s of
historical thinking.” The concepts of change over time, causality,
context, complexity, and contingency, we believe, together describe
the shared foundations of our discipline. They stand at the heart of
the questions historians seek to answer, the arguments we make,
and the debates in which we engage. These ideas are hardly new to
professional historians. But that is precisely their value: They make
our implicit ways of thought explicit to the students and teachers
whom we train. The five C’s do not encompass the universe of
historical thinking, yet they do provide a remarkably useful tool

“What Does It Mean to Think Historically?” by Thomas Andrews and Flannery Burke,
American Historical Association, January 1, 2007. Reprinted by permission.

19 x
Historical Revisionism

for helping students at practically any level learn how to formulate

and support arguments based on primary sources, as well as to
understand and challenge historical interpretations related in
secondary sources. In this article, we define the five C’s, explain
how each concept helps us to understand the past, and provide
some brief examples of how we have employed the five C’s when
teaching teachers. Our approach is necessarily broad and basic,
characteristics well suited for a foundation upon which we invite
our colleagues from kindergartens to research universities to build.

Change Over Time

The idea of change over time is perhaps the easiest of the C’s
to grasp. Students readily acknowledge that we employ and
struggle with technologies unavailable to our forebears, that we
live by different laws, and that we enjoy different cultural pursuits.
Moreover, students also note that some aspects of life remain the
same across time. Many Europeans celebrate many of the same
holidays that they did three or four hundred years ago, for instance,
often using the same rituals and words to mark a day’s significance.
Continuity thus comprises an integral part of the idea of change
over time.
Students often find the concept of change over time elementary.
Even individuals who claim to despise history can remember a
few dates and explain that some preceded or followed others. At
any educational level, timelines can teach change over time as
well as the selective process that leads people to pay attention to
some events while ignoring others. In our US survey class, we
often ask students to interview family and friends and write a
paper explaining how their family’s history has intersected with
major events and trends that we are studying. By discovering their
own family’s past, students often see how individuals can make
a difference and how personal history changes over time along
with major events.
As historians of the American West and environmental
historians, we often turn to maps to teach change over time.

x 20
 Is Historical Revisionism Useful?

The same space represented in different ways as political power,

economic structures, and cultural influences shift can often put in
shocking relief the differences that time makes. The work of repeat
photographers such as Mark Klett offers another compelling tool
for teaching change over time. Such photographers begin with a
historic landscape photograph, then take pains to re-take the shot
from the same site, at the same angle, using similar equipment, and
even under analogous conditions.2 While suburbs and industry
have overrun many western locales, students are often surprised
to see that some places have become more desolate and others
have hardly changed at all. The exercise engages students with a
non-written primary source, photographs, and demands that they
reassess their expectations regarding how time changes.

Context
Some things change, others stay the same—not a very interesting
story but reason for concern since history, as the best teachers will
tell you, is about telling stories. Good story telling, we contend,
builds upon an understanding of context. Given young people’s
fascination with narratives and their enthusiasm for imaginative
play, pupils (particularly elementary school students) often find
context the most engaging element of historical thinking. As
students mature, of course, they recognize that the past is not just
a playful alternate universe. Working with primary sources, they
discover that the past makes more sense when they set it within
two frameworks. In our teaching, we liken the first to the floating
words that roll across the screen at the beginning of every Star
Wars film. This kind of context sets the stage; the second helps
us to interpret evidence concerning the action that ensues. Texts,
events, individual lives, collective struggles—all develop within
a tightly interwoven world.
Historians who excel at the art of storytelling often rely
heavily upon context. Jonathan Spence’s Death of Woman Wang,
for example, skillfully re-creates 17th-century China by following
the trail of a sparsely documented murder. To solve the mystery,

21 x
Historical Revisionism

students must understand the time and place in which it occurred.

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich brings colonial New England to life by
concentrating on the details of textile production and basket
making in Age of Homespun. College courses regularly use the
work of both authors because they not only spark student interest,
but also hone students’ ability to describe the past and identify
distinctive elements of different eras.3
Imaginative play is what makes context, arguably the easiest,
yet also, paradoxically, the most difficult of the five C’s to teach.
Elementary school assignments that require students to research
and wear medieval European clothes or build a California mission
from sugar cubes both strive to teach context. The problem with
such assignments is that they often blur the lines between reality
and make-believe. The picturesque often trumps more banal or
more disturbing truths. Young children may never be able to get all
the facts straight. As one elementary school teacher once reminded
us, “We teach kids who still believe in Santa Claus.” Nonetheless,
elementary school teachers can be cautious in their re-creations,
and, most of all, they can be comfortable telling students when
they don’t know a given fact or when more research is necessary.
That an idea might require more thought or more research is a
valuable lesson at any age. The desire to re-create a world sometimes
drives students to dig more deeply into their books, a reaction few
teachers lament.
In our own classes, we have taught context using an assignment
that we call “Fact, Fiction, or Creative Memory.” In this exercise,
students wrestle with a given source and determine whether it is
primarily a work of history, fiction, or memory. We have asked
students to bring in a present-day representation of 1950s life and
explain what it teaches people today about life in 1950s America.
Then, we have asked the class to discuss if the representation is a
historically fair depiction of the era. We have also assigned textbook
passages and Don DeLillo’s Pafko at the Wall, then asked students
to compare them to decide which offers stronger insights into

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 Is Historical Revisionism Useful?

the character of Cold War America.4 Each of these assignments

addresses context, because each asks students to think about the
distinctions between representations of the past and the critical
thinking about the past that is history. Moreoever, each asks
students to weave together a variety of sources and assess the
reliability of each before incorporating them into a whole.

Causality
Historians use context, change over time, and causality to form
arguments explaining past change. While scientists can devise
experiments to test theories and yield data, historians cannot alter
past conditions to produce new information. Rather, they must
base their arguments upon the interpretation of partial primary
sources that frequently offer multiple explanations for a single
event. Historians have long argued over the causes of the Protestant
Reformation or World War I, for example, without achieving
consensus. Such uncertainty troubles some students, but history
classrooms are at their most dynamic when teachers encourage
pupils to evaluate the contributions of multiple factors in shaping
past events, as well as to formulate arguments asserting the primacy
of some causes over others.
To teach causality, we have turned to the stand-by activities
of the history classroom: debates and role-playing. After arming
students with primary sources, we ask them to argue whether
monetary or fiscal policy played a greater role in causing the
Great Depression. After giving students descriptions drawn from
primary sources of immigrant families in Los Angeles, we have
asked students to take on the role of various family members
and explain their reasons for immigrating and their reasons for
settling in particular neighborhoods. Neither exercise is especially
novel, but both fulfill a central goal of studying history: to develop
persuasive explanations of historical events and processes based
on logical interpretations of evidence.

