Real Life examples of retroactive continuity.
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Politics/Government
- When Seti I created the Abydos kinglist, which listed all of Egypt's pharaohs from King Menes, several were conspicuously missing: Hatshepsut, who had been retconned after her death by Thutmose III; Akhenaten, the Heretic King; and Tutankhamun and Ay, presumably because of association with Akhenaten. Instead, Horemheb's reign dates from the end of Amenhotep III's. 40 years after Hatshepsut's death, Thutmose III tried to erase all evidence that she had ever been pharaoh — we don't know why, but it may have been that a female pharaoh shook up the status quo too much.
- In 1660, the restored Royalist regime in England declared that the eleven years of republican rule had been "invalid" since no monarch had been there to give assent to the various laws parliament had enacted. A legal fiction was created where Charles II's reign was backdated to 1649 and the 1649-1660 Cromwellian era was described not as a republic but as an "interregnum" (i.e. a period where a kingdom has no sitting monarch). Very few modern historians accept 1649 as the beginning of Charles' rule, but the term "interregnum" is still often used to describe the Commonwealth period even though the monarchy did not technically exist during those years. Charles was proclaimed king by the Scottish parliament only a few days after his father's execution, and was even crowned at Scone before he had to flee to the Continent, so technically, his reign as King of Scotland could be dated to 1649. The throne of England was unambiguously vacant for eleven years, however.
- Similarly, the Bourbon Restoration decided to ignore both the First French Republic and Napoleon's empire. They declared the son of Louis XVI (who had died of illness while imprisoned) to have been King Louis XVII despite never having ruled or even been crowned, and Louis XVIII dated his own reign from Louis XVII's death in 1795, instead of 1814, when he actually came to power. And when Bonaparte's nephew Louis-Napoleon took over in 1852, he took the regnal name of Napoleon III, with Bonaparte's son termed Napoleon II despite never ruling.
- Henry VII officially dated his reign from the day before the Battle of Bosworth, i.e., the day before he finally became the last man standing in a decades-long game of Kingmaker. This was a very smart move as he could then strip the lands and titles of any lords who'd fought on the opposite side of the battle for treason against the King. It was also an incredibly unfair one, because it meant that people fighting to defend the crowned and anointed King of England (Richard III) against a rebel (Henry) were traitors.
- Josef Stalin:
- Stalin was constantly re-writing the history of the Bolshevik revolution and the early USSR to take credit for opponents' accomplishments or to ghost them out entirely, even when the resulting narrative made no sense. A few of his successors continued the practice.
- He's also known to have ordered the doctoring of images, although the manipulation now looks pretty crude. One can find photos where Trotsky and others Stalin had killed have been removed, and other photos where he is shown next to Lenin as the latter fell sick and died (even though at this time Lenin had started to dislike Stalin).
- For an unknown reason, Stalin retconned his own birthday; he claimed he was born on December 21, 1879 when in fact he was born on December 18, 1878.
- It was rumored during the space race that many Soviet cosmonauts had actually perished on failed missions, then were edited out of the group pictures taken with the equipment. In reality, there's no concrete proof of earlier, failed missions, but there IS proof of cosmonauts edited out of photos after public disgrace or loss of political favor.
- He would also have children remove the faces of kids who had been killed or taken away by the regime. Nineteen Eighty-Four was NOT exaggerating.
- After Stalin's death, a lot of accomplishments attributed to Stalin were erased. Stephen Jay Gould once reported reading a version of the Soviet Encyclopaedia that completely removed Stalin from history, which is kind of like trying to sell the Star Wars original trilogy as "The Jabba The Hutt Show!"
- Leonid Brezhnev in the 1970s gave himself a lot of medals for alleged accomplishments that he probably had nothing to do with. He got 4 gold medals of the Hero of Soviet Union (more than anyone else and as many as Marshal Zhukov), supposedly for his accomplishments during World War 2, even though he would have been too junior to have done what he got the medals for.
