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 ...
Various of my ancestors ate people and practiced human sacrifice, slavery and infanticide, too. I just am willing to admit it. I fail to see why what my pagan ancestors did should be of much importance to anybody today.
I’m unclear why various ethnic groups today are so invested in denying their history.
It is always possible they never hit anybody.
Thanks. Found this which is quite informative. http://hnn.us/articles/7302.html Guenter Lewy, Were American Indians the Victims of Genocide?
Agree. Good link relative to balance in post #11
Oops, that too, but i meant #23.
sorry about the multy post...computer issue
It’s also interesting to compare the US history of Indian relations with that of Argentina, which had similar problems with the native population.
Unlike the US, genocide/extermination was official Argentine policy for decades. Worked, too. Argentina has no Indian problem, since it has no Indians. Final Solution and all that.
You can say that again, though this exists sometimes on the other side somewhat.
I should have posted this before:
Historian and author John Fea of Messiah College states that,
Zinn writes well and is quite inspiring, but his book is bad history. In fact, I would not even call it history. A People’s History of the United States is a political tract that uses the past to promote a presentist agenda...Zinn’s book violates virtually every rule of good historical thinking.”
Michael Kazin, Professor in the Department of History at Georgetown University states that,
“A People’s History is bad history, albeit gilded with virtuous intentions. Zinn reduces the past to a Manichean fable”, whose failure to adequately explain why most Americans accepted the legitimacy of the capitalist republic “is grounded in a premise better suited to a conspiracy-monger’s Web site than to a work of scholarship.”
http://conservapedia.com/Howard_Zinn
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