Politically Correct History / Literature

• Parodied in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, where history and logic are rewritten, often to polar opposites of what they had been, based on the whims and imperatives of the Party (a party orator switches "We have always been at war with Eurasia" to "Eastasia" in mid-sentence). The protagonist is employed in the department where outdated history and contradictory facts are consigned to the "memory hole."
• As a genre, historical mystery fiction (and to an extent historical fiction in general) often has some amount of this in order to keep the character sympathetic. There is definitely a continuum of this though. On one end, the title character of the Brother Cadfael series is one of the most kind and humane characters imaginable and in one book/episode reacts tolerantly toward a couple who had sex in a church. On the other end, Judge Dee is a polygamist, who (in keeping with the justice system of the time) uses beatings and torture in interrogation and sentences people to horrific forms of death. However, he is notably pragmatic about using these methods and the author likely understood that any more descriptions of torture would lose the Judge the reader's sympathy. In all fairness, medieval secular mores were rather more relaxed than those preached by the Church, and Cadfael came late to his vocation. Moreover, Judge Dee hates having to watch the executions, which makes it simple to avoid too much description; it also helps that the people he sentences to horrible deaths almost always really deserve it.
• Parodied in Dave Barry Slept Here. A couple pages into Chapter Four: The Colonies Develop A Life-style, the Lemony Narrators interrupt the action to notify the readers that "a review committee... has determined that, so far, this history book is not making enough of an effort to include the contributions of women and minority groups. Unless some effort is undertaken to correct this situation, this book will not be approved for purchase by public school systems in absolutely vast quantities." Whereupon the narrators/authors "just now remembered... that during the colonial era women and minority groups were making many contributions, which we are certain that they will continue to do at regularly spaced intervals throughout the course of this book." They do... whenever the narrative remembers to mention it, anyway.
• Subverted and lampshaded in Stephen King's It. The town of Derry, Maine, has a chapter of "The Legion of White Decency", a Northern counterpart to the KKK, which the residents of Derry (and Northerners in general) like to forget about.
• In the young adult book After (2003) by Francine Prose, the school slowly starts to try to brainwash the students. One of the protagonist's friends points out that the documentary playing on the bus that day is on World War II, and was stating that the atom bombs were dropped on Japanese wilderness areas. He says, "Dude, Listen to that. I don't think that's true." followed by another friend asking, "How stupid were we?"
• Discussed throughout the 1632 series by Eric Flint, in regards to the commonly held perceptions of history by the citizens of a 20th century town transported into the middle of the Thirty Years' War, compared to the real historical facts.
  • One example is a discussion between a modern man and a 17th century Russian noble about the possibility of abolishing slavery in Russia. The modern man is shocked to find that most of the upper nobility are quite indifferent to slavery, but the petty nobles and non-noble farmers are violently opposed to slavery abolition. The Russian explains that the real reason for this divide is that the cash-rich upper nobility can afford to go without slaves, but for the land-rich and cash-poor, having a major part of your property taken away along with your ability to get the crops in at harvest time for some vaguely defined moral principle with no foundation in legal or religious precedent is highly unpalatable. He then takes a dig at the American belief in the Aristocrats Are Evil trope.
  • Ironically, at the described time while there was indeed legal slavery in Russia, it wasn't practiced as much as serfdom, which was discussed above, but which was much more relaxed in the early 17 century (in fact, until exactly the times of the novels, the serfs in Russia had the right to change their employer twice a year) was more economically efficient. It was the Peter the Great reform that ostensibly banned slavery which was responsible for the worsening of the serfs' lot. It was not well thought out, and instead of abolition of chattel slavery its provisions allowed the landowners to reduce the serfs' rights, turning all of them essentially into slaves.
  • The discussion described above was essentially taking place verbatim in the Russian high circles in the Catherine the Great's reign. Catherine and some of her advisers were hoping to abolish serfdom, but were unable because of the pressure from the lesser nobility — who comprised much of the army and the civil service, and whose livelihood depended not on the wages from the Crown (which in Russia was just as land-rich and cash-poor as its subjects), but on the rents from their estates in the country. The poor soils, unreliable climate and underdeveloped agricultural technologies of the time pretty much precluded any deviation from the old-timey manorial system if they wanted any semblance of reliability.
