Pseudohistory

Pseudohistory is a pejorative term applied to texts which purport to be historical in nature but which depart from standard historiographical conventions in a way which undermines their conclusions. Works which draw controversial conclusions from new, speculative or disputed historical evidence, particularly in the fields of national, political, military and religious affairs, are often rejected as pseudohistory.

Description

As "pseudohistory" is a label rather than a self-defined intellectual movement, a clear definition is not possible. Some criteria which have been suggested are:

• 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 portrayed strongly exaggerated in the modern mythology of Nazi occultism. Faced with this in his research, 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 of pseudohistory

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 ideologically misleading, 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 book 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.
• 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 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 an 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 FYROM are descendants of Ancient Macedonians and speak the same language.

See also

• Circular reference
• Historiography and nationalism
• Misery lit
• Pseudoarchaeology
• Pseudoscience
• Pseudoscientific metrology
• Self reference

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
• Nonsense (And Why It's So Popular) A course syllabus from The College of Wooster.