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Historical Revisionism

Contingency
Contingency may, in fact, be the most difficult of the C’s. To argue
that history is contingent is to claim that every historical outcome
depends upon a number of prior conditions; that each of these prior
conditions depends, in turn, upon still other conditions; and so on.
The core insight of contingency is that the world is a magnificently
interconnected place. Change a single prior condition, and any
historical outcome could have turned out differently. Lee could
have won at Gettysburg, Gore might have won in Florida, China
might have inaugurated the world’s first industrial revolution.
Contingency can be an unsettling idea—so much so that people in
the past have often tried to mask it with myths of national and racial
destiny. The Pilgrim William Bradford, for instance, interpreted the
decimation of New England’s native peoples not as a consequence
of smallpox, but as a literal godsend.5 Two centuries later, American
ideologues chose to rationalize their unlikely fortunes—from the
purchase of Louisiana to the discovery of gold in California—as
their nation’s “Manifest Destiny.” Historians, unlike Bradford and
the apologists of westward expansion, look at the same outcomes
differently. They see not divine fate, but a series of contingent
results possessing other possibilities.
Contingency demands that students think deeply about past,
present, and future. It offers a powerful corrective to teleology,
the fallacy that events pursue a straight-arrow course to a pre-
determined outcome, since people in the past had no way of
anticipating our present world. Contingency also reminds us
that individuals shape the course of human events. What if Karl
Marx had decided to elude Prussian censors by emigrating to the
United States instead of France, where he met Frederick Engels?
To assert that the past is contingent is to impress upon students
the notion that the future is up for grabs, and that they bear some
responsibility for shaping the course of future history.
Contingency can be a difficult concept to present abstractly,
but it suffuses the stories historians tend to tell about individual

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 Is Historical Revisionism Useful?

lives. Futurology, however, might offer an even stronger tool for

imparting contingency than biography. Mechanistic views of
history as the inevitable march toward the present tend to collapse
once students see how different their world is from any predicted
in the past.

Complexity
Moral, epistemological, and causal complexity distinguish historical
thinking from the conception of “history” held by many non-
historians.6 Re-enacting battles and remembering names and dates
require effort but not necessarily analytical rigor. Making sense of
a messy world that we cannot know directly, in contrast, is more
confounding but also more rewarding.
Chronicles distill intricate historical processes into a mere
catalogue, while nostalgia conjures an uncomplicated golden age
that saves us the trouble of having to think about the past. Our
own need for order can obscure our understanding of how past
worlds functioned and blind us to the ways in which myths of
rosy pasts do political and cultural work in the present. Reveling
in complexity rather than shying away from it, historians seek
to dispel the power of chronicle, nostalgia, and other traps that
obscure our ability to understand the past on its own terms.
One of the most successful exercises we have developed for
conveying complexity in all of these dimensions is a mock debate
on Cherokee Removal. Two features of the exercise account for the
richness and depth of understanding that it imparts on students.
First, the debate involves multiple parties; the Treaty and Anti-
Treaty Parties, Cherokee women, John Marshall, Andrew Jackson,
northern missionaries, the State of Georgia, and white settlers
each offer a different perspective on the issue. Second, students
develop their understanding of their respective positions using the
primary sources collected in Cherokee Removal: A Brief History
with Documents by Theda Perdue and Michael Green.7 While it
can be difficult to assess what students learn from such exercises,

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we have noted anecdotally that, following the exercise, students

seem much less comfortable referring to “American” or “Indian”
positions as monolithic identities.

Conclusion
Our experiments with the five C’s have confronted us with several
challenges. These concepts offer a fluid tool for engaging historical
thought at multiple levels, but they can easily degenerate into a
checklist. Students who favor memorization over analysis seem
inclined to recite the C’s without necessarily understanding them.
Moreover, as habits of mind, the five C’s develop only with practice.
Though primary and secondary schools increasingly emphasize
some aspects of these themes, particularly the use of primary
sources as evidence, more attention to the five C’s with appropriate
variations over the course of K–12 education would help future
citizens not only to care about history, but also to contemplate
it. It is our hope that this might help students to see the past not
simply as prelude to our present, nor a list of facts to memorize,
a cast of heroes and villains to cheer and boo, nor as an itinerary
of places to tour, but rather as an ideal field for thinking long and
hard about important questions.

Notes
1. Sam Wineburg, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future
of Teaching the Past (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001).
2. Mark Klett, Kyle Bajakian, William L. Fox, Michael Marshall, Toshi Ueshina,
and Byron G. Wolfe, Third Views, Second Sights: A Rephotographic Survey of the
American West (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 2004).
3. Jonathan D. Spence, Death of Woman Wang (New York: Viking, 1978); Laurel
Thatcher Ulrich, The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an
American Myth (New York: Knopf, 2001).
4. Don DeLillo, Pafko at the Wall: A Novella (New York: Scribner’s, 2001).
5. William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, ed. Samuel Eliot Morison (New York:
Random House, 1952).
6. Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of
History in American Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).
7. Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green, The Cherokee Removal: A Brief History with
Documents 2nd ed. (Boston and New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2005).

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Holocaust Education Retools the
Encyclopedia for Today’s Learners
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington,
DC, is a living memorial to the Holocaust, which exterminated six
million Jews and other targeted groups. It fights against intolerance
and advocates for genocide prevention.

W e live in a digital era riddled with distractions that compete

for our attention. We are online when we are on the go and
when we are not. Young people spend an average of nine hours
a day on devices chatting with friends, playing games, watching
videos—and sometimes doing all three at once. The Museum
seeks to engage youth in critical thinking about the history of the
Holocaust and its lessons for today’s world. How can we redefine
Holocaust education for the digital age?
In addition to the challenge of competing claims on attention,
we are witnessing an increase in Holocaust denial and antisemitism,
spread primarily through social media and the Internet. To
combat this hatred, the Museum must expand access to accurate
information about the Holocaust and help young people discern
the truth amid an onslaught of misinformation and falsehoods.
“We know that explorations of Holocaust history can both
spark learning and increase motivation to make a difference
in the world,” said Sarah Ogilvie, the Museum’s chief program
officer. “Now we must determine how best to harness evolving
technologies to provide new experiences that enable immersive
learning, scholarship, and collaboration.”

“Holocaust Education in the Digital Age,” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum,
April 19, 2017. Reprinted by permission.

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Historical Revisionism

Asking Why, Not What

Traditionally, Holocaust history has been taught with a focus
solely on what happened, when, where, and to whom. That is
the approach the Museum adopted when it debuted its online
Holocaust Encyclopedia nearly 20 years ago. At that time, the
encyclopedia contained roughly 130 articles in English. Today,
it includes 840 articles; has been translated into 15 languages,
including Arabic, Farsi, Russian, and Spanish; and annually serves
more than 14 million people all over the world.
Although comprehensive in scope, the encyclopedia lacks
a critical thinking framework that encourages people to ask
questions, draw connections, and analyze issues and ideas carefully.
“Presenting facts and figures alone does not help people see the
connections between this history and the world today, and their
role in it,” said Ogilvie.
The Museum is undertaking a massive transformation of this
core educational resource to prompt reflection on key questions
from the Holocaust: Why do societies fail? Why do individuals
become perpetrators, collaborators, or onlookers? What are the
warning signs of genocide? Why are they ignored?
As part of this transformation, the reenvisioned Holocaust
Encyclopedia will reflect changes both in the way people learn and
in how they access information online. Museum historians and
digital experts are retooling the articles to enhance context setting,
optimize them for display on mobile devices, and incorporate
compelling visuals that underscore the relevance of this history.
“The main goal is greater accessibility for students and a general
audience,” said Sarah Lumbard, director of Museum Experience
and Digital Media, who is overseeing the project. “We want each
person who engages with the encyclopedia to learn something
new, to pause and reflect, and ideally to wrestle with the question
of why the Holocaust was possible.”
The new encyclopedia, expected to come online in summer
2018, also will feature recent research and scholarship on the
Holocaust, as well as more items from the Museum’s collection,

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 Is Historical Revisionism Useful?

which has grown dramatically and is undergoing its own digital

transformation so that it can be accessed anywhere, anytime.

