The Need for New Historicism

A couple of weeks ago I was flipping through the Tulsa World when I came across an article with an intriguing title--"Politicians, pundits aim to rewrite history" (I couldn't get any sort of link to this to work, but you can find the article on the newspaper's website if you like). This article depicts some present ways in which politicians of the right are attempting (as the title says) to rewrite history, particularly in ways that would be unflattering to liberalism and thus, presumably, to the current regime (I do not mean to offend any who may be a part of the right, as there are many conservatives who are not fond of what is going on as well. I also don't mean to spark some sort of political debate.). Examples of changes they would like to be made are depicting Jamestown as a failed example of socialism. This ignores the fact that Jamestown was "a capitalist venture funded by the Virginia Company of London."
This seems to me to be one of the problems that New Historicism establishes itself as being counter to--the effect of biases on the writing of history. I do not think that it can be denied that these revisions are intended as means of bolstering the views of the Republican party; as Alan Brinkley (a historian at Columbia University) puts it in the article, "History in the popular world is always a political football. The right is unusually mobilized at the moment."