Posted on 02/24/2010 6:36:36 AM PST by flowerplough
Historian and ideologue overlooked basics of human nature.
The last week in January was fatal for writers: Louis Auchincloss, heir and novelist of New York high society; J.D. Salinger, popularizer if not inventor of teen angst, and Howard Zinn, who made "people's history" code words for activistism.
By all accounts, Zinn lived a long, productive, and happy life as a chronicler of national unhappiness. Son of Jewish immigrants, he grew up in Brooklyn during the desperate fervor of the Great Depression. At the age of 17 he was knocked senseless by police at a Times Square political rally, and came to with a knot on his head and a new attitude. As he recalled it for students, in the graphic-novel adaptation of his life: "I was no longer a liberal, a believer in the self-correcting character of democracy. I was a radical, believing something was fundamentally wrong with this country."
He served his country honorably in the Air Corps during World War II, married his teenage crush, and took advantage of the G.I. Bill to attend New York University and Columbia, where he completed a doctorate in history. After polishing his radical credentials at Spelman College, an all-black women's school in Atlanta, he landed a position at Boston University, where he taught from 1963 to 1988. He supplemented his teaching duties with anti-war protests, sit-ins, picket lines, and A People's History of the United States, published in 1980.
Zinn's stated purpose in writing was to recognize "peoples" generally overlooked in standard histories. He began with the peaceful, generous island tribe who in 1492 paddled out in their canoes to greet a curious sailing vessel commanded by Christopher Columbus. The story of America goes downhill from there, with slavery and exploitation an ironic complement to "liberty and justice for all."
(Excerpt) Read more at worldmag.com ...
Zed is dead
Liberals know that if they repeat a lie early and often enough, it will be perceived as fact. We have to fight back.
Leaving out the inconvenient fact that this peaceful people was in the process of being exterminated and eaten by invading tribes from the mainland, from whom we get the word "cannibal."
I have no problem with the “warts and all” type of history.
I object to the “warts only” version of American history.
It’s the balance that is missing. The evils and misdeeds of American history are, with rare exceptions, similar to those perpetrated by all other societies. A great many of the good things about Western Civ and America are, by contrast, completely unique. Notably the very idea of human rights and equality. NO other society has even conceived of this notion, which we take so for granted.
Surely these facts should be part of what is taught.
What is overlooked is how much an anomaly America became among nations in history . Put ethnically diverse peoples in land with vast natural resources, and a minimum of government, and it can easily degenerate into anarchy or a into slave state. While there were degree of this, something worked to bring souls to be sufficiently controlled from within so that they did not need much to be controlled from without, from its founders to its farmers, while educating them in values and judgment that enabled them to be entrusted with a republican from of government. Above all other factors, i submit that, directly and indirectly, it was the effectual preaching of the evangelical gospel.
Alexis de Tocqueville commented,
The Americans combine the notions of Christianity and of liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive the one without the other; and with them this conviction does not spring from that barren traditionary faith which seems to vegetate in the soul rather than to live.
in a pamphlet for Europeans titled Information to Those Who Would Remove to America (1754), Benjamin Franklin wrote, in part:
“ ...serious religion, under its various denominations, is not only tolerated, but respected and practiced. Atheism is unknown there; Infidelity rare and secret; so that persons may live to a great age in that country without having their piety shocked by meeting with either an Atheist or an Infidel. And the Divine Being seems to have manifested His approbation of the mutual forbearance and kindness by which the different sects treat each other, and by the remarkable prosperity with which He has been please to favor the whole country.[38]
Os Guinness comments that,
while America has never officially been a “Christian Republic,” for much of its history the Christian faith has been a leading contribution to its unofficial civil religion.
In elementary schooling in early America, the overtly Christian New England Primer was used in New England, which is estimated to have sold upwards to 3,000,000 copies from 1700 to 1850. In addition, approximately half of all American children learned from the McGuffey Reader, a series of textbooks of which 122 million copies were published (during a time when the population was much less than today, and books were passed on more)....
