Revisionist history
Revisionist history can be seen as a reaction against the metanarratives of the 1960s generation of both Marxist and liberal historians. These believed that it was possible to explain historiacal events in terms of long-term economic and social determinants – to a large extent removing the role of both contingency and freewill. In contrast, the revisionists rejected ideological approaches and the search for long-term explanations, as well as much of the social science terminology of these works, in favour of a return to local and parliamentary sources. They stressed continuity rather than change. The apotheosis of this probably came with Lawrence Stone's Causes of the English Revolution(1972), whose analysis of the Civil War was torn apart in the 1970s by a generation of young historians led by Conrad Russell and inspired by Geoffrey Elton.
- Historians:
- Elton, Geoffrey Rudolph
Russell, Conrad Sebastian Robert
Stone, Lawrence - Themes:
- Marxist history
Whig history
Related publications
- Glenn Burgess, On revisionism: an analysis of early Stuart historiography in the 1970s and 1980s, in The Historical Journal, 33, 3 (1990), 609–27
