[dragonwriter]

> There's a weird kind of historic revisionism that's been going on the last couple years

For various values of "last couple", e.g., I remember at least one college history class I had around 1996 where the instructor spent some time (it was something of a tangent from the central focus of the class) discussing research (which I don't think was particularly new at the time, but something the instructor thought most students wouldn't be aware of) which seemed to refute the existence of a period of a lack of technological development in the Middle Ages in Europe. (Not that a lot of early-developed technology wasn't lost or at least less widely distributed, just that new developments continued despite that.)