New Pathways for Learning

Digital platforms provide myriad opportunities for participatory
and informal learning, as well as for interacting with primary
sources. Over the past year, the Museum piloted two new
experiences for high school and college students that demonstrate
this potential as it relates to Holocaust history.
In conjunction with its next major initiative on Americans
and the Holocaust, the Museum developed a “citizen history”
project—History Unfolded: US Newspapers and the Holocaust—
that involves high school students in researching what ordinary
Americans knew about Nazi persecution of Jews while it was
occurring. Specifically, students look in archives of their local
newspapers for articles on key events related to the Holocaust.
To date, approximately 1,100 people have submitted more than
8,000 articles from newspapers in every state plus the District
of Columbia.
Their findings are available in an online database accessible to
the general public, scholars, and historians who, until now, had
studied coverage of the Holocaust only in major metropolitan
newspapers, such as the New York Times. The database includes
news about the Holocaust in papers big and small from Florida
(“Nazi Plan for Wiping Out Jews To Be Outlined,” November 25,
1942, Sarasota Herald-Tribune) to Alaska (“Polish Jews Doomed
to Die,” December 4, 1942, the Petersburg Press). The information
uncovered can help paint a fuller picture of American reactions
to the Nazi threat.
For university students and their instructors, the Museum
recently created a one-of-a-kind tool that curates and contextualizes
primary sources created by Jews to document their experiences
during the Holocaust. Experiencing History: Jewish Perspectives
on the Holocaust features a cross-section of materials from the
Museum’s collection, such as diaries, letters, reports, photographs,

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Historical Revisionism

historical film footage, and oral testimonies, along with a brief

description of the historical context in which the material was
created, its author or authors, and its relation to larger themes
about the Holocaust.
“Existing online source collections did not provide adequate
historical background information to facilitate their use in the
university curriculum,” said Emil Kerenji, applied research scholar
in the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced
Holocaust Studies. “In addition, they privilege perpetrator
documents, which reduce the victims to the faceless category of
‘Jew’ and silence their individual voices. We sought to correct this
marginalization, an effort that is both intellectually and ethically
vital for the study of the Holocaust at the university level.”
Currently in use on some 200 campuses, the tool has proved
valuable both for the information it provides and for its user-
friendly design. Faculty can easily curate a selection of materials
applicable to the lesson they are teaching and encourage students
to explore it individually or in small groups. “The resource allowed
me to give the students increasingly complex assignments where
they learned how the individual diarists’ writings fit in with the
overall chronology of the Holocaust,” said a history professor from
South Dakota.
As the Museum continues to develop its digital tools, it is
leveraging its most precious asset: the world’s most comprehensive
collection of Holocaust evidence. The collection is the foundation
for understanding this history in all its complexity and will serve
as a permanent rejoinder to deniers. Even as the digital age opens
new pathways for exploring Holocaust history, haters exploit
new technologies to peddle misinformation, minimization, or
outright denial.
“In the midst of this battle for ideas, the Museum must be the
go-to resource for the truth about the Holocaust and what this
history means for us today,” said Ogilvie.

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Revisionism Effectively Challenges
Hegemonic Ideas
Harry Targ
Harry Targ is a professor of political science and director of the
interdisciplinary program in peace studies at Purdue University in
West Lafayette, Indiana.

S ince the end of the Second World War, undergraduate and

graduate education in international relations has been largely
shaped by four theoretical approaches. As an undergraduate in
the 1950s, I was exposed to the logic and rhetorical elegance
of theories of political realism. The textbook used in my first
course in international politics was a later version of Hans
Morgenthau’s Politics among Nations, and in my subsequent
courses, Morgenthau’s version of realpolitik was supplemented
by the work of realist writers such as George Kennan, Reinhold
Niebuhr, Henry Kissinger, and E. H. Carr. While varying widely in
their politics and background, all saw the root causes of violence
and war as grounded in “human nature.”
As a graduate student in the 1960s, I was inspired by the new
science of international politics and the claim that by gathering
enough data and analyzing it carefully, using the latest statistical
techniques, scholars could develop an integrated theory of
international politics that could replace limiting assumptions
about human nature. We could study war, intra-state violence,
revolution, economic cooperation, and institution-building with
rigor. At last, scholars could develop a science of human behavior
that would parallel the natural and physical sciences.
Based on the lingering assumptions of realism and the passion
for constructing a science of international relations, two areas were
subjected to specific inquiry: national security and modernization.

“Cold War Revisionism Revisited,” by Harry Targ, Monthly Review Press, December 1,
2017. Reprinted by permission.

31 x
Historical Revisionism

Security studies was designed to use the tools of science to

determine how nations could best defend their physical space
and deter aggression. Modernization studies emphasized processes
of economic development that could improve living standards,
particularly through markets and democratic institutions. In the
end, the American field of international politics was dominated
by this nexus of realism, behavioralism (the quasi-scientific study
of international behavior), security studies, and modernization.
Not coincidentally, these approaches to research and
education in international politics arose at the height of the Cold
War. The United States was embarking on a dramatic escalation
of its adventure in Southeast Asia, and defense spending was
expanding such that President Eisenhower warned of a growing
“military-industrial complex.” As the war in Vietnam grew more
controversial, the prevailing international-relations perspectives
were increasingly challenged, both in the classrooms and the
streets. But for the most part, studies based on paradigms of
realism, behavioralism, security, and modernization remained
disconnected from broader debates about the world.
To the era’s activists and radicals, the cause of this disparity
between the academic study of international politics and the social
reality of the anti-war movement was obvious. The former was
influenced and supported by governmental institutions, including
the Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency,
and in the main, its theories and approaches served intellectually
to justify US foreign policy—from nuclear buildups and military
interventions to sponsoring coups and assassinations. In sum,
the midcentury American science of international politics, which
shaped a generation of students, was an ideological tool serving
the foreign policy of the United States and its allies.

