I’ve been wanting to make this post for a while; I’ve been seeing enough recently about history being primarily “storytelling,” or even simply dismissed as propaganda and or pithily reduced to “written by the victors” that as a historian I really want to push back.
This is a take that on its face sounds subversive and meaningful, but taken to its logical conclusion enables a lot of the same issues as history that was baldly written as propaganda. Reducing all history telling, especially modern, academic history to “stories written by the victors” is in my opinion both anti-intellectual and anti-academic. And this is not meant as a callout post or reprimand to anyone who’s used the phrase because in a lot of ways it sounds right, and it is important to think about who is writing history and what their agenda is, but it’s often used as a dismissal and conversation ender by people trying to sound progressive who I don’t think are considering the wider implications of that dismissal.
My credentials to discuss this are that as historian, my research and teaching focus has been on ideas memory, memorialization, and historical forgetting. I have conducted graduate level classes on this topic. For a bold and thought-provoking intro to these studies, I recommend the excellent essay: Why Every Single Statue Should Come Down, by Gary Younge.
We all of course know the common examples of “history written by the victors” erasing bad actions and atrocities. This is how history has been used as a propaganda tool, and why newly uncovered evidence and research like critical investigations into the atrocities of early US presidents who were slaveowners and books like Imperial Reckoning by Caroline Elkins, which uses primary sources to destroy the myth of the “peaceful” British exit from Kenya, are so important. But those revisions and deconstructions are not only also history, they are a far better example of what history is as a discipline now. It’s why the rising fascist governments find modern history and historians so dangerous and are cutting their funding: because relying on research, facts, and evidence, while not changing the fact that history is written as a narrative with a perspective, make unpleasant pasts harder to refute.
A large current example of this fascist rejection of history is the Trump administration ordering the National Park Service to take down signs at the presidents house in Philadelphia. Those signs detailed the reality of George Washington’s life as a slaver, and focused on the courage and full lives of individuals who escaped from enslavement while he was president, such as Oney Judge. Even though the administration was court ordered to return the signs in February they have not done so.
The Trump administration’s argument about these panels is that they present a “distorted” history “written by the victors” that is exaggerated and trying to make America look bad. The idea that the North distorted and exaggerated the horrors of the American South in their histories because they won and it made them look better is not new, and is the reason for the “lost cause” myth and the fact that today many Southern US schools do not teach accurate history about slavery.
Another large example of how the idea of “history being written by the victors” can be used to aid historical forgetting of atrocities is Holocaust denial. This is actually a common tactic with denial of many genocides but Holocaust denial is the clearest example because we can point to a legal trial around it. In 1993, historian Deborah Lipstadt wrote a book called “Denying the Holocaust,” which critically engaged with the distortions of evidence used by Holocaust deniers. One of those deniers, David Irving, sued Lipstadt for libel, essentially trying to argue in a court of law this his narrative of the Holocaust was as valid as hers and not “denial”. The court ruled in Lipstadt’s favor, crucially finding that Irving’s distortion of evidence did invalidate his history and make it illegitimate, and that it was not libel for Lipstadt to refute his bad research and call it denial. This trial is a huge statement on what modern, academic history is. Citations and documentation are a fundamental part of history as a discipline, as much as if not more so than crafting narrative out of what those documents show us.
(As an aside, the way more fun drama that happens in history now is when someone gets caught drawing terrible and incorrect conclusions from the primary documents they did cite, such as when Naomi Wolf’s entire dissertation and book premise was debunked as a completely avoidable lack of understanding of what “death recorded” meant in UK legal terminology in the 19th century. She has since, unsurprisingly, become a right-wing grifter who can’t stop posting on X).
History is a relatively new discipline, historically speaking (pun intended) and one that relies on storytelling to engage and craft narrative. But it also, crucially and increasingly, equally relies on evidence and primary sources. Looking at what evidence someone is using to craft their narrative is far more important than “were they the victor” or even sometimes “what is their agenda?” If we buy into the idea that all history is propaganda storytelling because a pithy line makes us feel enlightened about what lies have been told in the name of Nationalist history narratives, we run the risk of enabling people who would like us to forget history altogether.
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