Historical representations arising within and across various media have varying degrees of reliability as historical accounts, presenting complex “mixtures of fact, fiction, fabrication and faking” (Ellsworth, 1991), and may be artefacts of rigorous scholarship executed within recognisable traditions of historiography, but are just as likely to be the products of a commercial imagination with little respect for disciplinary rigor or forms. This problem is compounded in contemporary postmodern culture, where the line between fact and fiction in historical work has been questioned and is often deliberately blurred in reality television, mocumentaries, historical films and novels, and other popular media forms, inviting complex considerations from viewers about what ‘historical narratives’ they will believe or disbelieve; where, even in television news, as Jean Baudrillard (1995) has argued, reality and representation implode, leaving us with only an endless array of simulations which have supplanted any reality they were once intended to depict. Within this cultural context, ‘conspiracy theory’ narratives – in novels, on films, and throughout the internet – have found a new home. Conspiracy theory in the form of ‘historical denial’ has troubled academic historians, and in its virtual (internet) and celluloid forms, presents a particular problem for history teachers, given the evidence that young people’s historical understanding is affected by representations in the popular media (Seixas, 1993). This paper draws on a growing body of academic work focused on defining, understanding, and detecting ‘conspiracy theory’ (Coady, 2006). Using examples, it will be argued that not only does conspiracy theory present a challenge to our current ways of thinking about historical literacy, but it also reveals the limitations of formalist approaches to the study of historical narratives, of which Hayden White is the chief proponent. While the typical answer is to re-assert the importance of disciplinary method, this paper will conclude with an argument for the importance of meta-disciplinary historiographic knowledge in constructions of historical literacy.

1. History as a method not a truth:
How internet and celluloid conspiracy theory
challenges concepts of historical literacy
Robert Parkes
University of Newcastle
James Goulding
University of Sydney

2. Why are we interested in
conspiracy theories?
• Historical Denial as Conspiracy Theory
• Decoding DaVinci – Fiction as History
• Navigating rival histories (history, fiction, film, hagiography,
historical denial, rival narratives, conspiracy theories)
• Wineburg and ‘cognitive flexibility’
• Are existing ways of understanding historical literacy adequate
for dealing with conspiracy theory?

3. What do existing ways of thinking about
historical literacy assume?
• Literacy is acquired through learning the discipline
(historical methodology).
• A level of threshold knowledge may be required to
evaluate sources. (Schüllerqvist, 2013)
• Readers may switch between different reading
frameworks. (Gottlieb & Wineburg, 2012)

4. What is Conspiracy Theory?
• A secret plan on the part of a group to influence events partly by
covert action. (Pigden, 1995, p.5)
• A proposed explanation of some historical event (or events) in terms
of the significant casual agency of a relatively small group of persons
– the conspirators – acting in secret. (Keeley, 1999, p.116)
• A conspiracy theory is a proposed explanation of an historical event,
in which conspiracy (ie. agents acting secretly in concert) has a
significant casual role. Furthermore, the conspiracy postulated . . .
Must be a conspiracy to bring about the historical event which it
purports to explain. Finally the proposed explanation must conflict
with an ‘official’ version of the same historical event. (Coady, 2006,
p.117)

5. Three problems for conspiracy theorists
• The fundamental attribution error – over-estimating the
importance of dispositional factors and underestimating the
significance of situational factors (Clarke, 2002).
• Unfalsifiability of their theories (Basham, 2006).
• Holding on to theories that should otherwise be abandoned.
[A progressive research program is one in which novel
predictions are made that are generally successful. In a
degenerating research program, successful novel predictions
are not made. Instead, auxiliary hypotheses and initial
conditions are successively modified in light of new evidence,
to protect the original theory from apparent disconfirmation.]
(Clarke, 2002).

6. Why do people believe
conspiracy theories?
•
The social nature of CT and the 'culture of conspiracism’.
•
Conspiracies are presented as based on ‘more evidence’ than ‘received histories’.
(Clarke, 2002) – all theories have errant data (Coady, 2006).
•
Interested in not just what CT is (common epistemological elements etc) but why
people believe it, and what are the implications for educators? A lot of the literature
focuses on the peculiar epistemological nature of CT, but a look at its development
over time reveals it to be a profoundly social phenomenon (Byford, 2011).
•
CT as a reaction to postmodernism, rather than a product of it (strictly speaking CT,
being a reaction to PM, is still a product of it, but driving force is different). CT as the
everyday epistemological quick fix to complex historical problems.
•
The CT industry – multi faceted, mutually supportive discursive and rhetorical 'webs'.
Print, film, internet (static web sites and social media).

7. Holocaust Denial & Conspiracy Theory
(Coady, 2003, p. 205)

8. Implications for Educators
• The way we have been educating students may
inadvertently be making them more (not less)
susceptible to the claims of CT.
• How to respond?

9. Reconceptualising
Critical Historiography
• Traditional critical historiography is good tool for unpacking the claims
of CT, but it tends to be limited to textual analysis. Until now, the most
common arena for the refutation of CT has been in books and journal
articles.
• CT targets context sensitive vulnerabilities in multiple mediums,
therefore the response must also be context sensitive.
• Taking traditional historical analysis a step further – introduce the
notion of meta-disciplinary historiographic knowledge as a conceptual
framework that is more responsive to mechanisms and mediums of
contemporary CT than traditional historiography.
• On the web - consider ethos: combining new media literacy with
traditional historiography.

10. Future Directions
• Synthesising research from multiple disciplines into
a coherent and comprehensive framework
• Importance of meta-disciplinary perspectives
(meta-history / historiography).
• Empirical assessment of how readers tell the
difference between conspiracy theory and
‘authentic’ history; and how conspiracy theorists
‘read’ historical narratives.