Pseudohistory
Pseudoscholarship that attempts to distort historical record / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Pseudohistory is a form of pseudoscholarship that consists of attempts to distort or misrepresent the historical record, pseudohistorians frequently employ methods which resemble those methods which are used in scholarly historical research. The related term cryptohistory is applied to a form of pseudohistory which is derived from the superstitions which are intrinsic to occultism. Pseudohistory is related to pseudoscience and pseudoarchaeology, and the usage of the terms may occasionally overlap. Although pseudohistory comes in many forms, scholars have identified many common features that pseudohistorical works contain; one example of such a feature is based on the fact that the use of pseudohistory is almost always motivated by a contemporary political, religious, or personal agenda. Additionally, pseudohistory frequently presents sensational claims or it frequently presents a big lie about historical facts which would require an unwarranted revision of the historical record.[3]
Another hallmark of pseudohistory is an underlying premise that scholars have a furtive agenda to suppress the promotor's thesis—a premise commonly corroborated by elaborate conspiracy theories. Frequently, works of pseudohistory exclusively point to unreliable sources—including myths and legends, they frequently consider them literally and historically true—to support the thesis which they are promoting and they ignore valid sources that contradict it. Sometimes, a work of pseudohistory will adopt a position of historical relativism, insisting that there is really no such thing as historical truth and insisting that one hypothesis is just as good as any other hypothesis. Many works of pseudohistory conflate mere possibility with actuality, assuming that if something could have happened, then it did.
Notable examples of pseudohistory include British Israelism, the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, the Irish slaves myth, the witch-cult, Armenian genocide denial, Holocaust denial, the clean Wehrmacht myth, the 16th- and 17th-century Spanish Black Legend, and the claim that the Katyn massacre was not committed by the Soviet NKVD.