It looks as if former Indiana governor Mitch Daniels is giving as good as he got in the debate over his controversial e-mails slamming the work of radical historian Howard Zinn at the time of Zinn’s passing in 2010.
Zinn’s book, A People’s History of the United States, has been lauded by leftists for its “victimology” approach to U.S. history and slammed by many scholars. “What Zinn offers us is not a corrective, but a distortion,” Roger Kimball wrote in National Review in 2010. “It is as if someone said to you, ‘Would you like to see Versailles?’ and then took you on a tour of a broken shed on the outskirts of the palace grounds. ‘You see, pretty shabby, isn’t it?’”
Daniels, who became the president of Purdue University after leaving the governorship in January, has been accused of advocating censorship in e-mails to his staff that were uncovered through pubic-records requests by the media.
“This crap should not be accepted for any credit by the state,” was one pungent phrase by Daniels, who wondered if the book could be withdrawn from curriculums. He insists he was not trying to censor the book.
“I merely wanted to make certain that Howard Zinn’s textbook, which represents a falsified version of history, was not being foisted upon our young people in Indiana’s public K-12 classrooms,” Daniels said in a statement on Wednesday. “No one need take my word that my concerns were well-founded. Respected scholars and communicators of all ideologies agree that the work of Howard Zinn was irredeemably slanted and unsuited for teaching to schoolchildren.”
I actually agree that there are problems with using A People’s History of the United States in an academic setting. It’s a corrective or supplement more than an introduction or comprehensive history. It’s useful for the obvious contrast it provides to standard American histories, particularly of the bland rah-rah type. But it can’t stand alone precisely because it does look a bit like the woodshed at Versailles. I’d recommend it for an AP history course in high school or as a piece of balance in an introductory college course. And, obviously, not only would I not ban it, I would recommend it to all students of American history. What I’d rather see is some of the material in Zinn’s work getting incorporated into standard textbooks so that we give our students a broader picture of the good and the bad of our country’s history.
