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not be accepted for any credit by the state,” was one pungent phrase by Daniels, who wondered if the book could be withdrawn from curriculums.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.
Kimball’s critique of Versailles presumes that the shabby woodshed was the worst thing that French monarchy produced. Unintentionally revealing of Kimball’s own shabby knowledge of history, that.
His book was my summer assignment for AP US History in 11th grade. Then when had to write a 10+page critique of it. I got a 100 on that paper, which surprised me considering my peers got between 70 and 80. Either way, that book made me appreciate the importance of history, a class of study I had always hated and saw as pointless (who cares about people and dates?), especially bc I was predisposed to math and science. Critically thinking about it, and understanding those periods allow us to navigate the current waters and understand WHY things are the way they are. It also radicalized my politics, being a good corresponding element to my favorite band at the time, Rage Against the Machine.
In short, his book changed my life and how I really looked at the world, despite being a liberal for as long as I can remember. Ban it? Pffft, put it on a pedestal and plate it in gold.
After having read “A People’s History” and “You Can’t Be Neutral On A Moving Train” in the last couple of years, I have to say that no one can claim to have a well rounded understanding of the American historical perspective if they have not read these books. It was like I found a never before discovered cave that held information no one else I knew had ever articulated. I devoured those books, and I now cannot un-read them in my mind. It forever altered by perspective on our nation’s history.
I’d recommend it for an AP history course in high school or as a piece of balance in an introductory college course.
That’s the context where I encountered the book: as a supplement to an AP US history class. I think it was a good choice for that purpose.
What really gets me more about what Daniels did, though, is not that he has a severely negative opinion about Zinn and his work, but that he clearly tried to crap all over academic freedom at the state university system and is now lying about it rather transparently.
Also, I wonder how many people who get that wound up about this stuff genuinely remember being a teenager. I read a ton of weird stuff from all over the ideological spectrum at that age, and very little of it did much to budge me from my decision to be a moderate Republican as a form of adolescent rebellion. I’m glad I did, too, or else I would never have read Slouching to Gomorrah, which may well be the most unintentionally hilarious polemic ever penned.
If you read the AP’s email excerpts, you will see that Daniels and his people were not talking about K-12 education at all. They were talking about Zinn’s book (which I didn’t particularly care for, but that’s neither here nor there) being used in teacher education courses at state universities.
Daniels is an excellent example of the truism that all it takes to tell if a Republican is lying is to see whether his lips are moving.
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Very well, have students for an AP class read The Politics of History and then have them do original historical research using censuses and documents, audio, and video found on Internet Archives.
The real point is that the conservative movement in America has had a systematic program of amputating lefter-than-them ideas from American culture for over 80 years. It got it’s first institutional boost during the Truman administration with Communists in Hollywood hearing and “Red Radio” exposes and so on.
It is a systematic attempt to mythologize history in an Americanism mold, and many state curricula are up from about the Americanism, free enterprise cheerleader agenda forced on public schools.
I find it highly unlikely that any public school history teacher in Indiana would be using The Peoples History of the United States as the primary text for the course. Daniels was likely trying to strip it from an “approved books” list issued by the Department of Public Instruction (or whatever Indiana calls their school agency).
Well, those AP students would ironically be doing the very type of original research Zinn himself tended to avoid, at least after completing his PhD dissertation.
This is the situation I found, to my surprise given the serious buzz about the book, 20 some years ago browsing his People’s History in the bookstore, and finding time after time that virtually all his footnoted items cited to secondary sources, often an establishment newspaper like the NYT. (I didn’t buy the book, nor read it in full later.)
Never a big fan of the guy, nor some of his wildly caustic takes on certain famous American political figures, even as I agree not enough of the underdog’s perspective has been a part of our own history narrative and that Zinn can be credited for his role, however flawed, in bringing this neglected side of the story to the public’s attention.
As long as people are doing original historical research, you also need people to synthesize it into a more or less unified story, preferably a good writer. Zinn was a marvelous writer, and if he was biased, at least his biases were worn openly and with pride, so he wasn’t misleading anybody in the manner of the studiously neutral. You can read him accordingly, with the grain of salt, with great pleasure and profit.
It’s a popular history book, intended for general audiences.
Judging it as a scholarly contribution to the academic field is as misguided as judging it as a stand-alone survey of American history.
The problem is that Babbitt-brained American “conservatives” (like Daniels) refuse to acknowledge that the “broken shed” even exists “on the outskirts of the palace grounds.”
What “conservatives” like Daniels want is to make sure that Zinn’s point of view, not simply his magnum opus, is officially declared “crap” and “unsuited for teaching to schoolchildren”. Make sure it’s understood that this point of view is illegitimate and officially frowned upon. By suppressing the (well known) work, it’s easier to suppress the (disfavored) opinion.
It’s very important that (nativist and plutocrat-approved) history is the only distorted history that’s on offer by a state, for either its teachers or its students. Can’t have real education going on….especially in a once-sane state like Indiana.
And I’m sure that Daniels has been equally active rooting out “falsified versions of history” vomited out by approved “conservative” historians. Mitch Daniels—academician, Oy. But why not, with Prof Petraeus teachin’ the unqualified benefits of fracking and fossil fuel to the kids? Since academia doesn’t really generate many “conservative” profs these days—no intelligent person can sign onto its braindead beliefs—that means “conservative” operatives from other slag heaps of America have to be imported into the universities…..
–sigh– Such a small, small man.
Call you out for heightist piggery, Marie! 😉
I like how Fund cites the National Review as if we should give a shit about their judgment of anybody’s scholarship. I could pull a quote from The Nation or Mother Jones praising Zinn’s work, but what would that prove?
Hell, even if A People’s History of the United States was crap, that still isn’t an argument for not accepting it for credit, let alone not reading it. If it’s a falsified version of history, you could help your students learn the real story by tracing through the falsifications, and you would be giving them a valuable lesson in the political uses of history at the same time.
For a little cock sucker like Daniels to cast aspersions on Zinn’s patriotism is disgusting, especially since Zinn served (enlisted) in combat as a bombadier in WWII, while that piece of shit Daniels got to hide out in law school during the Viet Nam War.
I wouldn’t piss on Daniels if his heart was on fire.
A fine sentiment!
Just a heads up, though: there are some people who view “cock sucker” as a homophobic slur.
That used to be one of my favorite general-purpose profanities, until someone pointed that out to me.
http://doghouseriley.blogspot.com/2013/07/little-man.html
I’ve made a gift of the book many times to immigrants aspiring to, or recently sworn into US Citizenship.
I live in Indiana and am disgusted with Daniels. His mild persona holds the heart of all of the shit legislation that the GOP is ramming through in other states. It often happened in Indiana first and because the people here buy into his nonsense it was allowed to flourish.
I’m glad you wrote this post because this is the first that I understood his issue with Zinn. And the comments have clarified it.
He was W. Bush’s Dir. of Management and Budget and masterminded all of those financvial inequalities. I attended Purdue in the late 60’s when, among other nonsense, they instituted quotas on the number of students from NY so they could limit radicals. He’s an ass and he’s right at home at Purdue.
Daniels was never a moderate. Just like Christie isn’t a moderate. They just gladly play the part the TradMed wants them to play.
Even the mere mention of our former governor’s name has always brought this Randy Newman tune to my mind and I substitute the word small for short. He would better serve as ambassador to, say, Outer Mongolia, or some such.