- After World War II, French President Charles de Gaulle (the leader of the Resistance) declared that the Vichy Regime had never been more than a puppet government
and he was to be recorded as the true and rightful head of state for the duration of the war, even though he spent four of those years in exile in England. This has not prevented many later historians from debating which city was functioning as the true wartime capital of France, London, Brazzavillenote , or Vichy. - In the early hours of April 1, 1964, the Brazilian military carried out a coup d'etát and began a 20-year dictatorship. Predictably, they retconned the date of the coup to March 31.
- Ron Ziegler, Richard Nixon's press secretary during the unfolding of the Watergate scandal, famously undid his previous statements on the burglary. The White House had previously dismissed allegations of connections to the events at the Watergate, only for Nixon to reveal in April 1973 that there was a possible connection. Ziegler then sought to reconcile the White House's previous and current positions by invalidating the former. (He also later said that "mistakes were made" and that he was "overenthusiastic" in attacking the Washington Post's reporting.)Ziegler: This is the operative statement. The others are inoperative.
- Common practice in North Korea, especially with the details of the lives of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il and of The Korean War. One story of Kim Jong Il's birth was that North Korean soldiers stationed in the mountains near his claimed birth-site had a premonition that something wonderful was happening at the time he was born. To mark the occasion, they carved the date into a tree. This tree was then shown to visiting foreigners... until a Japanese botanist pointed out there's no way anyone could have carved something in that tree on that date because the tree was not old enough to have existed at the time. The tree was silently cut down and never referred to again.
- Commonwealth countries that recognize the British monarch as head of state, such as Australia and Canada, originally did so as colonies, as it was only natural for the ruler of the imperial power to also be the nominal head of all colonial governments. As the colonies became more autonomous and self-governing, imperial law became more complicated, and when Elizabeth II ascended to the throne, she was proclaimed to be the independent queen of over a dozen independent monarchies (i.e.; Queen of Australia of the Australian monarchy), rather than the imperial British queen. Commonwealth countries now frequently retcon old British monarchs in this way ("Former Kings of Canada") which further muddles the evolution of the relationship. Furthermore, the queen's regnal name in all the countries she reigned over was 'Elizabeth II'. With the possible exception of Canada (there was a tiny English settlement in Canada during Elizabeth I's reign), she was the first monarch called Elizabeth in all her countries except Britain itself (and even that doesn't hold true in Scotland).
- In the 1990s, the Progressive Conservative Party of the Canadian territory of Yukon changed its name to the Yukon Party, to avoid association with the unpopular federal Progressive Conservative Party. In its official online history of itself, it avoids mentioning its old name, and refers instead refers to retconned events like the election of the "first Yukon Party government" in the 1970s.
- The United States Supreme Court sometimes admits it decided a case incorrectly and reverses a prior decision. That means the old decision no longer applies.
- The 1896 case of Plessy v. Ferguson decided that having segregated facilities for blacks and whites was okay as long as they were equivalent, the "separate but equal" clause (which was controversial in large part because segregated facilities were virtually never truly equal; the facilities for blacks were always substandard). This lasted over 50 years until Brown v. Board of Education was decided in 1954, finding segregation illegal.
- The court originally ruled the first 8 amendments to the constitution (the Bill of Rights) only applied to the Federal Government, not to the states, and that the 14th Amendment didn't change this. Then later it was decided that the 14th Amendment did apply to the states, as did most of the Bill of Rights.
- In 1976 in Doe v. Commonwealth's Attorney of Richmond, the Court upheld the sodomy law of the Commonwealth of Virginia as constitutional. In 1986, Bowers v. Hardwick said that a state could make sodomy (anal sex) illegal. In 2003, Lawrence v. Texas stated that Bowers was "wrongly decided" and that consensual non-commercial sodomy was legal for adults.
- The 2015 case Obergefell v. Hodges overturned a previous ruling in the 1972 case Baker v. Nelson which stated that two people of the same gender could not be legally married to each other.
- Usually averted in the case of ex post facto laws (i.e laws applying retroactively). The US constitution specifically forbids it, and most developed countries have laws prohibiting it as well.
