Rational or Too Rebellious: The Ethics of Radically Reinterpreting History

“What if I told you that Abraham Lincoln is what we would today call ‘queer’? Would he still hold a place in your heart?” said Thomas Balcerski, a professor of American History at Eastern Connecticut University.

Last September, Balcerski released a documentary examining Lincoln’s sexuality. Provocatively titled “Lover of Men” the documentary builds a case that Lincoln was gay. But as Balcerski’s question reveals, the documentary is just as fixated on the cultural reception and 21st-century impact of this proposition as it is with the evidence defending it.

“Lover of Men” is one of multiple documentaries released in recent years that strives to reinterpret history, often utilizing contemporary terminology to construct a narrative that aids a 21st-century movement. Another prominent example is the Netflix docuseries “Queen Cleopatra,” released in May 2023, which makes the claim that one of the most politically and culturally powerful women of all time was Black, not a Macedonian Greek.

The two documentaries both prompted fierce backlash. The former was mercilessly ridiculed by figures like Elon Musk and Ben Shapiro, and the latter resulted in an Egyptian petition to UNESCO for $2 billion in damages. Although media that either takes liberties with or challenges some aspect of accepted historical fact to sensationalize or offer important insight is nothing new — with period dramas and historical fiction being prime examples — treating these counter-narratives as serious historical hypotheses is a recent development, one that begs examination of their impetus and the ethics of crafting them at all.

The urge to reinterpret history in radical ways is understandable, when considering the power of historical narrative to shape the present. French historian Ernest Renan argued that collective memory, an assemblage of historical events embraced by a population that jointly forgets and remembers, shapes national identity. Widespread acknowledgement that Abraham Lincoln, one of the most revered American cultural heroes — “our god,” as Balcerski says — is gay could induce a significant cultural shift.

“If you can accept a queer Lincoln, you can accept queer people overall,” Balcerski said.

Jada Pinkett-Smith, producer of “Queen Cleopatra,” also had a noble agenda that drove her reinterpretation of history.

“We don’t often get to see or hear stories about Black queens, and that was really important for me, as well as for my daughter,” Pinkett-Smith said in a Netflix Tudum interview.

Her documentary could play a pivotal role in inspiring confidence in young Black women, as well as respect for Black women’s contributions to society.

Simarlary, although part of an explicitly fictionalized account of history, “Hamilton”’s casting of men of color as American cultural heroes like George Washington allows them to figuratively occupy these pivotal roles, challenging notions of who belongs in positions of power in American historical memory.

Although it concerns a modern-day cultural hero, not a historical one, a January CNN article commenting on a New York Times article that speculated that Taylor Swift was bisexual is also part of this recent trend of claiming a cultural hero as a member of a marginalized group to improve that group’s status in society.

It seems that all these narratives have the power to effect much-needed social change. These reinterpretations raise two questions: Is it ethical for a political or social agenda to drive historical inquiry? And what standard of truth must a noble counter-narrative, intended to drive beneficial political or social change, meet?

Traditional standards of historical inquiry dictate that a historian should not enter into research with a preconceived objective, so as not to taint their findings. Selectively assembling historical episodes for political gain is the machination of populists, not academics, who answer to a higher creed. However, as Renan implicitly argues, history is relevant because it has modern-day implications. Especially when some treat history as a war in which all is fair, it would be defeatist to refuse to engage in some of the same tactics — namely, applying an agenda to history.

In a country that continues to struggle with discrimination, a deliberate project to illuminate the experiences of marginalized peoples — which could inspire important societal change — is noble and one historians should undertake. The fact that an agenda evidently drove the formulation of the questions the Lincoln and Cleopatra documentaries present is not a problem.

However, simply because a narrative has such potentially beneficial implications for society does not exempt it from meeting conventional standards for historical research nor does the fact that it is a radical counter-narrative require it to meet higher standards than the widely accepted one. Although it may seem obvious that there should be a consistent standard for both narrative and counter-narrative, the reaction to these two documentaries has refused this happy medium. The creators of each of the two documentaries rightly lament the lack of interest from academies in research like theirs, which is often required to clear a higher bar of evidence. But the documentaries — particularly “Queen Cleopatra” — at points fall prey to the danger of having a political or social agenda drive historical inquiry, neglecting to fully address well-substantiated counter-arguments and thus committing some of the same faults as the narratives they seek to uproot.

When judging narrative and counter-narrative, the public must also apply equal standards. The stakes of lowering or raising bars for historical fact are just too high, affecting not only perception of the time period concerned but the history that goes on to be influenced by it.