Political Economy and Foreign Policy

Anti-imperial sentiment has had a long history in public discourse
on US foreign policy. But by the 1950s, the virulently anti-
communist and conformist environments of academia, the media,

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 Is Historical Revisionism Useful?

and electoral politics had caused discussion of the United States

as an imperial power virtually to disappear. The last prominent
political figure to criticize US Cold War policy was Henry Wallace,
the Progressive Party candidate for president in 1948. A year after
Wallace’s defeat, eleven unions were purged from the Congress of
Industrial Organizations for their leftwing politics, including their
support for Wallace.1 The voice of militant labor was silenced, and
this was followed, more famously, by anti-communist purges in
radio, television, and the movies. Prominent progressive figures
lost their jobs, livelihoods, and access to a broad public.
Academic fields were transformed into ideological training
grounds in support of the United States’ mission in the world. In
history and social science, new scholarship portrayed an American
politics, history, and society founded on pluralist democracy rather
than political elitism, consensus-building rather than class struggle,
and groups, not classes, as the basic units of society.
Indeed, in the 1950s, some realists represented the most
“radical” of critics of US foreign policy. While they did not highlight
economic interest, the pursuit of empire, or overreaction to the
Soviet threat, they did argue that US national interests had to be
defined more carefully in security terms. They challenged the view
that moral purpose and global vision should or could guide foreign
policy. Theorists such as Morgenthau claimed that international
relations should be motivated by needs of national security, not
some grand campaign against international communism.
At the same time, however, a handful of historians began to
challenge these dominant narratives. In particular, the history
department at the University of Wisconsin encouraged young
scholars to examine the economic taproots of US foreign policy. In
1959, the university’s most influential historian, William Appleman
Williams, broke new ground with The Tragedy of American
Diplomacy. His students and others began to challenge reigning
orthodoxy about international relations and the historic role of
the United States in the world. Williams documented the rise
of an American empire that expanded after the Civil War, while

33 x
Historical Revisionism

other historians began to conceive of the conquest of the North

American continent as part of an empire-building process founded
on the slaughter of millions of native peoples and the seizure of
a large section of the landmass of Mexico. Still others studied the
kidnapping and enslavement of millions of Africans as central to
the construction of the Southern cotton economy, and ultimately
to the global capitalist system.
In The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, along with The
Contours of American History (1961) and The Roots of the
Modern American Empire (1969), Williams located the origins
of US imperial expansion in the rise of agricultural production
and the need for a growing economy to find markets overseas,
particularly after domestic outlets had been capped with the closing
of the “frontier.” Drawing on Frederick Jackson Turner’s “frontier
thesis,” US leaders believed that a new, global American empire
was needed to sell products, secure natural resources, and find
investment opportunities.
The rift between realist thinking and the newer radical
scholarship is clearly illustrated by their contrasting interpretations
of Secretary of State John Hay’s articulation of a new Open Door
policy during the administration of William McKinley in 1898.
In a series of notes, Hay warned European leaders that the United
States regarded Asia as “open” to US trade and investment, as
occasioned by the disintegration of the Chinese state into civil war
and the occupation of the country’s regions by European states and
Japan. The United States insisted that unfettered access to markets
in China be honored—and by implication, that the closing of such
markets to US goods might lead to confrontation.
For realists, the Hay “Open Door Notes” illustrated the
propensity of policymakers to make threats that far exceeded any
likely action. The strategic gap between rhetoric and reality, they
argued, had long characterized US foreign policy, from the 1890s to
the era of President Woodrow Wilson’s calls for democratization to
the vehement stance against the spread of communism expressed
by every Cold War president.2

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 Is Historical Revisionism Useful?

Revisionists such as Williams instead argued that the Open

Door Notes presaged the emerging US global imperial vision.3 Hay’s
demands that the world respect the country’s right to penetrate
economies everywhere would become the guiding standard for
the US role in the world.
Some of Williams’s writings seemed to emphasize material
reality—the needs of capitalism—and others the beliefs held by
elites, namely the overriding necessity of new markets. Among
the revisionist school of historians, which also included Lloyd
Gardner, Gar Alperowitz, and Thomas Paterson, was Gabriel Kolko,
author of The Politics of War and, with Joyce Kolko, The Limits of
Power: United States Foreign Policy from 1945 to 1954.4 In these
volumes, the authors laid out in more graphic and precise terms
the material underpinnings of US Cold War policy. The Kolkos
emphasized the material and ideological menace that international
communism, particularly the example of the Soviet Union and
popular Communist parties in the third world, represented to
the construction of a global capitalist empire after the Second
World War.
For the Kolkos and other revisionists, the expansion of
socialism constituted a global threat to capital accumulation. With
the end of the Second World War, there were widespread fears
that the decline in wartime demand for US products would bring
economic stagnation and a return to the depression of the 1930s.
The Marshall Plan, lauded as a humanitarian program for the
rebuilding of war-torn Europe, was at its base a program to increase
demand and secure markets for US products. With the specter
of an international communist threat, military spending, another
source of demand, would likewise help retain customers, including
the US government itself. The idea of empire, which Williams so
stressed, was underscored by the materiality of capitalist dynamics.
The historical revisionists thus introduced a political-economic
approach to the study of foreign policy. This frame emphasized
different factors shaping US global behavior than did those that
singularly emphasized national security. The realists referred

35 x
Historical Revisionism

to human nature and the inevitable attributes of state behavior,

particularly the pursuit of power. The traditionalists highlighted
the threat to security of certain kinds of states, mostly from
international communism. For them, the modern international
system was driven by a vast ideological contest between free and
democratic states and totalitarian ones. Power, security, and anti-
communism were together central to understanding US foreign
policy, not economic interest.
The revisionist approach emphasized several different
components of policy. First, the new historians saw fundamental
connections between economics and politics. Whether the
theoretical starting point was Adam Smith or Karl Marx, they
looked to the underlying dynamics, needs, and goals of the
economic system as sources of policy. These writers began from
the assumption that economic interest infused political systems
and international relations.
While the realists acknowledged economic interest as a factor
of some importance to policy-making, it was considered merely
one of a multiplicity of variables shaping international behavior.
By contrast, revisionists argued that while the forces of security,
ideology, elite personalities, and even “human nature” had some
role to play, all were influenced in the end by economic imperatives.
The behavior of dominant nation-states from the seventeenth
through the twentieth century involved trade, investment,
financial speculation, the pursuit of slave or cheap labor, and
access to natural resources. The pursuit of economic gain drove
the system of international relations, and while sometimes this
required cooperation, at other times it necessitated war, conquest,
and colonization.
The revisionists made a further innovation at the level of
discourse: during the Cold War, the mere mention of the word
“capitalism” signaled that the user was a Marxist. Consequently,
without naming the economic system, any hope of analyzing its
relation to politics and policy was foreclosed. And that meant
ignoring the possible relevance of the dominant economic system

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 Is Historical Revisionism Useful?

from the fifteenth century on. But, as has been suggested, some
historians and social scientists who employed the political-
economic perspective recognized that as an economic system
evolved, international relations changed with it. This was so because
capitalist enterprises and their supporting states accumulated more
and more wealth, expanded at breakneck speed, consolidated
both economic and political power, and sometimes built armies
to facilitate further growth.
Some historians, borrowing from Marx, studied the evolution
of capitalism by analyzing the accumulation of capital and newer
forms of the organization of labor. At first, theorists wrote of the
rise of capitalism out of feudalism. Marx called this the age of
“primitive” or “primary” accumulation, because profit came from
the enslavement of peoples, the conquest of territories, and the
use of brute force. Subsequently, trade became a significant feature
of the new system, and capitalists traversed the globe to sell the
products produced by slave and wage labor.
This era of commercial capitalism was dwarfed, however, by
the emergence of industrial capitalism. New production techniques
developed, particularly factory systems and mass production.
The promotion and sale of products in domestic and global
markets increased. By the 1870s, the accumulation of capital in
products and profits created enormous surpluses in the developed
countries. These required new outlets for sale, new ways to put
money capital to work, and ever-expanding concentrations of
capital in manufacturing and financial institutions. By the mid-
twentieth century, some theorists wrote of a new era of “monopoly
capitalism,” a global economic system in which most commercial
and financial activities were controlled by a small number of
multinational corporations and banks.5
The revisionists of the 1960s argued that much of this
economic history was ignored entirely by mainstream analyses
of international relations. They responded by uncovering the
reality of the US role in the world, concentrating on specific
cases of links between economics and politics. These included the

