Editing Historical revisionism (section)

=== Access to new data/records ===
The release, discovery, or publicization of documents previously unknown may lead scholars to hold new views of well established events. For example, archived or sealed government records (often related to national security) will become available under the [[thirty-year rule]] and similar laws. Such documents can provide new sources and therefore new analyses of past events that will alter the historical perspective.

With the release of the [[Ultra (cryptography)|ULTRA]] archives in the 1970s under the British thirty-year rule, much of the Allied high command tactical decisiomaking process was re-evaluated, particularly the [[Battle of the Atlantic]]. Before the release of the ULTRA archives, there was much debate over whether Field Marshal [[Bernard Montgomery]] could have known that [[Battle of Arnhem|Arnhem]] was heavily garrisoned. With the release of the archives, which indicated that they were, the balance of the evidence swung in the direction of his detractors. The release of the ULTRA archives also forced a re-evaluation of the [[history of computing hardware|history of the electronic computer]].<ref group="notes">In 1972, before the release of official documents about ULTRA, [[Herman Goldstine]] wrote in ''The Computer from Pascal to von Neumann'' page 321 that: "Britain had such vitality that it could immediately after the war embark on so many well-conceived and well-executed projects in the computer field." In 1976 after the archive were opened [[Brian Randell]] wrote in ''The COLOSSUS'' on page 87 that: "the COLOSSUS project was an important source of this vitality, one that has been largely unappreciated, as has the significance of its places in the chronology of the invention of the digital computer."</ref>