Science
- The 2006 reclassification of Pluto as a dwarf planet retconned decades of science textbooks. It was starting to get embarrassing as more and more trans-Neptunian objects were discovered that were of a similar size (one of them, Eris, was thought to be larger, although current figures have it being a bit smaller) but were deemed too small to call planets. The main argument for keeping Pluto in the class of planets was "cultural" (read: sentimental), so the "dwarf planet" term was a cultural compromise with a scientific bonus. Culturally, Pluto's significance as the first Kuiper Belt Object discovered and as one of the largest was still recognized (it became the Trope Namer for a new sub-class of KBOs / dwarf planets, the plutoids). Scientifically, Pluto was no longer complicating the IAU's terrestrial planet definition and the "upgrade" of Ceres from asteroid to dwarf planet resolved the paradox of the latter being the only Asteroid Belt Object massive enough to have overcome hydrostatic equilibrium and taken on a spherical shape note . Like Pluto, Ceres was considered a planet when it was first discovered in 1801 but "downgraded" soon afterwards when other large objects were found in the same general orbit.
- This happens all the time in biology and taxonomy when the scientific name of a species has to change. There are rules that detail how the process must undergo, in order to keep stability and avoid the chaos that would ensue if any author decided to change a name. For example, the name of a species can change if it has been discovered that another author previously described its scientific name in an independent manuscript. This is for example how Brontosaurus became Apatosaurus. Another case happens when data analysis (particularly molecular data analysis in recent decades) shows that a species isn't really separated from another one and should be merged, or that a population is sufficiently different to warrant being distinguished as a subspecies or a new species. This is how it was established that Nanotyrannus is actually a juvenile form of Tyrannosaurus, that the African forest elephant is a separated species from the savannah one, or that Brontosaurus was later proposed again as another specimen.
- Still, for practical uses, sometimes the retcon is not accepted anyway. In the most revelant cases several bacteria of interest for medicine should have their scientific name changed based on molecular data, but this would create unnecessary complications with manuals, protocols, therapies and screenings, thus physicians and biomedical researchers continue to use the older names. For example, it is a matter of contentious if the four Shigella species, which is an important pathogen, should be included within the very common Escherichia coli.
- Still, for practical uses, sometimes the retcon is not accepted anyway. In the most revelant cases several bacteria of interest for medicine should have their scientific name changed based on molecular data, but this would create unnecessary complications with manuals, protocols, therapies and screenings, thus physicians and biomedical researchers continue to use the older names. For example, it is a matter of contentious
- Before 1800, fungi were considered part of the kingdom of plants and not their own kingdom.
- It was between the 60s and the 70s that scientific consensus started to realize that dinosaurs weren't closer to modern reptiles, but rather to birds, to the point that birds directly evolved out of a branch of dinosaurs and from a genealogical point of view (that is phylogenesis) they should be considered dinosaurs themselves. Further discoveries, particularly evidence that many dinosaurs were feathered, contributed to completely change our understanding and depictions of them.
Sports
- In athletics it is common to strip an athlete or even an entire program of its honors and records retroactively if the subject is found guilty of a serious enough violation. The justification for this — especially in cases of doping, match-fixing, or bribery — is that an achievement which did not occur on a fair playing field was never an achievement to begin with.
- All of cyclist Lance Armstrong's results from after August of 1998 were wiped from the official stats in 2012 when evidence that Armstrong had engaged in systematic doping came to light. Among the titles he lost were 7 Tour de France victories, an Olympic bronze medal, 2 Criterium du Dauphiné victories, and a victory at tour of Switzerland.
- Amongst other punishments meted out by the NCAA, all 112 of Pennsylvania State University's football victories between 1998 and 2011 (including 5 bowl games) were scrubbed from the official records after it was revealed that university officials had helped cover up a former assistant coach's involvement in child sexual abuse. As a result, former head coach Joe Paterno lost his status as the winningest Division I head coach, dropping from 409 victories to 298. This decision was eventually reversed, however.
- An arguably more notable NCAA punishment came in February 2018, when the University of Louisville lost 123 men's basketball wins from 2011 to 2015. This included a national title in 2013, making the Cardinals the first Division I school to be stripped of a basketball title (men's or women's). The sanctions stemmed from an episode in which a program staffer paid a local madam thousands of dollars to provide strippers and prostitutes for players and recruits.
