Pseudohistory  

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Pseudohistory is a pejorative term applied to a type of historical revisionism. It purports to be history, and uses ostensibly-scholarly methods and techniques (which in fact depart from standard historiographical conventions), but is inconsistent with established facts or with common sense and often involves sensational claims whose acceptance would significantly require rewriting accepted history. The term may apply to a theory or to a work or works based on that theory. Cryptohistory is a related term, sometimes applied to pseudo-historical publications based on occult notions.

The pejorative nature of the term arises from the implication of ignorance, deliberate misrepresentation, carelessness, gullibility or poor scholarship on the part of the (pseudo)historian.

Examples

The following are some commonly cited examples of pseudohistory:

• Catastrophism
  • Immanuel Velikovsky's book Worlds in Collision
• Alternative chronologies - revised sequences of events or other alterations to the timeline of ancient history.
  • Anatoly Fomenko's theory New Chronology
• Psychohistory The ill-fated attempt to merge psychology with history, replacing historical method.
• Pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact
  • Gavin Menzies's book 1421: The Year China Discovered the World, which argues for the idea that Chinese sailors discovered America.
• Religious history (see also scientific foreknowledge in sacred texts)
  • 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
  • The writings of author David Barton and others postulating that the United States of America was founded as an exclusively Christian nation.
  • See also Searches for Noah's Ark
• Ethnocentric pseudo-history (see also National mysticism)
  • Most Afrocentric (i.e. Pre-Columbian Africa-Americas contact theories, Black Egypt) ideas have been identified as pseudohistorical
  • The Indigenous Aryans theories published in Hindu nationalism during the 1990s and 2000s.
  • The "crypto-history" of Germanic mysticism and Nazi occultism.
  • British-Israelism (Anglo-Israelism).
• Anti-semitism inspired (see also Blood libel)
  • The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, a fraudulent work purporting to show a historical conspiracy for world domination by Jews
  • Holocaust denial: claims of writers such as David Irving that the Holocaust did not occur or was exaggerated greatly.
• Ancient Astronauts, Archaeoastronomy and Lost lands (see also Atlantis location hypotheses)
  • The theory of Lemuria and Kumari Kandam.
  • Chariots of the Gods? and other books by Erich von Daniken, which claim ancient visitors from outer space constructed the pyramids and other monuments.
  • Publications by Christopher Knight, such as Uriel's Machine (2000), claiming ancient technological civilizations.
• The Shakespeare authorship question, which claims that someone other than William Shakespeare of Stratford wrote the works traditionally attributed to him.

See also

pseudo-

• Historical Revisionism (negationism)
• Historiography and nationalism
• Misery lit
• Pseudoarchaeology
• Pseudoscience
• Pseudoscientific metrology