Pseudohistory

Pseudohistory is produced by the application of the research techniques of the historical method (primary sources and evidence) characteristic of legitimate history; yet, in itself, the work of pseudohistory is intellectually inconsistent with the historical record and with the common-sense understanding held in the collective memory of society. In practice, a pseudohistory presents a big lie—sensational claims—about historical fact that would require the revision (re-writing) of the historical record. The term pseudohistory is applied to works of historical revision that are based upon or derived from a theory or upon a re-interpretation or both; moreover, the related term cryptohistory applied to a pseudohistory based upon or derived from the superstitions inherent to occultism.

Definition and etymology

The term pseudohistory was coined in the early 19th century; a usage older than the term pseudo-scholarship and earlier than pseudo-science.^[1] Similarly, in an 1815 attestation, it is used to refer to Certamen Homeri et Hesiodi, a fictional contest between two historical poets.^[2] The pejorative sense of the term, labelling a flawed or disingenuous work of historiography, is found in another 1815 attestation.^[3] Pseudohistory is akin to pseudoscience in that both forms of falsification are achieved using the methodology that purports to, but does not, adhere to the established standards of research for the given field of intellectual enquiry to which the pseudoscience claims to be a part, and which offers little or no supporting evidence for its plausibility.^[4]

Historian of science Douglas Allchin^[5] contends that when history in science discovery is presented in a simplified way, with drama exaggerated and scientists romanticized, this creates wrong stereotypes about how science works, and in fact constitutes pseudohistory, despite being based on real facts.

Writers Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman see pseudohistory as "the rewriting of the past for present personal or political purposes".^[6]

Characteristics

Robert Todd Carroll has developed a list of criteria to identify pseudo historic works. He states that: "Pseudohistory is purported history which:

• Treats myths, legends, sagas and similar literature as literal truth
• Is neither critical nor skeptical in its reading of ancient historians, taking their claims at face value and ignoring empirical or logical evidence contrary to the claims of the ancients
• Is on a mission, not a quest, seeking to support some contemporary political or religious agenda rather than find out the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about the past
• Often denies that there is such a thing as historical truth, clinging to the extreme skeptical notion that only what is absolutely certain can be called 'true' and nothing is absolutely certain, so nothing is true
• Often maintains that history is nothing but mythmaking and that different histories are not to be compared on such traditional academic standards as accuracy, empirical probability, logical consistency, relevancy, completeness, fairness, honesty, etc., but on moral or political grounds
• Is selective in its use of ancient documents, citing favorably those that fit with its agenda, and ignoring or interpreting away those documents which don't fit
• Considers the possibility of something being true as sufficient to believe it is true if it fits with one's agenda
• Often maintains that there is a conspiracy to suppress its claims because of racism, atheism or ethnocentrism, or because of opposition to its political or religious agenda"^[7]

Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke prefers the term "cryptohistory." He identifies two necessary elements as "A complete ignorance of the primary sources" and the repetition of "inaccuracies and wild claims."^[8][9]

Other common characteristics of pseudohistory are:

• The arbitrary linking of disparate events so as to form – in the theorist’s opinion – a pattern. This is typically then developed into a conspiracy theory postulating a hidden agent responsible for creating and maintaining the pattern. For example, the pseudohistorical The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail links the Knights Templar, the medieval Grail Romances, the Merovingian Frankish dynasty and the artist Nicolas Poussin in an attempt to identify lineal descendants of Jesus.
• Hypothesising the consequences of unlikely events that “could” have happened, thereby assuming tacitly that they did.
• Sensationalism, or shock value

Categories and examples

The following are some common categories of pseudohistorical theory, with examples. NB;

• not all theories in a listed category are necessarily pseudohistorical; they are rather categories which seem to attract pseudohistorians
• caution should be exercised with lists of theories, as proponents of any historical theory, or any ideology, may assert that theories with which they disagree are pseudohistorical, in order to discredit them and their promoters:

American edition of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion

• Ethnocentrism and antisemitism inspired (see also Blood libel)
  • The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, a fraudulent work purporting to show a historical conspiracy for world domination by Jews.^[10]
  • The Khazar theory, an academic fringe theory which postulates that the bulk of European Jewry are of Central Asian (Turkic) origin. In spite of mainstream academic consensus, this theory has been promoted in Anti-Semitic and Anti-Zionist circles alike, arguing that Jews are an alien element both in Europe and in Palestine.
  • Holocaust denial and genocide denial in general: claims of such writers as David Irving that the Holocaust, Holodomor, Armenian genocide, or other genocides did not occur, or were exaggerated greatly.^[11]
• Ancient astronauts, Archaeoastronomy and Lost lands (see also Atlantis location hypotheses)
• Catastrophism
  • Immanuel Velikovsky's book Worlds in Collision^[12]
• Alternative chronologies - revised sequences of events or other alterations to the timeline of ancient history.
  • Anatoly Fomenko's theory New Chronology^[13]
• Confederate revisionists (AKA "Civil War revisionists") and Neo-Confederates argue that the Confederate States of America's prime motivation was the maintenance of states rights and limited government rather than the preservation and expansion of slavery.^[14][15][16]
• Ethnocentric pseudo-history (see also National mysticism)
  • Most Afrocentric (i.e. Pre-Columbian Africa-Americas contact theories, see Ancient Egyptian race controversy) ideas have been identified as pseudohistorical^[17][18]
  • The Indigenous Aryans theories published in Hindu nationalism during the 1990s and 2000s.^[19]
  • The "crypto-history" of Germanic mysticism and Nazi occultism.^[20] Among leading Nazis, Heinrich Himmler is believed to have been influenced by occultism and according to one theory, developed the SS base at Wewelsburg to an esoteric plan
  • British-Israelism (Anglo-Israelism).
  • The "Ancient Macedonia continuity theory" that postulates demographic, cultural and linguistic continuity between Macedonians of antiquity and the main ethnic group in Republic of Macedonia.
• Psychohistory The ill-fated attempt to merge psychology with history, replacing historical method.
• Pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact excluding the Norse colonization of the Americas and other reputable scholarship
  • Arab or Islamic discovery of the Americas.^[21]
  • Gavin Menzies's book 1421: The Year China Discovered the World, which argues for the idea that Chinese sailors discovered America.^[22]
• Religious speculation (see also scientific foreknowledge in sacred texts)
  • works such as The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, which purports to show that certain historical figures, such as Godfrey of Bouillon, and contemporary aristocrats are the lineal descendants of Jesus Christ, using genealogical tables that are now known to be spurious:^[23]
  • The writings of author David Barton and others postulating that the United States of America was founded as an exclusively Christian nation.^{[24][25][26][27]}
  • See also Searches for Noah's Ark^[28]
  • The theory of Lemuria and Kumari Kandam.^[22]
  • Chariots of the Gods? and other books by Erich von Däniken, which claim ancient visitors from outer space constructed the pyramids and other monuments.^[29]
  • Publications by Christopher Knight, such as Uriel's Machine (2000), claiming ancient technological civilizations.^[30][31]
  • Visits to Earth by spacefaring aliens
• The Shakespeare authorship question, which claims that someone other than William Shakespeare of Stratford wrote the works traditionally attributed to him.^{[32][33][34][35]}

See also

• List of pseudohistorians
• Historiography and nationalism
• Pseudoarchaeology
• Pseudoscientific metrology