- In both 2005 and 2006, Juventus won Serie A, the top football (soccer) league in Italy. Then the story broke that it was one of four teams involved in many instances of match-fixing. The 2005 season was simply wiped from the record books, and the 2006 title was awarded to third-place Inter Milan after Juventus and second-place AC Milan were disqualified due to the scandal.
- Marseilles won Ligue 1, the top French division, in 1993, but were subsequently stripped of the title after it was revealed that they had engaged in match-fixing, and their results were expunged from the record. Runners-up Paris Saint-Germain were now considered to have finished first, but bizarrely were not awarded the title, which was simply left unattributed.
- In 2003, London-based English football team Wimbledon FC controversially relocated to Milton Keynes (which is not even remotely close to Wimbledon). After being told by the Football League that this would require them to change their name, they became "MK Dons" in 2004 (but legally and organisationally were still the same club). In the meantime, London-based Wimbledon fans, furious that their team had been moved, founded a new side, "AFC Wimbledon". After several legal cases, eventually the two teams came to a settlement in 2007, under which MK Dons was retconned as a new club formed in 2004, while AFC Wimbledon became the Spiritual Successor of Wimbledon FC.
- In 2000, Romanian gymnast Andreea Raducan was stripped of the gold medal she had won in the women's all-around after testing positive for a banned substance. This one has been the subject of extreme controversy because it involved an over-the-counter cold medicine; not only was the violation completely unintentional, but the effect on her performance was negligible (the substance was later removed from the banned substance list because the claim that it was performance-enhancing was found to be questionable at best). Despite acknowledging both of these facts, the International Olympic Committee refused to reinstate the medal on appeal, and the official record still does not recognize Raducan as having won the event.
- In 2008, it was discovered that Chinese gymnast Dong Fangxiao, a member of the 2000 Chinese women's team, had been in violation of minimum age requirements and had falsified her age to conceal this fact. As a consequence, all of her scores were invalidated, resulting in the Chinese team being stripped of their bronze medal from the team competition. In 2010, the bronze medal was re-awarded to the United States team, who had initially placed fourth behind the Chinese.note
- In the women's floor exercise final at the 1968 Olympics, the judges retroactively raised Soviet gymnast Larisa Petrik's score from the preliminary round several days earlier to the exact number needed to put her in a tie with Czechoslovak gymnast Věra Čáslavská, who would have won gold outright based on the original scores. Unsurprisingly, this was more than a little controversial.
- The Brazilian football championship officially started in 1971. Then in 2010, the Football Confederation decided to turn winners of two previous tournaments Brazilian champions as well... even if it meant two winners in two years (as both those tournaments had editions in '67 and '68) and champions with only two games.
- There are also a few examples in major U.S. sports leagues...
- NFL: In 1996, Cleveland Browns owner Art Modell moved the team to Baltimore. The move proved so controversial that as part of a league-brokered settlement of a court case brought by the city of Cleveland, unlike every other case of a team relocation, the team that moved to Baltimore began operating as a new, separate franchise (the Baltimore Ravens) while the Browns' history and records remained in Cleveland to be taken up by a "new" Browns team that began play in 1999. So, as far as the NFL is concerned, the Ravens are an expansion team that began play in 1996, even though it had the same ownership and management structure as the "old" Browns, and the Browns are officially on the books as a Long Runner team founded in 1946 even though the current iteration of the team really only came into existence in the late 1990s.
- This precedent was followed by Major League Soccer, though without the rancor and legal action, when the San Jose Earthquakes moved to become the Houston Dynamo after the 2005 season. The Quakes' history and records were left behind for a new ownership group that emerged in 2007, with the team returning to MLS the next year.
- MLS' distaff counterpart, the National Women's Soccer League, has both inverted and embraced this trope.
- After the 2017 season, FC Kansas City folded, with its player-related assets being acquired by the owners of MLS side Real Salt Lake, who launched Utah Royals FC the next season. In 2021, a new Kansas City team began play, but did not inherit any of FCKC's history or records. The new team played its first season under the placeholder name of Kansas City NWSL before becoming the Kansas City Current. It should be noted here that no member of the Current's ownership group had an ownership interest in FCKC.