37 x
Historical Revisionism

influence of the country’s largest oil companies on the US-managed

overthrow of Mohammed Mosaddegh in Iran in 1953 or the coup
in Guatemala in 1954 after president Jacobo Árbenz threatened
to nationalize lands owned by the United Fruit Company. And
while some revisionists did see the Soviet Union as a security
threat to the United States, the broad consensus of the political-
economy approach was that socialism as a world force threatened
the continued global expansion of capitalism. As the nature of
the anti-capitalist forces and challenges in particular countries
changed, so too did the needs and tactics of US foreign policy.
The political-economy approach also regarded class structure
as central to the understanding of the foreign policy of any nation.
Some classes dominate the political system at the expense of others.
In capitalist societies, those who own or control the means of
production dominate political life. Therefore, while realists and
traditionalists prioritize states as the most important actors in world
affairs, political economists see states and classes as inextricably
connected. Writers of all schools write about rich and poor states
and powerful and weak states. Most, however, stop there. The state
is central. Political economists and historical revisionists connected
states to classes, and vice versa.
Finally, while revisionist historians worked on the principle
that class interest controlled the foreign policy process, they tended
to take a “hegemonic” view of that control, leaving little room
in their theoretical frame for counterforces of resistance. The
resulting analyses often seemed to imply that the United States
was omniscient, all-powerful, unbeatable, and unchangeable
in its conduct. After the Cuban Revolution and the Vietnam
War, however, some analysts began to focus on challenges to
US hegemony around the world, especially in the global South.
However, in the main, the historical revisionists developed a
top-down understanding of international relations. Much of
the anti-American ferment in the world, including anticolonial
struggles, revolutions, and third world coalition-building, received
insufficient attention.

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 Is Historical Revisionism Useful?

The Revisionist Legacy

Ways of thinking have consequences. Generations of students in
the twentieth century were exposed to analyses of international
relations that emphasized certain purportedly iron laws of state
behavior. Others were taught that international politics was best
understood by embarking on statistically based studies that
disaggregated political reality into a complex array of discrete
variables. Still other students of international relations were
encouraged to specialize in security studies or modernization and
democratization. As the Vietnam War escalated, activists began to
turn to a small group of historians for an alternative understanding
of US involvement in the country. The activism and scholarship of
the Vietnam era began the process of challenging the hegemony
of intellectual systems that had generally supported the US role
in the world.
Although that hegemony has been weakened, the traditional
ways of studying international relations in the United States remain
influential. Many studies are ahistorical, atomizing political reality
while marginalizing the causal role of economics, and ignoring
the effect of class interests in the making of foreign policy. The
old enemy, international communism, is gone, but a new one,
international terrorism, has taken its place. And like their Cold
War precursors, mainstream theorists of international relations
normalize war, regime change, and an ever-expanding military
and security state.
Hegemonic thinking during the Vietnam era was questioned
by scholars who challenged professional barriers and ideological
taboos. Social movements demanded new thinking about world
affairs. And scholar-activists began to revisit the work of maligned
theorists such as Marx and V. I. Lenin. Historical curiosity
increasingly led them to ask not only what happened, but why.
Breaking through hegemonic ideas remains a vital task today.

39 x
Historical Revisionism

Notes
1. An old but still compelling history of US labor struggles and anti-communism in
the early years of the Cold War can be found in Richard O. Boyer and Herbert M.
Morais, Labor’s Untold Story (New York: United Electrical, Radio and Machine
Workers of America, 1955).
2. See George F. Kennan, American Diplomacy, 1900–1950 (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1969).
3. William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (New York:
Delta, 1962).
4. Lloyd C. Gardner, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and Hans J. Morgenthau, The Origins of
the Cold War (Waltham, MA: Genn, 1970); Gar Alperowitz, Atomic Diplomacy
(New York: Vintage, 1965); Thomas G. Paterson, Soviet-American Confrontation
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973); Gabriel Kolko, The Roots of
American Foreign Policy (Boston: Beacon, 1969) and The Politics of War (New
York: Vintage, 1968); Joyce Kolko and Gabriel Kolko, The Limits of Power (New
York: Harper, 1972).
5. Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review
Press, 1966).

x 40
Revisionism Has Negative Connotations
James McPherson
James McPherson is an American historian and professor emeritus
at Princeton University. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1989 for History
for Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era.

T his summer the Bush administration thought it had discovered

a surefire tactic to discredit critics of its Iraq adventure.
President Bush followed the lead of his national security adviser
Condoleezza Rice to accuse such critics of practicing “revisionist
history.” Neither Bush nor Rice offered a definition of this phrase,
but their body language and tone of voice appeared to suggest that
they wanted listeners to understand “revisionist history” to be a
consciously falsified or distorted interpretation of the past to serve
partisan or ideological purposes in the present. Or did George Bush
and Condoleezza Rice mean to suggest only that those who now
criticize the administration’s Iraq policy have revised their earlier
opinions? But few if any have done so. Almost all the historians
I know of who maintain that the evidence for Iraq’s weapons of
mass destruction or support for Al Qaeda is ambiguous or false
were saying the same things six months or a year ago. All who then
insisted that Iraq posed little threat to the United States or its allies
and that a war with Iraq would endanger American lives, security,
and national interest far more than a continuation of the policy of
containment and UN inspections, have not changed their position.
Whatever Bush and Rice meant by “revisionist historians,” it is
safe to say that they did not mean it favorably. The 14,000 members
of this Association, however, know that revision is the lifeblood of
historical scholarship. History is a continuing dialogue between
the present and the past. Interpretations of the past are subject to
change in response to new evidence, new questions asked of the

“Revisionist Historians,” by James McPherson, American Historical Association,

September 1, 2003. Reprinted by permission.

