Tornado Alley (PROG)

[blackhawks]

You're assuming a position of his not in evidence, that he refuses to debate.

The debate lends itself to confusion as between legitimate historical revisionism and denialism/negationism. The latter taints the former with a negative connotation, IMO.

Historical revisionism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_revisionism

Historical revisionism is the means by which the historical record — the history of a society, as understood in its collective memory — continually integrates new facts and interpretations of the events commonly understood as history, about which the historian and American Historical Association member James M. McPherson, said:


The fourteen-thousand members of this association, however, know that revision is the lifeblood of historical scholarship. History is a continuing dialogue, between the present and the past. Interpretations of the past are subject to change in response to new evidence, new questions asked of the evidence, new perspectives gained by the passage of time. There is no single, eternal, and immutable “truth” about past events and their meaning.

The unending quest of historians for understanding the past — that is, revisionism — is what makes history vital and meaningful. Without revisionism, we might be stuck with the images of Reconstruction [1865–77] after the American Civil War [1861–65] that were conveyed by D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation [1915] and Claude Bowers’s The Tragic Era [1929]. Were the Gilded Age [1870s–1900] entrepreneurs “Captains of Industry” or “Robber Barons”?

Without revisionist historians, who have done research in new sources and asked new and nuanced questions, we would remain mired in one or another of these stereotypes. Supreme Court decisions often reflect a “revisionist” interpretation of history, as well as of the Constitution.[2]


The historian Deborah Lipstadt (Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, 1993), and the historians Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman (Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It?, 2002), distinguish between historical revisionism and historical negationism, the latter of which is a form of denialism.

Lipstadt said that Holocaust deniers, such as Harry Elmer Barnes, disingenuously self-identify as "historical revisionists" in order to obscure their denialism as academic revision of the historical record.


As such, Lipstadt, Shermer, and Grobman said that legitimate historical revisionism entails the refinement of existing knowledge about a historical event, not a denial of the event, itself; that such refinement of history emerges from the examination of new, empirical evidence, and a re-examination, and consequent re-interpretation of the existing documentary evidence.

That legitimate historical revisionism acknowledges the existence of a "certain body of irrefutable evidence" and the existence of a "convergence of evidence", which suggest that an event — such as the Black Death, American slavery, and the Holocaust — did occur; whereas the denialism of history rejects the entire foundation of historical evidence, which is a form of historical negationism.[