• The German kids edutainment series Viel Spaß mit... (Have fun with... <insert people from history here>) doesn't gloss over the fact that the Romans had slaves, or that pigs would run around in medieval cities, but the characters (typically from a Nuclear Family, with focus on the kids) act more like modern people, so the Values Dissonance doesn't take over and make the protagonists unrelatable. For example, the daughter of the Roman family is married off at the age of 16 instead of 12 - the latter is mentioned as being standard then, but the family does it differently. And of course, they always treat their slaves / servants well.
• Recent editions of Mark Twain's works that remove offensive language (one word that seems to offend above all others). This is so much the case that it's spawned uncensored versions of Twain's works.
• J.T. Edson's The Hooded Riders had a similar premise to The Birth of a Nation above. Scheming, thieving carpet-bagging scum were out to shoot practically every good Southern cowboy stone dead (even taking ex-slaves along, who fortunately couldn't shoot straight, nossir) and steal their farms in a dastardly plan to take over the United States. Dusty Fogg and his companions (one of whom is a half-Commanche dog soldier who rides a horse with no bridle and can smell your shadow a mile away) borrow the concept of wearing white hoods from the Ku Klux Klan, intimidate the sheriff's assistants and pay off the loans of every put-upon, hapless smallholder in the tri-county area. And then the President of the United States shows up, and the carpetbaggers try to murder him too! But he's saved by Dusty Fogg, the intrepid Texas Ranger! After which, the Hooded Riders renounce their KKK regalia, even though they appreciate the need for folks to protect their womenfolk from A Fate Worse Than Death, because they don't need to operate in darkness any more. The president has seen the light and now everyone knows that Reconstruction is a con. This would be almost in So Bad, It's Good territory but for a fairground fight between Dusty Fogg (who just happened to have learned Jujutsu from his uncle's Japanese manservant, improbably enough) and an angry, drunk strongman who happens to be black. The strongman loses the fight, loses his temper, tries to knife the intrepid Texas Ranger and gets killed stone dead. Then everyone tells Dusty Fogg to run and hide because those new law enforcement types from the North just won't understand, and will definitely try and convict him for murder! Add in a Southern Belle who knows how to talk to "colored folks" to get information out of them, by banging her fist on the table and using the right imperious tone, and you really wish J.T. Edson had stuck to his Son of Tarzan series. They remain among his most controversial work, and the aforementioned killing of a black man was apparently based on one by the real criminal John Wesley Hardin, who also claimed it was self-defense.
• The Help has received criticism for this. The book is about a woman writing a book about African-American maids in The '60s. While it does show some of the indignities they had to face, it doesn't emphasize the things such as sexual assault and other horrors that occurred, referring to them only briefly.
• Brother Eagle, Sister Sky by Susan Jeffers, according to Publishers Weekly review on Amazon, "is an adaptation of a speech delivered by Chief Seattle at treaty negotiations in the 1850s". There are only three little problems. It's "not well served by images that ignore the rich diversity of Amerindian cultures (even Seeathl's own Northwest people) in favor of cigar-store redskins in feathers and fringe", as a review in School Library Journal put this — i.e. The Theme Park Version. The author insists that "an ancient people were a part of the land that we love and call America", that is long gone, while 1854 is hardly "ancient" and Seeathl's people are still living and kicking — specifically, as it turns out, her book. And scavenging of New Age gold material from this speech is plain cherry-picking — since, quoth the linked review, "make a 'beautiful environmental statement' out of that, if you can":
  ... And when the last red man shall have perished... the streets of your cities and villages... will throng with the returning hosts that once filled and still love this beautiful land. The white man will never be alone. Let him be just and deal kindly with my people, for the dead are not altogether powerless.
• L. Neil Smith's The North American Confederacy series.
