Historians spend most of their careers trying to ask good questions.  Occasionally those questions move other historians, the students they teach, and perhaps even the general public, to consider new ways to understand a past that seemed fairly well known.  This process is the basis of the historical method.  Sometimes it is called revisionism, though in the politics of the academy that term can also be used imprecisely as an epithet. On one level, revisionism simply describes how historians test historical assumptions as they discover or take another look at the sources of those assumptions.  On another level, perhaps a Read more