Black legend
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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A black legend is a historiographical phenomenon in which a sustained trend in historical writing of biased reporting and introduction of fabricated, exaggerated and/or decontextualized facts is directed against particular persons, nations or institutions with the intention of creating a distorted and uniquely inhuman image of them while hiding their positive contributions to history. The term was first used by French writer Arthur Lévy in his 1893 work Napoléon Intime, in contrast to the expression "Golden Legend" that had been in circulation around Europe since the publication of a book of that name during the Middle Ages.
Black legends have been perpetrated against many nations and cultures, usually as a result of propaganda and xenophobia. For example, the "The Spanish Black Legend" (Template:Lang-es) is the theory that anti-Spanish political propaganda, whether about Spain, Portugal, the Spanish Empire, the Portuguese Empire or Hispanic America, was sometimes "absorbed and converted into broadly held stereotypes" that assumed that Spain and Portugal were "uniquely evil".
See also
- Anti-Catholicism
- Atrocity propaganda
- Black armband view of history, a similar concept in Australia
- Black Legend of the Spanish Inquisition
- Blood libel
- Colonial mentality
- Population history of indigenous peoples of the Americas
- Historical revisionism
- History wars
- Information warfare