  • There is a major inconsistency between the special emphasis on the property rights of individual citizens that differentiates The North American Confederacy from the present timeline and the fact that slavery is abolished entirely in 1820 C.E., with no apparent backlash at all. The author, being a libertarian, probably thought that better economic systems make better people. Never mind that back then, only white people were considered to be citizens and the African-descended slaves were considered to be the property of their masters. If the individual property rights of citizens were given especial protection all along, especially with the attitudes of most white people in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, slavery would most likely have been abolished later than in our timeline, if it was abolished at all.
  • In The Gallatin Divergence, he has 18th century characters talking about discrimination over "sexual preference". Although he clearly considers some sexual preferences preferable to others.
• In the Christian Middle Ages, legends and epics about old-time heroes often recast their protagonists as Christians, even if in their time and place they clearly would have been pagan. Beowulf, for example, has Beowulf and Hrothgar invoke the Christian God, while 6th century Scandinavia was then still untouched by Christianity. At one point in the poem, the Norse from desperation pray to the old "stone" pagan gods, but this is clearly portrayed disapprovingly. As the poem may have been written (or at least copied down) by a monk (as was much literature at the time) it's not surprising. Norse legends that were written down in general have been shown as having Christian elements into them and it's unclear how much they differed from the originals.
• In Orson Scott Card's Alvin Maker series, the title character is a thinly veiled portrait of Joseph Smith, founder of the LDS, Card's faith. He's portrayed as The Paragon and the issue of polygamy is dealt with by stating that any women claiming to be married to him other than his first wife are either deluded or being put up to it by his enemies (in actual fact his plural marriages to women, along with theological sanction for them, are well recorded).
• Strongly discouraged in How NOT to Write a Novel. The authors note that having a historical character who possesses socialist/neo-conservative/etc viewpoints which did not even exist at the time the novel is set in, or a rebellious protagonist who questions the never-before questioned values of a historical society (from the perspective of the author's never-questioned Western values), will tend to violate a reader's Willing Suspension of Disbelief.
• Defied and arguably Lampshaded in Harry Turtledove's career-making novel The Guns of the South. Members of the AWB (standing for Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging- Afrikaner Resistance Movement, or basically white South African Neo-Nazis) travel from (initially) 2014 to 1864 in order to help the Confederacy win the American Civil War with the expectation that Apartheid Era South Africa will gain a useful (and racist) ally on the global stage and last well into the 21st Century in the resulting Alternate Timeline. They instead find out that a vast majority of the Confederates are only racist because their whole world is for the most part, and (with only a couple exceptions) are in fact even better than most with regards to said issue. Their actions eventually result in (presumably) a new timeline with better race relations than the "Prime" timeline. Turtledove actually backed away from this book later on in his Timeline-191 timeline where his views of the Confederacy, if it survived, would have become the setting's equivalent of the Nazis, although that's because they turn into The Scapegoat when the Confederates lose WW1, which is blamed by Hitler-like figure Jake Featherstone on having Black revolts during the war (it appears that although slavery was abolished, their status was de facto serfs instead, and some rebelled due to this).
• Dear America: While most of the series is an aversion, a couple of the books try to soften up difficult subjects:
  • My Heart Is On The Ground is the most blatant example, where the notorious Boarding School of Horrors Carlisle Indian School is portrayed as a relatively nice school run by well meaning but misguided missionaries and its director is a Cool Old Guy. In Real Life, the teachers abused the students and the director in particular was a bully. To make matters worse, it attempts to portray the forced assimilation of indigenous children into white society as a good thing; where the children will thrive. Needless to say, the book was hated by Native American readers.
  • When Will This Cruel War Be Over? tackles the issue of the Civil War written by a girl in the South by going out of its way to portray Emma and her family as kind and compassionate to their slaves, to the point of running a school for the children. In Real Life, education for slaves of any age was illegal and both the slaves and owners would be punished. However, as the book goes on, it’s clear that Emma is ignorant of the truths about slavery and almost all of slaves flee North anyway, averting Happiness in Slavery.