References

1. Monthly magazine and British register, Volume 55 (February 1823), p. 449, in reference to John Galt, Ringan Gilhaize: Or, The Covenanters, Oliver & Boyd, 1823.
2. C. A. Elton, Remains of Hesiod the Ascraean 1815, p. xix.
3. The Critical review: or, Annals of literature, Volume 1 ed. Tobias George Smollett, 1815, p. 152
4. Fritze, Ronald H,. (2009). Invented knowledge: false history, fake science and pseudo-religions. Reaktion Books. pp 7-18. ISBN 978-1-86189-430-4
5. Allchin, D. 2004. Pseudohistory and pseudoscience 1 Science & Education 13:179-195.
6. Michael Shermer, Alex Grobman. Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It?, University of California Press, 2009, ISBN 978-0-520-26098-6, p.2
7. Carroll, Robert Todd. The skeptic’s dictionary. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons (2003), p. 305.
8. Goodrick-Clarke 1985: 224,225
9. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism, page 225 (Tauris Parke Paperbacks, 2005 edition). ISBN 978-1-86064-973-8
10. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia "Protocols of the Elders of Zion", last updated 4 May 2009.
11. Deborah E. Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, Plume, 1994, Page 215, ISBN 0-452-27274-2
12. Fritze, Ronald H,. (2009). Invented knowledge: false history, fake science and pseudo-religions. Reaktion Books. p. 169. ISBN 978-1-86189-430-4.
13. Novikov, S. P. (2000). "Pseudohistory and pseudomathematics: fantasy in our life". Russian Mathematical Surveys 55.
14. David Barton (December 2008). "Confronting Civil War Revisionism: Why the South Went To War". Wall Builders. Retrieved 30 December 2013.
15. Barrett Brown (27 December 2010). "Neoconfederate civil war revisionism: Those who commemorate the South's fallen heroes are entitled to do so, but not to deny that slavery was the war's prime cause". TheGuardian.com. Retrieved 30 December 2013.
16. "Howard Swint: Confederate revisionism warps U.S. history". Charleston Daily Mail. June 15, 2011. Retrieved 30 December 2013.
17. Sherwin, Elisabeth. "Clarence Walker encourages black Americans to discard Afrocentrism". Davis Community Network. Retrieved 2007-11-13.
18. Ortiz de Montellano, Bernardo & Gabriel Haslip Viera & Warren Barbour (1997). "They were NOT here before Columbus: Afrocentric hyper-diffusionism in the 1990s". Ethnohistory (Duke University Press) 44 (2): 199–234. doi:10.2307/483368. JSTOR 483368.
19. Nanda, Meera (January–March 2005). "Response to my critics" (PDF). Social Epistemology 19 (1): 147–191. doi:10.1080/02691720500084358. Sokal, Alan (2006). "Pseudoscience and Postmodernism: Antagonists or Fellow-Travelers?". In Fagan, Garrett. Archaeological Fantasies: How pseudoarchaeology misrepresents the past and misleads the public. Routledge. ISBN 0-415-30592-6.
20. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke. 1985. The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and Their Influence on Nazi Ideology: The Ariosophists of Austria and Germany, 1890–1935. Wellingborough, England: The Aquarian Press. ISBN 0-85030-402-4. (Several reprints.) Expanded with a new Preface, 2004, I.B. Tauris & Co. ISBN 1-86064-973-4
21. http://hnn.us/article/23662
22. Fritze, Ronald H,. (2009). Invented knowledge: false history, fake science and pseudo-religions. Reaktion Books. p. 11.ISBN 978-1-86189-430-4.
23. Laura Miller (2006). Dan Burstein, ed. Secrets of the Code. Vanguard Press. p. 405. ISBN 978-1-59315-273-4.
24. Specter, Arlen (Spring 1995). "Defending the wall: Maintaining church/state separation in America". Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy 18 (2): 575–590.
25. House Passes, Considers Evangelical Resolutions, Baltimore Chronicle
26. David Barton - Propaganda Masquerading as History, People for the American Way
27. Boston Theological Institute Newsletter Volume XXXIV, No. 17, Richard V. Pierard, January 25, 2005
28. Dietz, Robert S. "Ark-Eology: A Frightening Example of Pseudo-Science" in Geotimes 38:9 (Sept. 1993) p. 4.
29. Fritze, Ronald H,. (2009). Invented knowledge: false history, fake science and pseudo-religions. Reaktion Books. p. 201. ISBN 978-1-86189-430-4.
30. Merriman, Nick, editor, Public Archaeology, Routledge, 2004 page 260
31. Tonkin, S., 2003, Uriel's Machine – a Commentary on some of the Astronomical Assertions.
32. Hope, Warren and Kim Holston. The Shakespeare Controversy (2009) 2nd ed., 3: "In short, this is a history written in opposition to the current prevailing view".
33. Potter, Lois. “Marlowe onstage” in Constructing Christopher Marlowe, James Alan Downie and J. T. Parnell, eds. (2000, 2001), paperback ed., 88-101; 100: “The possibility that Shakespeare may not really be Shakespeare, comic in the context of literary history and pseudo-history, is understandable in this world of double-agents . . .”
34. Aaronovitch, David. “The anti-Stratfordians” in Voodoo Histories (2010), 226-229: “There is, however, a psychological or anthropological question to be answered about our consumption of pseudo-history and pseudoscience. I have now plowed through enough of these books to be able to state that, as a genre, they are badly written and, in their anxiety to establish their dubious neo-scholarly credentials, incredibly tedious. . . . Why do we read bad history books that have the added lack of distinction of not being in any way true or useful . . .”
35. Kathman, David. Shakespeare Authorship Page: “. . . Shakespeare scholars regard Oxfordianism as pseudo-scholarship which arbitrarily discards the methods used by real historians. . . . In order to support their beliefs, Oxfordians resort to a number of tactics which will be familiar to observers of other forms of pseudo-history and pseudo-science.”

External links

• "Pseudohistory and Pseudoscience" Program in the History of Science and Technology, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States.
• Pseudohistory entry at Skeptic's Dictionary
• The Hall of Ma'at
• "The Restoration of History" from the American Skeptic magazine.