- As for the Royals, they played in the league through the 2020 season, after which a racism controversy involving Real's principal owner led him to put RSL up for sale and fold the Royals. The NWSL announced that Real's new ownership would have the option to revive the Royals in 2023, and the new owners took them up on it. The revived Royals, which will inherit the original's history, will start play in 2024.
- After the 2001–02 season, the NBA's Charlotte Hornets moved to New Orleans, keeping the team name. A new Charlotte franchise, the Bobcats, joined the league in 2004. Eventually, the Hornets changed their name in 2013 to the more Louisiana-centric Pelicans. A year later, the Bobcats, now owned by Michael Jordan, reclaimed the Hornets name, along with the history of the 1988–2002 Charlotte Hornets.
- In NASCAR, the various racing series have changed names several times due to changes in sponsorship; commentators discussing past races (until recently) pretty much always referred to them by the current names, no matter what the series was called at the time. For instance, until very recently it could be mentioned that Dale Earnhardt won seven Monster Energy Cup championships, even though when he won them they were called Winston Cup championships. Similarly, Richard Petty's seven Cup championships consist of two Grand National and five Winston Cup titles, and Jimmie Johnson's seven consist of two Nextel Cup and five Sprint Cup titles.
- However, an informal consensus emerged in most media (especially those that don't televise NASCAR) to use just "Cup Series" when discussing past races in the top series. This became official starting in 2020, when NASCAR adopted a new sponsorship model in which the top series is called the "Cup Series", with four companies as primary sponsors but none having their name on the series itself. Similarly, the third-level Craftsman Truck Series is typically known generically as the "Truck Series" (since all of that series' names have ended with those two words). The second-level series, however, holds to this trope, with the then-current name (now "Xfinity Series") typically used even in historic references. The term "Buschwhackers" (referring to Cup Series teams that race the secondary series for more track time), referring to its former name of the Busch Series (as in Busch beer), is still common though, although later fans used the term "Cup leech" for a more sponsor-neutral terminology.note
- The NCAA has a few other examples:
- The Division I men's basketball tournament was first held in 1939, well before the NCAA split into divisions. However, that 1939 edition wasn't organized by the NCAA, but instead by the trade association for college men's coaches, the National Association of Basketball Coaches. The NCAA took over the event the following year, and recognized the 1939 NABC championship as its own.
- In some other sports, the NCAA treats championship events organized by other bodies as part of its official records. The most notable example is in men's golf, in which a national collegiate championship has been held since 1897–nine years before the NCAA itself was founded. This championship was organized by a body last known as the National Intercollegiate Golf Association. In 1939, the NCAA took over the event, and recognizes the pre-1939 championships as its own—including those from the era before the NCAA existed.note
- The Big East Conference split into three blocs in 2013 along football lines. One group of three schools moved to the Atlantic Coast Conference, one of the conferences now considered part of the so-called Power Five Conferences. A second group, consisting of schools that didn't sponsor FBS (top-level) football, essentially said "Screw This, I'm Outta Here" and left to form their own non-football conference, buying the "Big East" name. The third group stayed in the conference structure under the new name of the American Athletic Conference. The retcon: the current Big East considers itself the athletic successor of the original conference in all sports that it sponsors, and The American goes along with this. (Interestingly, this means that the pre-2013 histories of Big East football and women's rowing—the two sports that were sponsored by the pre-2013 Big East and remain sponsored by The American—are not recognized by either conference.)
- A couple of major international events in women's sports have been subject to this trope:
- When FIFA sponsored its first official world championship events for women's football/soccer in 1991, it didn't want to use the "World Cup" name, instead calling it the "1st FIFA World Championship for Women's Football for the M&M's Cup". While the "M&M's Cup" part was dropped after that event, the 1995 edition was still officially known as the "FIFA World Championship for Women's Football". It wasn't until 1999 that the women's event was officially called by its current name of the FIFA Women's World Cup. The 1991 and 1995 editions are now officially considered to have been the first two Women's World Cups.
- The rugby union event historically known as the Women's Rugby World Cup and now officially the "Rugby World Cup" (for women) has an even stranger history in this regard. The first two events, in 1991 and 1994, were not officially sanctioned by the sport's governing body, then known as the International Rugby Football Board and now as World Rugby. The governing body began officially backing the event in 1998, but did not officially recognize the 1991 and 1994 events as World Cups until 2009.
