After observing that it CAN be (and often is) legitimate scholastic re-examination of existing knowledge about a historical event, Wikipedia's article on Historical Revisionism bends over backwards to be fair, and so, I'll use it for this section. But call it "revisionism" and all of a sudden you can't find an article on it using a Google search that isn't biased in one way or another. As far as the revisions we do in history are concerned, almost everything passes unnoticed, and people who don't pay attention to the changes (like the recent incident at CPAC when a young delegate began to speak about how good American slavery was) tend to be ridiculed. Revision based on "new" documents and other new information or new interpretation of existing source material is central to ALL scholarship.
I'm going to do some deconstruction of some of the more outrageous attacks on what I wrote, but first I need to get a few things straightened out about the use of the epithet "revision" when it's applied to a scholarly endeavor. I also think there's some residual xenophobia involved too, but that's a more difficult claim to make because I don't know how old all of my attackers were (and yes, age makes a difference here). I've done some reading on the various players in the Enola Gay controversy and I've come to the conclusion that the complaints about my presentation of the event were ideologically based, not rooted in fact. I generally try to stay out of controversy in my own diaries, but the problems that comments headlined "Warning to all readers of this diary" and "The scholarship on the revisionist side is awful" caused seemed to me to require more than just a "thanks for your comment" approach.
Two weeks ago, I wrote a diary in this series called "Dropping the Bomb on Japan." I was surprised when it recapitulated the Enola Gay controversy of 1996, and I would have said it turned into a gun diary only that would be insulting to the RKBA people who generally, as is traditional here at Daily Kos, trade in facts.