Pseudohistory
Works of pseudohistory often point exclusively to unreliable sources—including myths and legends, often treated as literal historical truth—to support the thesis being promoted while ignoring valid sources that contradict it.
[7]: 7–18 Writers Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman define pseudohistory as "the rewriting of the past for present personal or political purposes".
[8]: 2 Other writers take a broader definition; Douglas Allchin, a historian of science, contends that when the history of scientific discovery is presented in a simplified way, with drama exaggerated and scientists romanticized, this creates wrong stereotypes about how science works, and in fact constitutes pseudohistory, despite being based on real facts.
An alternative chronology is a revised sequence of events that deviates from the standard timeline of world history accepted by mainstream scholars.
Other, less extreme examples, are the phantom time hypothesis, which asserts that the years AD 614–911 never took place; and the New Chronology of David Rohl, which claims that the accepted timelines for ancient Egyptian and Israelite history are wrong.
[15] In the eighth century, a forged document known as Donation of Constantine, which supposedly transferred authority over Rome and the western part of the Roman Empire to the Pope, became widely circulated.
[22][23][24] Mainstream historians instead support the traditional position, which holds that the American founding fathers intended for church and state to be kept separate.
[30][31] While closely related to previous categories, historical negationism or denialism specifically aims to outright deny the existence of confirmed events, often including various massacres, genocides, and national histories.
It also states as its goal the combination of the insights of psychology, especially psychoanalysis, with the research methodology of the social sciences and humanities to understand the emotional origin of the behavior of individuals, groups and nations, past and present.
[7] In 1968, Erich von Däniken published Chariots of the Gods?, which claims that ancient visitors from outer space constructed the pyramids and other monuments.
[7]: 201 Similarly, Zechariah Sitchin has published numerous books claiming that a race of extraterrestrial beings from the Planet Nibiru known as the Anunnaki visited Earth in ancient times in search of gold, and that they genetically engineered humans to serve as their slaves.
"[7]: 201 [42] The author Graham Hancock has sold over four million copies of books promoting the pseudohistorical thesis that all the major monuments of the ancient world, including Stonehenge, the Egyptian pyramids, and the moai of Easter Island, were built by a single ancient supercivilization,[43] which Hancock claims thrived from 15,000 to 10,000 BC and possessed technological and scientific knowledge equal to or surpassing that of modern civilization.
[7] He first advanced the full form of this argument in his 1995 bestseller Fingerprints of the Gods,[7] which won popular acclaim, but scholarly disdain.
[7]: 11 Furthermore, similar conspiracy theories promote the idea of embellished, fabricated accounts of historical civilizations, namely Khazaria and Tartaria.
The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion is a fraudulent work purporting to show a historical conspiracy for world domination by Jews.
In spite of the mainstream academic consensus which conclusively rejects it, this theory has been promoted in Anti-Semitic and some Anti-Zionist circles, they argue that Jews are an alien element in both Europe and Palestine.
[58] A large number of nationalist pseudohistorical theories deal with the legendary Ten Lost Tribes of ancient Israel.
British-Israelism, also known as Anglo-Israelism, the most famous example of this type, has been conclusively refuted by mainstream historians using evidence from a vast array of different fields of study.
[84][81] Other nineteenth-century writers, such as Thomas Gold Appleton, in his A Sheaf of Papers (1875), and George Perkins Marsh, in his The Goths in New England, seized upon false notions of Viking history to promote the superiority of white people (as well as to oppose the Catholic Church).
Such misuse of Viking history and imagery reemerged in the twentieth century among some groups promoting white supremacy.
Mainstream historians have widely panned the book, categorizing it as pseudohistory,[98][99][100][101][102][103][104][105] and pointing out that the genealogical tables used in it are now known to be spurious.
[106] Nonetheless, the book was an international best-seller[105] and inspired Dan Brown's bestselling mystery thriller novel The Da Vinci Code.
Vasudev Devnani, the education minister for the western state of Rajasthan, said in January 2017 that it was important to "understand the scientific significance" of the cow, as it was the only animal in the world to both inhale and exhale oxygen.
[117] In 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi told a gathering of doctors and medical staff at a Mumbai hospital that the story of the Hindu god Ganesha showed genetic science existed in ancient India.