41 x
Historical Revisionism

evidence, new perspectives gained by the passage of time. There

is no single, eternal, and immutable “truth” about past events and
their meaning. The unending quest of historians for understanding
the past—that is, “revisionism”—is what makes history vital and
meaningful. Without revisionism, we might be stuck with the
images of Reconstruction after the American Civil War that were
conveyed by D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation and Claude Bowers’s
The Tragic Era. Were the Gilded Age entrepreneurs “Captains of
Industry” or “Robber Barons”? Without revisionist historians who
have done research in new sources and asked new and nuanced
questions, we would remain mired in one or another of these
stereotypes. Supreme Court decisions often reflect a “revisionist”
interpretation of history as well as of the Constitution. Would
President Bush and Condoleezza Rice wish to associate themselves
with Southern political leaders of the 1950s who condemned Chief
Justice Earl Warren and his colleagues as revisionist historians
because their decision (which, incidentally, was based in part on
the research of historian John Hope Franklin and others) in Brown
v. Board of Education struck down the accepted version of history
and law laid down by the Court in Plessy v. Ferguson?
The administration’s pejorative usage of “revisionist history”
to denigrate critics by imputing to them a falsification of history
is scarcely surprising. But it is especially ironic, considering that
the president and his principal advisers have themselves been
practitioners par excellence of this kind of revisionism. Iraq offers
many examples. To justify an unprovoked invasion of that country,
the president repeatedly exaggerated or distorted ambiguous
intelligence reports to portray Iraqi possession of or programs
to develop biological, chemical, and nuclear “weapons of mass
destruction” that posed an imminent threat to the United States. In
his State of the Union message on January 28, President Bush made
clear his acceptance of a British intelligence report that “Saddam
Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from
Africa” to develop nuclear weapons. This assertion was “revisionist
history” with a vengeance; the US government knew at the time

x 42
 Is Historical Revisionism Useful?

it was received that the intelligence was unreliable and learned

soon afterwards that it was based on forged documents. Yet not
until July did the administration concede its gaffe—and then tried
to blame the CIA. That agency took the fall, but with respect to
another administration justification for the war—Saddam Hussein’s
alleged ties to Al Qaeda—the CIA refused to provide any aid and
comfort. An official in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence
and Research offered (in the New York Times of July 12, 2003) a
pointed description of the kind of revisionist history practiced
by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al: “This administration has had a
faith-based intelligence attitude: ‘We know the answers, give us
the intelligence to support those answers.’”
In its foreign policy, too, the Bush administration has a strong
commitment to this kind of revisionism. During his campaign
for the presidency, Bush dismissed the previous administration’s
efforts at “nation building” with contempt. The government is now
engaged in the most expensive experiment in nation-building in
more than a half century—and so far the least successful. The
Pentagon has constantly revised upward the cost of rebuilding
Iraq—which at this writing stands at $180 billion and counting.
Coming into office with a surplus in the federal budget and a
commitment to a balanced budget, the administration is running
the largest deficits in history, which will probably continue into
the indefinite and seemingly infinite future. In his campaign for
the presidency, Bush also insisted that as a superpower, the United
States had an obligation to be “humble” in its dealings with other
nations. Vive la revision!
For many of us, the term “revisionist historians” recalls
distasteful memories from the 1970s of Holocaust deniers who
called themselves “revisionists.” One hopes that in resorting to this
phrase now, the president’s associates are not seeking to falsely
and maliciously link present-day critics of the administration to
those who misrepresented the past for nefarious ends. But even
if they are not guilty of such an insinuation, by misusing the term
“revisionist historians” to derisively deflect criticism, Condoleezza

43 x
Historical Revisionism

Rice and her cohorts are denigrating a legitimate and essential

activity of historians.
The judgmental tone of Rice’s derogatory reference to
“revisionist historians” brings to mind a review of her book
The Soviet Union and the Czechoslovak Army, 1948–1983, in the
December 1985 issue of the American Historical Review (p. 1236)
when she was an assistant professor at Stanford. The reviewer
claimed that Rice “frequently does not sift facts from propaganda
and valid information from disinformation or misinformation.”
In addition, according to the reviewer, she “passes judgments and
expresses opinions without adequate knowledge of the facts” and
her “writing abounds with meaningless phrases.” I cannot testify
for or against the accuracy and fairness of this review. But I am
tempted to wonder, in the immortal words of Yogi Berra, whether
we are experiencing deja vu all over again.

x 44
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 Um Mitternacht

Gelassen stieg die Nacht ans Land,

Lehnt träumend an der Berge Wand,
Ihr Auge sieht die goldne Wage nun
Der Zeit in gleichen Schalen stille ruhn;
Und kecker rauschen die Quellen hervor;
Sie singen der Mutter, der Nacht, ins Ohr
Vom Tage,
Vom heute gewesenen Tage.

Das uralt alte Schlummerlied,

Sie achtet’s nicht, sie ist es müd;
Ihr klingt des Himmels Bläue süßer noch,
Der flücht’gen Stunden gleichgeschwungnes Joch.
Doch immer behalten die Quellen das Wort,
Es singen die Wasser im Schlafe noch fort
Vom Tage,
Vom heute gewesenen Tage.

Eduard Mörike
 Sternentrost

Es gäb noch mehr der Zähren

In dieser trüben Welt,
Wenn nicht die Sterne wären
Dort an dem Himmelszelt;
Wenn sie nicht niederschauten
In jeder klaren Nacht
Und uns dabei vertrauten,
Daß Einer droben wacht.

Martin Greif
 Der Sternseher

Die Jahre gehn vorüber,

Auch ich geh bald zur Ruh,
Da schau ich immer lieber
Dem Lauf der Sterne zu.

Ich kann mich oft noch freuen

Recht wie ein großes Kind,
Wenn abends die Getreuen
Auf ihren Wegen sind.

Mich dünkt, sie stehn so stille,

Sie schaun und ruhn zumeist,
Da doch ein ew’ger Wille
Sie zur Vollendung reißt.

So staun ich wohl in Fernen

Und sinn und blick empor.
Da spricht mir aus den Sternen
Mein Herz ein Gleichnis vor:

Du füllst den Tag mit Hasten,

Und bleibt doch leeres Spiel.
Hier glaubst du still zu rasten
Und näherst dich dem Ziel.

Carl Busse
 In Harmesnächten

Die Rechte streckt’ ich schmerzlich oft

In Harmesnächten
Und fühlt’ gedrückt sie unverhofft
Von einer Rechten –
Was Gott ist, wird in Ewigkeit
Kein Mensch ergründen;
Doch will er treu sich allezeit
Mit uns verbünden.

C. F. Meyer
 Ansage

Ein Käuzlein rief vergangne Nacht

Vom Berg ins Dorf hinein: »Komm mit!«
Lang horcht ich hin, als ich erwacht,
Und immer rief es noch: »Komm mit!«

Wie dann vom Turm die Zwölfe schlug,

Ins Läuten kam die Glock’: »Komm mit!«
Als käm’s zum letzten Atemzug
Von einem bald, so rief’s: »Komm mit!«

