"A People's History" author gave students a new perspective
Ben Wibking
Issue date: 2/17/10 Section: Opinion
Howard Zinn's work as a leftist thinker and best-selling author profoundly affected the way America looked at its past and provided a first glimpse of "revisionist" history. His history is biased, and he admits as much in the opening pages of his "A People's History of the United States":
"My viewpoint, in telling the history of the United States, is different... Nations are not communities and never have been. The history of any country, presented as the history of a family, conceals fierce conflicts of interest... between conquerors and conquered, masters and slaves, capitalists and workers, dominator and dominated in race and sex. And in such as world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people... not to be on the side of the executioners."
The idea of an "alternate" history is shocking to some people. The fact that his work is so widespread and divisive speaks to his importance in American dialogue. In my time at Vanderbilt, I have encountered his fans in unexpected places. Some are friends I have known since I arrived on campus, to whom I had never previously talked about politics. I even found a fellow Zinn fan in my RA down the hall.
Vanderbilt math professor Eric Schechter spoke positively over a listserv message about Zinn's insights on history. "Somebody once asked Zinn if his books were... biased. I don't remember his precise reply, but roughly, it was, yes, all history books are biased. It took me a while to understand that, since my own training is in mathematics, where something very much like objectivity is not only possible but quite ordinary and taken for granted... Howard Zinn knew what his bias was [and] didn't try to hide it."
Howard Zinn is largely responsible for my political views today. "A People's History" made me reconsider my ideological beliefs, especially through the chapters that dealt with the recent past.
My history teachers from elementary to high school would try to explain to their students that the European treatment of Native Americans was "wrong," to varying degrees. What was remarkable to me when I first read Zinn was that his treatment of the current American empire is just as harsh as his views on the American empire of the 1890s, and harsher than his treatment of the British empire in North America of the eighteenth century. It is rare to condemn policies of the present so frankly.
Slowly, I came to identify not as a "Democrat," but as a "leftist." Zinn helped me to realize what I really believed, and exposed the hidden biases of mainstream "liberal" culture which have run throughout this country's history.
His was a history of the oppressed, but it was certainly not without hope. A revisionist historian can also be a revisionist futurist. To millions of readers, he tried to impart his belief "that our future may be found in the past's fugitive moments of compassion rather than in its solid centuries of warfare." As long as alternate visions of history like his survive, hope for the future will live on.
"My viewpoint, in telling the history of the United States, is different... Nations are not communities and never have been. The history of any country, presented as the history of a family, conceals fierce conflicts of interest... between conquerors and conquered, masters and slaves, capitalists and workers, dominator and dominated in race and sex. And in such as world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people... not to be on the side of the executioners."
The idea of an "alternate" history is shocking to some people. The fact that his work is so widespread and divisive speaks to his importance in American dialogue. In my time at Vanderbilt, I have encountered his fans in unexpected places. Some are friends I have known since I arrived on campus, to whom I had never previously talked about politics. I even found a fellow Zinn fan in my RA down the hall.
Vanderbilt math professor Eric Schechter spoke positively over a listserv message about Zinn's insights on history. "Somebody once asked Zinn if his books were... biased. I don't remember his precise reply, but roughly, it was, yes, all history books are biased. It took me a while to understand that, since my own training is in mathematics, where something very much like objectivity is not only possible but quite ordinary and taken for granted... Howard Zinn knew what his bias was [and] didn't try to hide it."
Howard Zinn is largely responsible for my political views today. "A People's History" made me reconsider my ideological beliefs, especially through the chapters that dealt with the recent past.
My history teachers from elementary to high school would try to explain to their students that the European treatment of Native Americans was "wrong," to varying degrees. What was remarkable to me when I first read Zinn was that his treatment of the current American empire is just as harsh as his views on the American empire of the 1890s, and harsher than his treatment of the British empire in North America of the eighteenth century. It is rare to condemn policies of the present so frankly.
Slowly, I came to identify not as a "Democrat," but as a "leftist." Zinn helped me to realize what I really believed, and exposed the hidden biases of mainstream "liberal" culture which have run throughout this country's history.
His was a history of the oppressed, but it was certainly not without hope. A revisionist historian can also be a revisionist futurist. To millions of readers, he tried to impart his belief "that our future may be found in the past's fugitive moments of compassion rather than in its solid centuries of warfare." As long as alternate visions of history like his survive, hope for the future will live on.
Be the first to comment on this story