On the Rewriting of History

Abstract

The current edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (the fifteenth) appeared in 1974. Its form has been mildly controversial, being divided into a ten-volume "Micropedia" of short reference articles and a nineteen-volume "Macropedia" of in-depth discussions of important topics. Its content of course is not so obvious. However, the intellectual renaissance of the late 1960s and early 1970s, which had challenged the crippling anti-Communist dogmatism of the late 1940s and 1950s, did exert some influence on major articles in many fields of the 1974 edition.

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