Martin Greif
 Mondspuk
Der Vollmond leuchtet hoch am bläulichen Himmel; sein Glanz hat
das letzte, weiße Wölkchen verzehrt; sogar die Sterne sind in seiner
Lichtflut ertrunken, und nur die großen Himmelsbilder glänzen noch
neben ihm. Von unten herauf funkelt die Wintererde festlich im
Schnee; Berge recken dort ihre Silberköpfe empor, und mitten in den
Bergen drin, am Fuß eines Hügels, liegt das Dorf lautlos im
Mondschein.
Leer und hell sind alle Gassen des Dorfs. Riesig ragt die Kirche
aus den niedrigen Häuschen hervor, ein mächtiges, steinernes
Ungetüm; wie ein hoher Zaubererhut glitzert der spitze Kirchturm
darüber. Zwei Lukenaugen schauen finster aufgerissen unter dem
Hut. Auf einmal fängts an, im Innern des steinernen Tiers zu
rumoren; es rasselt, es stöhnt, es zieht schwerfällig Atem: ’s will
Mitternacht schlagen. Aber seltsam: es stöhnt und rasselt, es wird
wieder still, und kein Glockenschlag hat geschallt. Statt dessen in
den dunklen Lukenaugen droben glüht’s auf, und eine schnarrende
Stimme schreit hinaus ins Land:
»Eins, zwei, drei … zwölf!«
Da tut’s einen Rumpler unten im Dorf. Das ist im Haus vom
Wegmacher-Jackl gewesen. Der selber ist aus dem Bett hart auf die
Füße gefahren und wandelt quer durch die Stube. Aber ganz
abwesend schaut er drein. Er geht ans Fenster; ’s ist dicht mit Efeu
zugewachsen; und sitzt nieder. Der Mond scheint durch den Efeu,
malt helle Flecke aufs wetterbraune Runzelgesicht und blickt grad
hinein in die Augen …
Ganz stad ist’s draußen, und grausam hell, und alle Haustüren
stehn weit offen.
»Was ist denn des?« denkt der Jackl: »is doch nachtschlafende
Zeit!«
 Aber die Haustüren stehen offen, und jetzt sieht er’s: eine ganz
leise, leuchtende Schafherde wimmelt die Gasse hinab; schneeweiß,
wollig, flockig wimmelt’s, wuselt’s durcheinander. Ein mondheller
Wolfshund rennt an ihr hin, umkreist sie; Funken tanzen aus seinem
Borstenfell, flüssiges Silber trieft ihm aus dem Maul. Und hinter der
Herde drein wankt der Hirt, in blauem Mantel, ein alter Mann. Tief
sitzt ihm der große Glanzhut im Gesicht, daß nur der welke Mund
und das bleiche Kinn hervorschauen; an langem Stecken wankt er
hin und bewegt die Lippen. Er singt.

»In Gottes Namen

Die Mondschaf treib ich. Amen!«

klingt’s kaum hörbar in die Stube, während er vorbeischwankt. Und

Hirt und Hund und Herde sind verschwunden.
Lange Eiszapfen funkeln an den Dachrinnen. Der Schnee strahlt
von tausend feurigen Sternlein. Mit schlafschwerem Blick schaut der
Jackl hinaus in die weiße Pracht, die so stumm ist und so kalt.
»Wie einsam, daß is, ha, wie einsam!«
Auf einmal träppelt’s daher durch die Mondnacht – ein Hündlein
träppelt über den glitzernden Schnee. Ganz allein. Graufarben ist’s,
ein Krummbein, ein Dackeltier ist’s. Kerzengerade hat’s seinen
Schwanz aufgestellt und wedelt leis mit der Spitze, und seine langen
Ohrwatscheln zittern, wie es dahinläuft. –
»Ah, Narr! Is denn das nit der Woidl! Ja bist denn nit tot? Was bist
denn so grau, Woidl?«
Aber Jackl’s Stimme hat gar keine Kraft. Der Waldl hört ihn nicht,
schon ist er weg – und die Gasse hinab kommt eine junge Dirn
gezogen, wie im Schlaf, mit geschlossnen Augen. Sie hat ein volles
Gesicht; doch ist es so weiß wie das Licht, das draufscheint. Einen
Augenblick bleibt sie stehen und wendet den Kopf mit den
geschlossenen Augen in der Luft, als suchte sie etwas. Dann geht
sie grad aufs Haus vom Maurer Franz zu. Die Eckenlisl ist’s, die so
schnell hat sterben müssen, ein Jahr ist’s her! Sie tritt ans Fenster.
Mit den Fingerspitzen der rechten Hand schlägt sie leicht ans Glas,
daß es klingt. Dann setzt sie sich aufs Bänklein darunter, legt die
Hände in den Schoß und lächelt still vor sich hin.
Aber da rauscht es auf in der Ferne; rauscht wie ein
Menschenflüstern, zieht näher; die Lisl verblaßt, zergeht; jetzt
schwillt’s ins Dorf und schau! durch die Gasse stäubt’s heran, eine
blasse Schar, Männer und Weiber. Eben grad sichtbar blinken sie im
Mondlicht durcheinander. Bekannte, Unbekannte wechseln, wogen
hin, verdrängen einander, und alle steigen sie dort hinten bei der
Kirche ins Mondlicht hinein und verschwinden einer um den andern.
Der Jackl will sie anrufen, den, jenen, zurückhalten will er sie – zu
rasch treibt alles dahin. Wie er sich aber noch anstrengt, sie zu
erkennen, da knarrt’s ihm zu Häupten, knarrt und rasselt, als täte
sich die Decke auseinander, als schütte der Kalk herab, und die
schnarrende Stimme schreit durch die offene Decke: »Eins!«
Der Jackl steht auf – sein Bewußtsein ist ausgelöscht, die Augen
haben sich geschlossen – und marschiert zurück in sein Bett.
Reingefegt ist die Gasse von allem Spuk, nirgends regt es sich
mehr. Die Haustüren sind zu. In den Lukenaugen des Kirchturms ist
das heimliche Glühen ausgegangen. Der Mond scheint aufs weiße
Zifferblatt, und unten biegt der bärtige Nachtwächter ums Eck beim
Krämer und singt in die Gasse hinein:

»Hört, ihr Herren, und laßt euch sagen:

Die Glocke hat eins geschlagen.
B’hüt euch Gott und Maria!«

Leopold Weber
 Alter Spruch

So dunkel ist doch keine Nacht,

Daß Gottes Aug nicht drüber wacht.

Volksmund
Stimme im Dunkeln

Es klagt im Dunkeln irgendwo.

Ich möchte wissen, was es ist.
Der Wind klagt wohl die Nacht an.

Der Wind klagt aber nicht so nah.

Der Wind klagt immer in der Nacht.
In meinen Ohren klagt mein Blut,
Mein Blut wohl.

Mein Blut klagt aber nicht so fremd.

Mein Blut ist ruhig wie die Nacht.
Ich glaub, ein Herz klagt irgendwo.

Richard Dehmel
 Alp

Ich stellte den Stuhl nicht an die Wand

Und wandte die Schuh am Bett nur halb
Und nahm den Daumen nicht in die Hand,
Da kam des Nachts der böse Alp.
Er bohrte durch ein Wandloch sacht;
Ich dacht und nahm es genau in acht:
»Sollst dich auf mir nicht wiegen,
Wart, wart, ich will dich kriegen!«

Und als er zur Wand hereingeschlüpft

Und auf den Zehen leise ging,
Da war ich zum Loch an der Wand gehüpft
Und stopft es zu, da schrie das Ding
Mit feiner Stimm’: »O Pein, o Pein,
Nun muß ich hier gefangen sein!
O weh, wie werden weinen
Zu Hause meine Kleinen!«

»O Menschlein,« wimmert er bitterlich,

»Hab sieben Kinderchen zu Haus,
Die müssen verhungern fürchterlich,
O Menschenkind, laß mich hinaus!«
Da sprach ich: »Komm nicht wieder herein.«
Da sprach er: »Nein, gewiß nicht, nein.«
Kaum, daß ich mich aufmachte …
Husch, war er hinaus und lachte. –

Und wie er so lachte, ging ich nach,

Und als ich vor die Haustür kam,
War er schon unten an dem Bach;
Ich sah, wie er ein Ruder nahm,
Und lief hinab und hielt den Kahn:
Da winselt er von neuem dort
Und sah zuletzt mich drohend an.
Ich ließ den Kahn – da glitt er fort! –
Mich überkam ein Grauen
Vor seinen Augenbrauen!

