The right’s recent obsession with Howard Zinn is probably counterproductive. The more attention they give him, the more people will be curious about the controversy and pick up one of his books. The more they try to keep Zinn’s books out of classrooms, the more students will be inspired to defy the censorship. And as more people read Zinn’s books, more people will be informed by his worldview, which is certainly not a good thing for the right.
In a way, I can understand the consternation. Zinn paints a relentlessly negative picture of Western Civilization and America. Is that what we want to teach our kids? The thing is, it’s not like the only history kids get is produced by Howard Zinn. Ninety-nine percent of the history they get, whether in school or on television or through cultural osmosis, is relentlessly positive. Sure, Jim Crow and slavery were bad, but we overcame that. What happened to the indigenous population is a shame, but that’s what happens when two cultures at much different levels of technological development clash over the same land. Sure, we’re the only country to drop radioactive bombs on women and children, but it saved American lives and shortened the war.
But, you know, there are other points of view. And we need to understand the critique of our history and our system to have a fully-rounded education. This critique of Howard Zinn in the Wall Street Journal is rich with irony, not least of which is the title of the author’s book: Humility: An Unlikely Biography of America’s Greatest Virtue.
Reading Howard Zinn’s version of history will do more to instill humility than pretty much anything I can think of. More than that, it will teach you just how little humility Americans tend to have. You could call our national creed “overconfidence.” It has helped us do great, almost unimaginable things in the past, but it has also led to some seriously humbling disasters.
On the whole, I have a positive view of America that has been enriched by having to come to terms with Zinn’s critique. I absorbed what he had to say, agreed with much of it, and still came away thinking this country is a net-positive force in the world. I’m just more humble about it than I was before.
BooMan,
I love ya, but don’t be in too big of a rush to say we’ve overcome Jim Crow!
If we’ve overcome it, then in the latest phase of our “Cold Civil War,” what’s going on in the old Secesh States – and too many non-Confederate ones, as well – now that Roberts SCOTUS declared racism is over?
Joe Raven Laws?
I wasn’t speaking for myself there; I was characterizing how history is perceived by most people.
Ninjahed!
I don’t think Boo was saying he believes personally we’ve overcome Jim Crow; rather, he was summarizing the rosy viewpoint of conventional teaching about American history. Same same for indigenous populations and the atom bomb. I’d expect our host to have far more nuanced views on all that.
Oh, I didn’t think BooMan believed that.
I was just trying to be a bit “snarky.”
it’s not like Zinn has been hiding…
man was outspoken for decades…
they JUST discovered him?
But he’s safely dead and can’t defend himself.
Apparently yes. MItch Daniels showing how he loves freedom by trying to censor Indiana university curriculum. Good news: Spike in Zinn’s readership!
Heh – lots of Zinn reading down here in IU’s home county as well.
In their defense, he just teamed up with ACORN.
“And as more people read Zinn’s books, more people will be informed by his worldview[.]”
No, informed about his world view.
Not at all the same thing.
Not everybody always believes the last book he’s read.
“More” does not mean “everyone.”
Did you check out the WSJ piece? All that social justice stuff is far more important than people reading a single book. Looks like a cultural revolution the conservatives have already lost, much more important than the one about sex they’re always yelling about.
I would say we do more than show the bad but say overall it turned out ok. Maybe it was my own ignorance or perhaps because I was bored with history until Zinn’s book, but you would never know we savaged the native population. We talked about them just getting wiped out by disease and the conclusion you take with that until you’re older is “oh well I guess it was just their lack of immune system that killed them, that’s not really our fault.” Or the civil war sucked yeah but the if the North wasn’t so aggressive then maybe it could have ended better. Or if the North wasn’t so intent on punishing the south that Reconstruction would have been better. Or sure there were lynchings and there was the Klan, but they weren’t widespread, just limited to extremists. THAT is the history you get without Zinn’s, at least until you get to college or have a teacher that goes beyond the Texas approved schoolbooks.
