Revisionist History Series: There is A Word For My Problems

It’s Called Presentism and I’ve Been Writing About It Without Knowing It This Whole Time

I’ve written on multiple occasions about how so many people, at this site and in historical articles, have taken the position of judging the past for the impossible crime of being the past. At the time I thought I’d had a real insight, only to find out, like so many of my other great ideas, someone smarter than me had it first a long time ago.

The term is called ‘presentism’. In historical analysis it’s a term for the introduction of present day ideas and perspectives in their work because they consider it a form of cultural bias and believe it creates a distorting understanding of the past. It was first cited in the historiographic sense in 1916 and may have been used in this meaning since the 1870s.

The historian David Hackett Fischer identified it as a fallacy known as Nunc pro Tunc, or now for them. In British history it was used in which 18th and 19th century British historians wrote history in such a way to use the past to validate their believes rather than an objective historical context. In this kind of approach, which emphasizes the relevance of history to the present things that don’t seem relevant receive little attention.

There has been much debate among historians about the problematic question of history and moral judgments. Among historians the orthodox view (and the one that was prevalent among traditional ones) is that reading…