Is history always written by the victors?

Question

The famous "history is written by victors" saying argues that the victors overwhelmingly influence historical accounts.

Be it in the past or present, are there any examples of history written by the losers?

Answer 1

I am reading Andrew Weatcroft's's The Enemy at the Gate: Habsburg, Ottomans, and the Battle for Europe (see also here). It contains this relevant statement in relation to a (from some perspective) loosing party rewriting history:

Of course, once the great [Ottoman attack on Vienna in 1683] failed, history was rewritten and the sultan portrayed as wisely dubious from the outset and latterly wholly innocent of his duplicitous servant's machinations.

That servant was Kara Mustafa, Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire under Sultan Mehmet IV, who survived the battle in the remote West but not its aftermath closer to home: he was strangulated on orders from the sultan, his co-loser in (and according to this source perhaps the co-initiator of) the failed campaign.

Answer 2

All the bad press given to Vikings (and the like) by angry monks suggests not always. Depends if the victors build a tradition of literacy and of documenting history or whether they just go build more longboats and get drunk.

Answer 3

Howard Zinn, in his A People's History of the United States, claimed to be endevoring to do something quite similar to that.

If you are interested in USA history, I highly reccomend it for two reasons. The first is that many others with that same interest will be familiar with it, so you can at least hold your own in conversations. The other is that it gives the best coverage of the (typically ignored) union movement in US history that I have seen. This was arguably the defining social issue of the late 19th and early 20th century. It is tough to understand the events of this period without it, yet most other US history books practically pretend it didn't happen.

I understand there is also from another author A People's History of the World, written in the same vein.

Answer 4

"History is written by victors" may itself be an example of history written by the losers! While the quote is commonly misattributed to Winston Churchill, it's origins are unknown and it might be inspired by Hermann Göring's quote:

We will go down in history either as the world's greatest statesmen or its worst villains.

On a (perhaps) more serious note, the aftermath of the Fall of Constantinople (1453) is a prime example of history written by the losers. A wave of Greek scholars emigrated to the west after the event that essentially marked the end of the Byzantine Empire, bringing with them extremely biased accounts of Ottoman brutality. The vilification of the Ottomans was the prevalent opinion in the Western world for centuries and served as propaganda material as late as 1832, when the Greek War of Independence ended. Even modern attempts at identifying the historical truth of the era, such as the 2011 "1821" documentary, are met with controversy in Greece.

A more recent example would be the American Civil War and the Lost Cause movement, a term borrowed from Edward Pollard's 1866 book The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates : Comprising a Full and Authentic Account of the Rise and Progress of the Late Southern Confederacy--the Campaigns, Battles, Incidents, and Adventures of the Most Gigantic Struggle of the World's History.

Lastly, a (perhaps controversial) example of history written by the losers is the account of the Vietnam War. Although whether the US lost the war is debatable they certainly didn't win it, still the overwhelming majority of historical documentation for the war comes from the US.

Further reading:

• Michel Foucault's Society Must Be Defended (Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-76)
• Thomas Carlyle's On Heroes and Hero Worship and the Heroic in History,
• Social history and People's history articles on Wikipedia,
• Philosophy of history article on Wikipedia,
• Truth by consensus article on Wikipedia,
• Historical revisionism article on Wikipedia,
• History written by the losers article on The Guardian.