Rewriting History
By Joonyoung Heo ‘25
Last month, a video was released on Youtube that called Abraham Lincoln “America’s first dictator.” In one hour and seven minutes, the creator argued (among other equally memorable points) that the Civil War was never about slavery and that Lincoln, having never cared about slaves, wrote the Emancipation Proclamation in 1862 to encourage Black men to murder the white women left in charge of Southern plantations. “No one ever caught a more deserving bullet,” the creator said. The thumbnail featured John Wilkes Booth cast in an angelic glow, taking aim at a caricature of Lincoln with horns sprouting from his forehead.
But perhaps the most disturbing thing about the entire video was the comment section. Thousands of people on the Internet, it seems, thoroughly enjoyed what the creator had to say. They praised him for “shining the light” on the untold truth of the American Civil War; they thanked him for teaching them what their teachers in school never would; they looked up to him for being well versed in the study of history and bold enough to share it with the stubborn public. In short, they watched an hour and seven minutes of poor argumentation and blatant historical inaccuracies, born out of ignorance or deliberate deception, and gave it a standing ovation.
Albeit a more extreme example, this video reflects the increasing problem of extreme revisionist history.
Today, students and adults alike — whether directly through a classroom curriculum or indirectly through news outlets and social media — are pushed to accept new methods and new facts to correct outdated standards. But we have passed equilibrium; in an effort to avoid these conventions, we’ve overdone it. Our corrections have become overcorrections. Progress has become counterproductive.
Of course, it is no fabrication that pre-modern historical education was less than ideal. Schools in 20th-century America taught a very one-sided history in which their country was a product of a smooth stream of equality and democratic goodness. In this romanticized timeline, Christopher Columbus was a selfless leader who discovered the Americas and George Washington was a flawless man who established the United States. Abraham Lincoln, too, would have been given similar treatment. The sixteenth president, called the “Great Emancipator,” was credited with ending slavery and lauded for standing on high moral ground in his fight against the South.
A defining feature of education in modern society is the universal pressure to think outside the conventions of previous decades.
Toward the end of the twentieth century, more and more people realized that something had to change. Howard Zinn and his A People’s History of the United States, first published in 1980, spearheaded the movement. Initially, his defining work was considered highly radical and saw limited success in the academic and commercial spheres. Now, with more than two million copies in print and counting, it has come to dominate our perception of the past. Matt Damon’s character in Good Will Hunting, released 17 years after its publication, calls it “a real history book.” A People’s History has become nothing short of a cultural icon.
Indeed, what Zinn put to paper was a landmark achievement in historiography. His approach of looking from “the bottom up” was groundbreaking. Throughout the book, he tells American history through the lives of the downtrodden — the slaves, the Cherokees, the Irish, the shell-shocked soldiers. Broadly, his intention was to take the conventional historical narrative and turn it on its head. In this sense, while some of his claims are supported by flimsy evidence and border on far-fetched, A People’s History was necessary. It illustrated the inadequacies of traditional history and took a significant leap in the other direction.
Unfortunately, we have taken so many leaps since then that we are nearing the opposite extreme. If the “outdated” historical narrative is at one end of a spectrum and the ideal narrative is somewhere in the middle, we’ve torn past the center point and toward the other end. The most common symptom is that the average individual is now prone to throw out the established narrative for the sake of it.
We can see this in Lincoln’s presentation. Today, many people refuse to acknowledge him as the “Great Emancipator,” and perhaps that’s for the better. They have a number of reasonable points against the picturesque presidential hero advanced by conventional history — that he suspended habeas corpus, the writ protecting against unlawful imprisonment, for instance. But many go farther. Even if we discount the extremists, the Youtuber mentioned earlier being one of them, it is not unusual for individuals to disparage his accomplishments and his importance in office. Conventional history said that Lincoln freed the slaves; certain modern narratives, in their eagerness to stray from the established, argue the polar opposite.
This is what we must realize: we don’t need to argue a position diametrically opposed to the conventional narrative. We cannot get caught up in revising history that we overcompensate for past errors by creating our own. Rather, we must acknowledge that there is something to be valuable we might learn from both narratives.
We can return one final time to Lincoln. The narrative of “Great Emancipator” may well be outdated, since the end of slavery must be credited to many other contemporary figures. To a large extent, it is true that the slaves had to take initiative in securing their freedom. It is also true that Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and bent the Constitution for the war effort. Yet it is equally true that he contributed much to the Civil War and, ultimately, the abolition of slavery. In many ways, his refusal to acquiesce and his steadfast sense of duty carried the North over the front lines and toward victory. Both narratives have their respective strengths and weaknesses.
The ideal historical narrative located at the center of the spectrum, then, is a compromise between the two extremes: recognition that conventional history can be unfounded and outdated, together with equal acknowledgement that there might only be a few things to rewrite. We cannot afford to disregard that which has been established for the sake of disregarding it. By all means, make way for the new, but be deliberate in paving over what is already in place.
Ava Zhao / The Exonian via Midjourney