August Kopisch
 Närrische Träume

Heute Nacht träumte mir, ich hielt

Den Mond in der Hand,
Wie eine große, gelbe Kegelkugel,
Und schob ihn ins Land,
Als gält es alle neune.
Er warf einen Wald um, eine alte Scheune,
Zwei Kirchen mitsamt den Küstern, o weh,
Und rollte in die See.

Heute Nacht träumte mir, ich warf

Den Mond ins Meer.
Die Fische all erschraken, und die Wellen
Spritzten umher
Und löschten alle Sterne.
Und eine Stimme, ganz aus der Ferne,
Schalt: »Wer pustet mir mein Licht aus?
Jetzt ist’s dunkel im Haus.«

Heute Nacht träumte mir, es war

Rabenfinster rings.
Da kam was leise auf mich zugegangen,
Wie auf Zehen ging’s.
Da wollt ich mich verstecken,
Stolperte über den Wald, über die Scheune vor Schrecken.
Über die Kirchen, mitsamt den Küstern, o weh,
Und fiel in die See.

Heute Nacht träumte mir, ich sei

Der Mond im Meer.
Die Fische alle glotzten und standen
Im Kreis umher.
So lag ich seit Jahren,
Sah über mir hoch die Schiffe fahren,
Und dacht, wenn jetzt wer über Bord sich biegt,
Und sieht, wer hier liegt,
Zwischen Schollen und Flundern,
Wie wird der sich wundern!

Gustav Falke
 Der Traum

Es war ein niedlich Zeiselein,

Das träumte nachts im Mondenschein:
Es säh am Himmel Stern bei Stern,
Davon wär jeder ein Hirsekern,
Und als es geflogen himmelauf,
Da pickte das Zeislein die Sterne auf.
Piep –
Wie war das im Traume so lieb!

Und als die Sonne beschien den Baum,

Erwachte das Zeislein von seinem Traum.
Es wetzte das Schnäbelchen her und hin
Und sprach verwundert in seinem Sinn:
»Nun hab ich gepickt die ganze Nacht,
Und bin doch so hungrig aufgewacht!
Ping –
Das ist mir ein närrisches Ding!«

Victor Blüthgen
 Ein Traum

Heut Nacht hatt ich ’nen tollen Traum,

Der hat mich zum Kamel gemacht,
Im Maule fühlt ich scharfen Zaum
Und auf dem Buckel schwere Fracht.

Und Wüste hier und Wüste dort,

Rückwärts und vorwärts, links und rechts,
Und durch die Glut ging’s langsam fort,
Im Sand tief watend mit Geächz.

Zum Knuspern fand sich da kein Strauch,

Kein Wind zur Kühlung fern und nah,
Zum Saufen war gefüllt kein Schlauch,
Kein Platz zum Niederstrecken da.

Da plötzlich – fern am Himmelssaum

Sieh! Palmen nicken, Quellenglanz!
Dorthin! – Da schwindet’s wie ein Traum,
Es war ein leerer Dünstetanz.

Und immerfort sich aufgerafft,

Und immer fort mit Ach und Uff!
Der Treiber braucht die letzte Kraft,
Mich anzufeuern durch ’nen Knuff.

Geäfft, gebrochen im Genick,

Schon war ich dem Verschmachten nah,
Als ich ganz nah der Quelle Blick
Durch grüne Schatten prachten sah.

Da hat das Glück mich so erschreckt,

Daß ich mit eins zusammenfuhr,
Da hat der Schreck mich aufgeweckt,
Und ach! ein Traum war alles nur.

O hätt’ ich ewig fortgeträumt!

Dann läg’ ich an der Quelle jetzt,
Weich hingestreckt und abgezäumt,
Vom frischen Schattentrunk geletzt.

So aber zieh ich fort und fort,

Auch wachend, als Kamel einher.
Dicht vor mir winkt der kühle Ort,
Doch ich erreich ihn nimmermehr.

Friedrich von Sallet

 Traumland

Wo gibt’s diese Welt wie im Traume?

So seltsame Luft, so milchig-kalt,
Solch Haus von Holze so silbrig-alt,
Solch seltsame Blätter am Baume –

Und Menschen gehen und kommen

Mit fremden Gesichtern, doch seltsam bekannt,
Die reden – ich weiß nicht, warum ich verstand,
Was ich von ihnen vernommen …

Drauf hab ich das Städtlein verlassen:

Da schwamm ein seltsam bleierner Fluß,
Der wälzte tiefab mit schweigendem Schuß
Die ungeheuren Massen …

Ich stieg auf den Berg, den vertrauten:

Da sah ich ein Land, das ich nie gesehn,
Erdfremde beleuchtet, so selig-schön! –
Meine Augen vor Wonne tauten …

Nun, wo ich am Tag so gehe,

Verfolgt mich die Sehnsucht überall
Nach dem seltsamen Fluß mit dem Wasserfall
Und dem Lande hinter der Höhe.

Victor Blüthgen
 Der kleine Häwelmann
Es war einmal ein kleiner Junge, der hieß Häwelmann. Des
Nachts schlief er in einem Rollbett und auch des Nachmittags, wenn
er müde war. Wenn er aber nicht müde war, so mußte seine Mutter
ihn darin in der Stube hin und her fahren, und davon konnte er nie
genug bekommen.
Nun lag der kleine Häwelmann eines Nachts in seinem Rollbett
und konnte nicht einschlafen. Die Mutter aber schlief schon lange
neben ihm in ihrem großen Himmelbett. »Mutter!« rief der kleine
Häwelmann, »ich will fahren!« Und die Mutter langte im Schlaf mit
dem Arm aus dem Bett und rollte die kleine Bettstelle hin und her,
immer hin und her. Und wenn ihr der Arm müde werden wollte, so
rief der kleine Häwelmann: »Mehr, mehr!« Und dann ging das Rollen
wieder von vorne an. Endlich aber schlief die Mutter fest ein, und so
viel Häwelmann auch schreien mochte, sie hörte es nicht.
Da dauerte es nicht lange, so sah der Mond in die
Fensterscheiben, der gute alte Mond. Und was er da sah, war so
possierlich, daß er sich erst mit seinem Pelzärmel über das Gesicht
fuhr, um sich die Augen auszuwischen. So etwas hatte der alte
Mond all sein Lebtag nicht gesehen. Da lag der kleine Häwelmann
mit offenen Augen in seinem Rollbett und hielt das eine Beinchen
hoch in die Höhe. Sein kleines Hemd hatte er ausgezogen und hing
es wie ein Segel an seiner kleinen Zehe auf. Dann nahm er ein
Hemdzipfelchen in jede Hand und fing mit beiden Backen an zu
blasen. Und allmählich leise, leise fing es an zu rollen, über den
Fußboden, dann die Wand hinauf, dann kopfüber die Decke entlang
und dann die andere Wand wieder hinunter. »Mehr, mehr!« schrie
Häwelmann, als er wieder auf dem Boden war, und dann blies er
wieder seine Backen auf, und dann ging es wieder kopfüber und
kopfunter.