More on the same

An article was recently posted on the New York Times Review on the new documentaries on US History by Oliver Stone. I personally only saw the episode on World War II. Before I read the article, I thought that it was an interesting take on World War II, neither particularly creative nor innovative. But as the review indicates, the purpose of the documentary is not to create new history, but rather to bring the ideas of revisionist historians to popular culture: "The real problem, they say, is that this revisionism has yet to penetrate the public schools, the mainstream media, and “those parts of America that cling to the notion of American exceptionalism.” Their version of history may not be untold, but “it has been almost entirely ‘unlearned.’”

The conclusion to the article is particularly interesting. The author of the article states: "Although the book by Stone and Kuznick is heavily footnoted, the sourcing, as the example of Wallace’s 1952 article suggests, recalls nothing so much as Dick Cheney’s cherry-picking of intelligence, particularly about the origins and early years of the cold war. The authors also devote many thousands of words to criticism of such destructive American policies as Ronald Reagan’s in Central America and George W. Bush’s in Iraq, but much of this will be familiar to readers of these pages, as will their objections to Barack Obama’s use of predator drones. This book is less a work of history than a skewed political document, restating and updating a view of the world that the independent radical Dwight Macdonald once likened to a fog, “caused by the warm winds of the liberal Gulf Stream coming in contact with the Soviet glacier”—but now more than twenty years after the dissolution of the Soviet empire.”

The key points in the review is this: the work, in spite of its engagement with scholarship is a skewed political document. This brings to an interesting point about what historians do, in fact, do. We are not simply reading books and create arguments. We consider sources in a holistic manner, trying to bring in as wide and array of perspectives as possible; we evaluate the sources by answering a particular set of questions; these questions allow us to look beyond coincidence, to look beyond personal bias and to craft novel arguments using theory. In principle, we should be equally critical both of primary sources and secondary sources.

This said, perhaps  Oliver Stone is being deliberately provocative… but in this case he is not doing history.