Pseudohistory

Pseudohistory is a pejorative term applied to sensational claims about history which depart from standard historiographical conventions in a way which undermines their conclusions. The term is used to discredit works or authors which make controversial conclusions based on new, speculative, unverified, or disputed historical claims and is therefore considered.

Etymology

The term pseudohistory comes from the Greek word pseudo (meaning "false, feigned, erroneous"), which is used as a prefix to the following root word—in this case, history (the recording of past events).

Pseudohistory is closely related to pseudoscience in that pseudoscience is defined as "a methodology, belief, or practice that is claimed to be scientific, but which does not adhere to an appropriate scientific methodology, and lacks supporting evidence or plausibility", while pseudohistory is a methodology, belief, or practice that is claimed to be historic, but which does not adhere to an appropriate historic methodology, and lacks supporting evidence or plausibility.

Because the prefix pseudo- implies an intention of fraudulence in 21st-century common parlance (as in pseudointellectual), both words not only indicate inaccurate material, but also connote an intent to deceive. Therefore, it is a pejorative description.

Description

The following are some of the criteria for warranting the term pseudohistory:

• That the work has a political, religious, or other ideological agenda.
• That a work is not published in an academic journal or is otherwise not adequately peer reviewed.
• That the evidence for key facts supporting the work's thesis is:
  • speculative; or
  • controversial; or
  • not correctly or adequately sourced; or
  • interpreted in an unjustifiable way; or
  • given undue weight; or
  • taken out of context; or
  • distorted, either innocently, accidentally, or fraudulently.
• That competing (and simpler) explanations or interpretations for the same set of facts, which have been peer reviewed and have been adequately sourced, have not been addressed.
• That the work relies on one or more conspiracy theories or hidden-hand explanations, when the principle of Occam's razor would recommend a simpler, more prosaic and more plausible explanation of the same fact pattern.

Goodrick-Clarke's description of cryptohistory

One narrow description of 'cryptohistory', a term probably less pejorative than pseudohistory, can be found in The Occult Roots of Nazism (1985) by the historian Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke. This book examines the field of Ariosophy, an esoteric movement in Germany and Austria 1890-1930, that Goodrick-Clarke himself describes as occult. The doctrines of Ariosophy strongly resemble Nazism in important points (e.g. racism), however, the only cases of direct influences that Goodrick-Clarke could find were the ones of Rudolf von Sebottendorf (and the Thule society) and Karl Maria Wiligut. While these cases did exist, they are often exaggerated strongly by the modern mythology of Nazi occultism. Goodrick-Clarke defines this genre as crypto-history, since its "final point of explanatory reference is an agent which has remained concealed to previous historians." When he debunks several crypto-historic books in Appendix E of The Occult Roots of Nazism, he states, that these "were typically sensational and under-researched. A complete ignorance of the primary sources was common to most authors and inaccuracies and wild claims were repeated by each newcomer to the genre until an abundant literature existed, based on wholly spurious 'facts' concerning the powerful Thule Society, the Nazi links with the East, and Hitler's occult initiation." Here Goodrick-Clarke brings down the description of cryptohistory to two elements: "A complete ignorance of the primary sources" and the repetition of "inaccuracies and wild claims".

Examples

The definition of pseudohistory can be extended to varying contexts. Historian Douglas Allchin contends that history in science education can not only be false or anecdotal, but misleading ideologically, and that this constitutes pseudohistory.

The following are some commonly cited examples of pseudohistory:

• Immanuel Velikovsky's book Worlds in Collision
• Anatoly Timofeevich Fomenko's theory New Chronology
• Heribert Illig's book Phantom time hypothesis
• Priory of Sion: works such as Holy Blood, Holy Grail, which conjecture that Jesus Christ may have married Mary Magdalene, who later moved to France and gave birth to the line of Merovingian Kings
• Holocaust denial: claims of writers such as David Irving that the Holocaust did not occur or was exaggerated greatly.
• Gavin Menzies's book 1421: The Year China Discovered the World, which argues for the idea that Chinese sailors discovered America.

• The writings of David Barton and others postulating that the United States of America was founded on Christian religious beliefs.
• Some Afrocentric (i.e. Pre-Columbian Africa-Americas contact theories) ideas have been identified as pseudohistorical
• Pre-Columbian African contact theories: the claim that African travelers arrived in the Americas prior to initial European contact in the 15th century.
• The theory of Lemuria and Kumari Kandam.
• The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, a fraudulent work purporting to show a historical conspiracy for world domination by Jews
• The Two Babylons, which claims that Catholicism is merely a veiled continuation of Babylonian paganism
• The Venetic theory, claiming that the original inhabitants of Central Europe, Northern Italy and parts of Sweden were a Proto-Slavic-speaking people, called Veneti, of which the Slovenes and West Slavs are the direct descendants
• The pseudo-Macedonian theory, claiming that the citizens of the Republic of Macedonia are descendants of Ancient Macedonians and speak the same language.
• The Orion Correlation Theory of Robert Bauval, that the three pyramids of Gizah are representations of the stars of the "belt" of the constellation Orion.
• Chariots of the Gods? and other books by Erich von Daniken, which claim ancient visitors from outer space constructed the pyramids and other monuments.
• The Shakespeare authorship question, which claims that someone other than William Shakespeare of Stratford wrote the works traditionally attributed to him.

See also

• Historiography and nationalism
• Misery lit
• Pseudoarchaeology
• Pseudoscience
• Pseudoscientific metrology

External links

• Pseudohistory entry at Skeptic's Dictionary
• "Pseudohistory and Pseudoscience" Program in the History of Science and Technology, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis MN, USA.
• "The Restoration of History" from Skeptic (U.S. magazine).
• The Hall of Ma'at