- The National Football League has a clause in their "Palpably Unfair Acts" rule that allows the NFL Commissioner to take actions up to and including reversing the result of a game (or voiding the game — entirely or from the point when the act was committed — and requiring a do-over) in the event that an especially egregious act is committed. To date, this particular clause is only theoretical, and commissioners understandably hope that a situation will never arise where they would need to use it, but it is a power that commissioners are explicitly allowed to exercise in the event that one ever feels it's necessary.
Other
- Some automobile magazines do not consider the Volkswagen Logus to be in continuity with the Ford Escort line, despite being related to it. Why say it's not related, when it uses an adaptation of the Ford Escort chassis?
- After ending production of the Lincoln Continental Mark II in 1957, from 1958-60 the top trim level of regular Lincoln was called Continental Mark III and IV through 1960; from 1961 the only car the division produced was the Lincoln Continental (no "Mark" designation) until 1968 when they branded their new personal-luxury coupe "Mark III" meaning the previous Marks III and IV somehow didn't count. Within Ford Motor Company, there was for a short period of time a discussion about taking the Continental out of the Lincoln mark and positioning it as its own luxury mark to compete with Cadillac; with the failure of the Edsel (positioned to compete with the mid-level GM marks such as Buick and Oldsmobile), this was dropped fairly quickly.
- Pope Gregory XIII decreed that the day after Thursday, 4 October 1582 would be not Friday, 5 October, but Friday, 15 October 1582. This was due to a miscalculation of days in the Julian calendar that had caused the Vernal Equinox to seemingly change from the traditional March 21 to March 11. Since the Church scheduled Easter based on the first day of Spring, the retcon was seen as necessary. Other countries who hadn't changed at the time due to being anti-Pope, such as England, Sweden, and Russia, changed later, often having to skip even more days in the process due to more time having passed and the calendars treating leap years slightly differently.
- In 2006 Sun dropped the major version number on Java to better reflect the maturity, scalability, and security, of the Java platform. Java 1.5.0 became Java 5. In addition, Sun reverted the names of the run time environment and development kit. The Java Development kit went back to JDK from Java 2 SDK and the run time environment went back to JRE from J2RE.
- Sun also did this with their Sun OS/Solaris Unix operating system. Sun OS versions 1-4 were retroactively declared Solaris version 1, while Sun OS version 5 was Solaris 2. Later, after a number of 2.x releases, the major version number was dropped.
- In January 2001, Billboard magazine shrank its Hot Country Songs chart from 75 to 60 positions, and in doing so, reset each song's tally for total number of weeks spent on the chart to count only weeks spent at #60 or higher. This created an interesting case with Gary Allan's "Right Where I Need to Be", which had been floating in the 61-75 range for several weeks in 2000, but finally managed to breach Top 40 just before the change. On the first chart of 2001, its total number of weeks was slashed from 23 to 16, leading to an eventual ascent to the top 5, even though counting those weeks would have made it the longest-running country chart single of the 2000-2010 decade (Billboard instead counts "Baby Girl" by Sugarland as this particular record-holder).
- Expungement of a criminal record is considered this from a legal standpoint. For purposes of the legal/judicial system, an expunged offense is treated as though it never happened.
- During trials, judges can (of their own volition or at the request of an attorney) order a statement to be stricken from the official record and/or instruct a jury to disregard it. The latter situation in particular is somewhat controversial, however; some people view it as a Subversion, noting that the jury will still remember the statement, and that even if jurors try to disregard it, there's no way to entirely prevent a stricken statement from affecting their unconscious perceptions.
- Easter eggs are said to tie into Easter, which celebrates the resurrection of Jesus, because they're a symbol of new life, and the empty shells represent the tomb Jesus awakened from and left empty. These metaphors were probably applied retroactively, and Easter eggs likely originated from the pagan tradition of people eating, exchanging and burying eggs during spring equinox festivals to represent the end of winter and beginning of spring. Christian missionaries likely shoehorned the tradition into their holiday as a way to encourage conversions. Similar comments could be made about many Christmas traditions and winter solstice.
