History and Pseudohistory(index)

From SkepticWiki

Pseudohistory is counterfeit history, which appears to be researched, but which lacks the underpinning of sound historical, archaeological, and scholarly methods on which real historical knowledge rests.

1 Notable pseudohistorians
2 Topics in pseudohistory
3 Other
4 Discussion
5 Related Pages

[edit] Notable pseudohistorians

[edit] Topics in pseudohistory

Here is a partial list of some of the topics in history around which misconceptions have been built.

[edit] Political Pseudohistory

[edit] People

[edit] Ancient Cultures: Real and Imaginary

[edit] Other

[edit] Discussion

There are a number of different types of pseudohistory, with different causes. The most widespread are the popular errors, such as Marie Antoinette saying “Let them eat cake”, or the story of the young George Washington and the cherry tree. Such anecdotes are the equivalent, in history, of urban legends: they survive because they are striking and memorable, not because they can be confirmed from historical sources.

Sometimes a story will turn into a full-blown and elaborate myth, as in the case of the Holy Grail or Atlantis, setting determined would-be scholars in pursuit of a historical origin to a myth that began as fiction.

Then there are the hoax artifacts of pseudohistory, such as the Shroud of Turin, or the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The original forger, in each case, had a motivation of greed or malice in perpetrating his fraud. In addition to this, there is a motivation (for Christians in the case of the Shroud, and anti-Semites in the case of the Protocols) to go on believing in the authenticity of these items even after most outsiders would agree that they’ve been debunked.

Sometimes, again for what might be called political motives, a past state of affairs will be fabricated (usually out of very little) to justify a present ideological stance. The idea of a lost paradisiacal matriarchy has its appeal to feminists; an African origin of civilization appeals to Afro-Americans; the idea that the Holocaust was faked by Jews appeals to anti-Semites; the idea that our ancestors, with their low technology, lived more “in harmony with nature” than we do appeals to Luddites; the New Ager, hearing of the lost sciences of the ancients, has one more reason to admire the supposed ancient wisdom of the East over the modern science of the West; the village atheist will explain how in the Middle Ages the Church brainwashed everyone into thinking that the Earth was flat; his fundamentalist counterpart will tell you that scientists are so dumb that until a few hundred years ago they went around telling everyone that the Earth was flat. And so it goes.

Then there are the conspiracy theorists, the believers in alien intervention, and the believers in ancient civilizations with technology (or magic) better than our own. What this group, at first sight diverse, has in common is that their approach to history is based on the God of the Gaps Fallacy. If, for example, a man believes that the Great Pyramid was constructed with the help of alien technology, then his inability to work out how humans might have performed the task alone and with primitive technology will only serve to confirm him in his views. In the same way, a holocaust denier, say, can take everything that puzzles him in the evidence for the holocaust and hold it up as proof that the evidence was fabricated by an evil Jewish plot.

And there are, as usual, the numerologists, who seek out occult relationships between the measurements of the Pyramids and Stonehenge. Any collection of data can be mined for significant-looking patterns, but these two monuments have a certain degree of mystery about their purpose which makes them particularly attractive

The reader will notice that the various kinds of pseudohistory, and the various different motivations for producing it, correspond fairly well to similar errors with similar motivations in pseudoscience, and this is no coincidence: the subject may be different, but the ways to think wrong-headedly about a subject remain the same.