Part of the problem, I think, is semantic (as so many problems are). Many people (myself included) would argue with the definitions implicit in your last paragraph.

The word "history" has three distinct meanings (it actually has more, but in the context of this discussion, these are the important and prevalent ones): (1) "a record of past events"; (2) "the human practice of studying and recording past events"; or (3) "a collection of past events." Perhaps in the Halls of Academia the language is a bit more specialized and precise (as it often is in the Halls), but in common usage things aren't as clear.

Naturally, this linguistic ambiguity can cause problems. If the word "history" means "a human account about the past," then rewriting history is fine (and often necessary). On the other hand, if the word "history" means "the events of the past" or "the past itself," then rewriting history is an impossible task, and those who seek to do so are either foolish or malicious or both.

Of course, your main point remains a true and vitally important one: the stories we tell ("histories") about the past ("history") are almost never completely accurate. New discoveries or insights can and do improve our understanding of history (the past) even as we recognize that the past itself was only one way.

As for why the electricians and accountants (and English majors? ;-p) want to tell you how to do history: History (however you define it) can be a very personal subject. Thinking about the past has a tendency to stir up lots of emotions. And when people get emotionally charged, they often get cranky and bossy. At least that's been the case in my experience.

You raise very good points, sir. I shall try to address them in an agreeable manner.

First, you are quite right that my final paragraph runs counter to common usage. Even historians often use the term "history" inconsistently. I think that if we kept these different ideas distinct, however, we would be much better off. And I think that differentiating between "history" and "the past" is by far the easiest way to do that.

Without such a distinction, we have problems like the one we had today. My interlocutor (a) claimed that history cannot change, and (b) claimed that we need to keep history from changing. Frankly, I think my distinction would help him out a little; without it, he's just contradicting himself.

And I think because people fail to make such a distinction, they equate the revision of history with relativism -- an identification that is totally unnecessary and usually inaccurate. On the contrary, I believe that those who believe in any sort of objectivity need to allow room for revision of our historical accounts.

And of course, you are right that many people have strong feelings about history. But I have strong feelings about electricity and accounting, too. In fact, the average accountant or electrician probably has a lot more power over my life than the average historian has. People would still think ill of me if I presumed to tell such specialists that they are all wrong about generally accepted accounting principles or the left-hand rule.

Speaking as a non-professional, it may be possible that there is something else at stake here...

One common example: for years we were told that Christopher Columbus was a super guy, who overcame incredible challenges to discover the new world. (though the books usually gave a passing reference to Leif Erikson)

Then, other experts came along and said no, not only did ol' Chris not discover the new world, even second or third, but he and his sailors spread measles and all kinds of awful diseases, killing off many of the natives in the area in gleeful and wild abandon. The books don't exactly tell you to "hate on him," but it's strongly implied that intelligent folks do.

So, aside from having to discern factual precision, there is the issue of agendas: the revised history making up for faults in the previous one, and perhaps purposely skewing the details in a slight "overcorrection."

What people like me really want to know is this:

Just who/what are we supposed to believe?

Does being the most recent publication automatically confer accuracy and objectivity on an historical work?

And frankly, as a homeschooling parent, I can't afford to buy all new history books every year....

Does being the most recent publication automatically confer accuracy and objectivity on an historical work?

No, but later historians do often have access to better material and more benefit of hindsight. (Many homeschool catalogs, in my experience, reverse this and treat older books as automatically more reliable. They are misguided -- although old books are very nice.) Historical knowledge tends to build up over time, and we do have to buy new textbooks sometimes anyway (though not necessarily every year).

Ideally, you will evaluate historical writing by evaluating the documentary evidence and argumentation behind a particular position. If that is not possible, then it is probably wise to go with the interpretation that has the most historians (especially if they hold a wide range of political and religious views) convinced. Even if you suspect a political agenda, your children need to know what the dominant interpretation is. The minority interpretation is just as likely to be part of an agenda.

In the case of Christopher Columbus, I think the later interpretation is generally better. (Although I don't think we can really blame the Europeans for carrying diseases they did not understand.) On top of being a terrible colonial administrator, Columbus began his voyage as a result of an important error on his part. As I understand it, he calculated that the world was far smaller than the experts of his day believed. The experts were right and he was wrong -- and no, they did not believe the world was flat. Fortunately for Columbus, there was another land mass between Europe and Asia that none of them knew about yet. He could have gotten his crew killed.

I don't have any great insight into your situation as a homeschooling parent, but I was homeschooled as a teenager. It took me a while to realize just how ideologically skewed my curriculum was -- just how often it departed from the best historical evidence in order to score a political point, and just how often it ignored things that mainstream historians quite properly highlight. (I speak of the A Beka curriculum.) I would therefore advise any homeschooling parent to make a conscious effort to minimize that danger.

Oh, and always choose a professional historian over a pundit, no matter whose politics you agree with more.

On the topic of being fair to ol' Chris, it should be noted that the common lay-person of Chris's day believed that the world was flat... and by "common lay-person", we mean just about everyone except for the elite .1% who could read.

Now, historically, there were two important calculations of the circumferencee of the globe: one done by Eratosthenes (correctly assessing the earth's circumference within about 500 miles...) and the other being the obsecenely-smaller circumference (over 12,000 miles off) that Strabo used in his later (and more widely-accepted) Geography... which used the anecdotes of Homer and treated them as more authoritative than modern scientists and scholars of his day.*

Now, since Strabo was more popular in Chris' day (at least, as best as I can figure from doing some research) than old Eratosthenes, it isn't unreasonable to look at your globe and realize that if someone hacked out that ~12,000 mile chunk with the pesky Americas in it and sewed the globe back up, you'd have a pretty clean shot from Spain to India. So, if you're Chris, and you figure that the circumference of the globe is roughly half of what it actually is... well, you can't blame him for thinking he got to India.

Lastly, the thing that I've always had against "revisionism" is that your average historian isn't out to screw with history in such a way that it makes someone look good or bad... he just wants to take the new manuscripts that some archaeologist found and the new accounts that were turned up in some musty library and any other new research and see if he can put together a better account than the one we've got. The historian's biggest problem in this case is he's not a very good PR person for his own work and he tends to get lumped in with some rather agenda-driven pundits who do some rather suspect historical work of their own and who will take his work and bend it sorely out of context if it fits whatever ends they are seeking after.

I've always thought historians as a professional group would do well if they banded together enough that they could get a representative to go make noise whenever their work go severely misrepresented... but that would take historians leaving off of their libraries and coming outside to blink at the bright sun and the world around them... and well, that's not most historians: especially not the good ones.

*This actually raises a good point by way of support of Wilson's latter claim: stick with real professional academics. As cool as Homer is, when you begin citing blind story-tellers as your source of geographical authority in opposition to good scientists and actual cartographers, bad things happen.

But History is never really about the past--it's about the present and the story of how the present got to be the way it is which is inextricably linked to why we are who we are. As the philosophers Rage Against the Machine remind us, "[he] who controls the past, controls the future"...

George Orwell said it first. In 1984, it is a Party slogan: "Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past."

So while the expression is a recognition of history's power in the present, I think Orwell uses it as an ironic plea for objectivity -- for not letting today's political considerations dictate history.

But you are of course right that history is written for a present audience in order to help that audience understand itself.