antihistory

English

Etymology

From anti- +‎ history.

Noun

antihistory (countable and uncountable, plural antihistories)

1. (uncountable) Spurious history.
   • 2011, Alan Dershowitz, The Case for Israel, page 213:

     Instead, there was the fraudulent manufacturing of false antihistory. It was the kind of deception for which professors are rightly fired […]

   • 2011, Robert C. Williams, The Historian's Toolbox, →ISBN, page 31:

     The most notorious example of antihistory is historical denial. Historical denial asserts that a well-known event never really happened or that a well-known person never existed.

2. (countable) A false or fictional narrative describing past events which did not actually occur.
   • 1975, Peter Hanns Reill, The German Enlightenment and the Rise of Historicism, →ISBN, page 69:

     Rousseau's antihistories paid homage to a time that might have been.

   • 2001, John Kadvany, Imre Lakatos and the Guises of Reason, →ISBN, page 316:

     [W]e are constantly subject to the danger of creating foundations for the antiethics of Stalinism, the antiscience of Lysenko genetics, and the antihistories of Muscovite historians.

Translations

narrative describing past events which did not actually occur

• Portuguese: anti-história f

See also

• alternate history
• antihistoricism
• pseudohistory