This resulted in the Readers becoming a unifying force in American culture, giving America a common value-laden body of literary reference and allusion,[33] and “a sense of common experience and of common possession”.[34] http://conservapedia.com/Moral_degeneration
Maybe he did change--perhaps from a Trotskyite to a Stalinist or some other shift within the communist movement--but the "cop hit me on the head" is typical of the lies communists tell.
Not only your niece:
“When changing the future, one can’t start too young. The Zinn Education Project, a nonprofit organization dedicated to “Teaching A People’s History” maintains a website of educational resources for getting Zinn’s ideas into elementary and even preschool classrooms. A Young People’s History of the United States is already available; next up is the comic-book version. The story always begins with friendly Indians paddling blithely into the clutches of European imperialists.”
And now this: http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=521994
Thanks. Do you have a reference for that handy? I collect things.
Socialist lies by omission are lies as well.
The Reds know this.
It took Pete Seeger 40 years to admit that Joseph Stalin had done some horrible things.
These creeps urge throwing aside the ONE nation that has stood above all others as the tide of creeping socialism and fascism sought to control Europe in the 20th Century.
Fascism wasn't just Nazism. It was in Italy and Spain too.
Both belong on the scrapheap of bad political ideas (along with Islamic theocracy).
But no, it is our Constitutional form of a Democratic-Republic and the land itself that is seen by the far Left as the source of all evil in the world (and it has been this way since 1492 apparently).
There’s an excellent book out there, 1491 by Charles Mann. It’s about the history of America (North and South) before Columbus.
You can also look up any good references on the Arawak and Carib peoples. The Caribs were native to S. America and were in the process of conquering the entire Caribbean.
When Columbus arrived they had already conquered the Lesser Antilles and were moving into the Greater Antilles. It’s probable they would have exterminated the Arawaks, the other tribe you should look up, in a century or two at most.
There is a whole PC issue about referring to people as cannibals, with the PC peeps frantically trying to spin away the evidence. But there’s all kinds of evidence the Caribs, like the Maori, ate people as a food source, not just ritualistically. Recently some scholars have been brave enough to address the history of almost all human groups as cannibals at one time or another.
Zinn be decompoZINN, yo!
Example:
Raw fact, Zinn served Air Corps during World War II on a bomber crew...
Therefore, raw fact: Zinn killed, women and children...
In Zinn’ s own "no context" style of history; Zinn is a villains arbitrary murder of women and children
In historical context, Zinn acted honorably during World War II
Sound, but propaganda is ideologically driven.
You racist hate-monger, Mr. Sherman Logan. :-)
Thanks for the info.
I’m so sick of these people who hate this country! I’m tired of them and their constant and relentless attacks, but I’ve got to remember that THEY never tire and “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”
Ideologically is what flavor the facts and context the history writer will admitted and emitted or even bother to write about in the first place for a historical dialog...
All history will have some degree of ideologically taint, ever at our best there a limitation of human perspective ....
But when is becomes deliberately gross intellectually dishonest, it moves in to propaganda...read Zinn & Chomsky to see on display at it vulgar best
Deliberately out of context "facts" are tactical requirement for leftist history
Ideologically is what flavor the facts and context the history writer will admitted and emitted or even bother to write about in the first place for a historical dialog...
All history will have some degree of ideologically taint, ever at our best there a limitation of human perspective ....
But when is becomes deliberately gross intellectually dishonest, it moves in to propaganda...read Zinn & Chomsky to see on display at it vulgar best
Deliberately out of context "facts" are tactical requirement for leftist history
Ideologically is what flavor the facts and context the history writer will admitted and emitted or even bother to write about in the first place for a historical dialog...
All history will have some degree of ideologically taint, ever at our best there a limitation of human perspective ....
But when is becomes deliberately gross intellectually dishonest, it moves in to propaganda...read Zinn & Chomsky to see on display at it vulgar best
Deliberately out of context "facts" are tactical requirement for leftist history
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