Sam Adams and co were just freedom loving patriots with their Boston Tea Party…and greed heads who didn’t like British tea ruining their smuggling business.
I used to assign some partial readings from Zinn. My kids ate up the Columbus critiques, because who gives a fuck about Columbus except the Knights of Columbus?
But his criticisms that got closer to the present rankled them more and more. And frankly, A People’s History does get to be as much fun to read as an apocalyptic Cormac McCarthy novel with footnotes.
I’d rather assign them Hugh Thompson’s testimony about My Lai and the Smoking Gun tape than have them read a polemic steeped in the worst assumptions.
The collection of documents that is a companion to The People’s History is much better. John Lewis’s speech at the March on Washington is a classic window into a number of things that were going on at the time.
As I understand it, the current controversy is not about what we teach kids, but what we teach teachers who are going to teach history to kids.
I see no proposals out there for making Zinn’s People’s History the classroom textbook for US history although it is better written and more engaging than most.
What this issue shows is the fact that states from the beginning of state regulation of public schools have been very keen on presenting one particular narrative of “world” (i.e. Western) history and US history that argues the inevitability and morality of US power and empire. The theme of the United States as the worthy successor of Greek democracy and Roman empire has been a theme of the US civil religion since before the American Revolution. In terms of what historians see history doing today, that is not history, that is civil mythology. And the right wing is very anxious to preserve it as it undergirds a lot of their political positions.
The argument with regard to public school curricula is pretty moot as the No Child Left Behind/Race to the Top approach is pretty much a rote memorization of facts and approved interpretations likely to be on the end-of-year tests.
And the growing number of private charters and homeschooling resources likely write out Zinn as supplementary reading from the get-go.
Public schools and increasingly higher education are not about critical thinking anymore.
Zinn’s The Politics of History speaks very well to what this flap is all about.
It seems to me that the issue is deeper than whether we use one particular textbook or another in US classrooms. As you say, there are no proposals for making Zinn’s book the one and only official textbook of history classes. But by including it in the curriculum with other books, students will be confronted with alternative points of view. They’ll have to use critical thinking to figure out what to believe.
And we can’t have that, now can we?
Howard Zinn is the new Saul Alinsky.
Jeez, BooMan, I was hoping that was going to be David Brooks’s new book, not David J. Bobb’s. What a hilarious opportunity lost.
Wow, this is a tough room.
I always voted and stayed somewhat informed before 2001, but my worldview was shaken by 9/11. Remember the days after the unimaginable attack, when everyone’s shock overcame our nationalism and allowed there to be a sincere public exploration on mass media of the question “Why do many people in the Middle East hate us so much?” My memory is that the sincerity of that exploration lasted about a week, started flagging during the second week, then the propaganda of the oligarchs overwhelmed the frightened American public. By the end of September, “They hate us for our freedoms!” was the answer from way too many of us.
Me, I never stopped being open to considering new answers to that question. That’s what threw me into political work to this day.
That question made me open to anti-nationalistic information on our domestic policies as well. If people like Mitch Daniels, destroyer of the Clinton budget surpluses, hate Zinn, that increases Howard’s legitimacy in my eyes.
Pretty sure this is wrong. Absent the disease apocalypse the natives would have thrown the Europeans back into the sea, and in fact did do so until the diseases hit. In the face of actual resistance, the Americas might have ended up more like Africa.
That’s not to whitewash what was done by the English and to a lesser extent the French and Spanish and their descendants: They seized the advantage and pressed it in a fashion even more ruthless than many conquerors in the Old World. If you were an Indian it would have been better to submit to Genghis Khan than America.
Genghis Khan didn’t take prisoners, unless he intended to rape them.
And if you submitted you’d generally be spared and your way of life would continue. If the Indian tribes submitted they were broken up, killed anyway, or uprooted and placed on shit land. And I don’t doubt a number of rapes went on.