What is the difference between traditional history and revisionist history?

: What is the difference between traditional history and revisionist history?
Traditional history and revisionist history. I’m confused on what each one is. I understand that revisionist history is when a scholar or a professor gives there view point and opinion on a historical event (or so I believe) but what is traditional history? Is that the bias history that one learns during childhood saying that George Washington is the greatest president of all time and things like that?

Answers and Views:

Answer by Gerald Cline
Revisionist Historians take an unconventional view of history, and try to push a theory or agenda most other historians do not accept. In your example most historians are impressed with the way George Washington lived his life and his accomplishments. A revisionist historian might want to condemn him and erase his name from history because he owned slaves. It is not unusual for revisionists to fixate on one small point, and think that it should taint all other point’s of view. They have a tendency to be narrow-minded. Not always (and some have been proven right on some technical point) but usually.

Answer by lwhhow
They’re relative terms, but ‘traditional’ history is the history on a certain topic that has been accepted and taught and believed accurate for a long time (decades or even 100’s of years). ‘Revisionist’ history is where someone has taken that traditional history and recently (in the current day or in the last 10 years) and ‘revised’ (changed) it. This could be done for good reasons…maybe the traditional history that was accepted for decades or 100 years on a topic was found to be inaccurate, or maybe new information was learned recently. More often however it’s done for a ‘bad’ reason where the long time traditional history is changed ‘revised’ in the current day to go along with the revisor’s current day political, profit, prejudice, political correctness etc. agenda.
As a rule of thumb scholars don’t accept ‘revised’ history unless it goes through a lot of peer review, all it’s facts hold up, and the author of the changes doesn’t have some current day agenda motive.

Answer by ?
Simply put,, traditional history cand be a very facinating subject, on the other hand, revisionist history is something to stay away from untill you have the intelligence and at least a doctorate in history and can read between the lines of the writer and recognise his objective.