Zinn never says that poor whites did those things because rich people told them to. He sets out to demonstrate that rich people encouraged and took advantage of racial tension to keep their position and power. Keep the poor people fighting each other for the advantage of the rich. Which was true, and which worked. Working and middle class whites were larger in favor of welfare up till the late 70s. Why shouldn’t they be? Most recipients where white people like their family, friends, and neighbors. It wasn’t until rich people who wanted to lower their taxes convinced them that most welfare was going to cheating blacks who lived like kings that popular opinion started turning against welfare assistance.
Yep. And it goes on to this day. Keep the blacks and the browns and the poor whites fighting amongst themselves. Just like the newly free slaves after the war, should have been in a union with their poor white brothers, working for a barley survivable wage, instead, whites pitted against these “Niggers” trying to take the poor white’s subsistence jobs . And it goes on today, with these “rapists” coming over to take jobs from Americans who are happy to work 16 hours a day jobs for$ 6 an hour to pick the crops that allow us to have cheap food. Go, Capitalism!
Cool! It’s a good survey course for lots of aspects of American history that tend to be glossed over in more traditional textbooks. If you’re comfortable with your knowledge level of American history in these areas–if you have a passing familiarity with them–then this isn’t the best book for you. Not because it’s biased, but because it’s a bit 101 when you’re learning about these aspects of US history.
Starting here:
Which, I can assure you, is not the thesis of the book.
That reviewer has nothing to say about the facts of the book, and apparently feels that if the history of the oppressed isn’t discussed politely enough with regards to the powerful, then it’s all BS and we shouldn’t consider it.
We are treated to:
. . . which is a pretty clear analog to defensive/offensive cries of “what about black on black crime!?” whenever anyone tries to point out ways in which white people are responsible for black oppression.
The reviewer also manages to take any points Zinn might and cast them in the most disparaging light possible.
“Everything” was a “concentrated act of evil”? This whole thing is a classic example of defensive lashing out when one would rather not address the issue at hand. Point out the ways in which someone (or group) did something bad, and the response is “I guess you just want them all to DIE then, you extremist!” Point out a way in which a person or group did something with intent to retain power at the expense of someone else, and the response is, “I guess EVERYTHING they do is just EVIL then!”
Again, I’m not arguing that this is a “perfect” book, or that it’s even meaningful or worth the time in 2020. But, there’s a lot of solid criticism (and compliments despite its imperfection) about the book out there that would better inform you than this “review” that is as biased and narrow as anything they are accusing Zinn of.
Ultimately, people find it much easier to criticize a perspective for being too “overly simple” or narrow or biased when it’s a new perspective than when it’s the mainstream perspective. All books are overly simple and narrow and biased. No single text is going to provide an appropriate or reasonably complete understanding of American history. That’s why we it’s important to read lots of different books that approach subjects from different angles/perspectives. Excluding sources specifically because they approach the subject from an alternative perspective does nothing but protect preconceived understandings.
I perceive Zinn’s book as a useful alternate-perspective cross-reference to the traditional narrative. When you hear one story that sounds perhaps a tad jingoistic, it might be worthwhile to have the means to see it from another angle.
A People’s History was assigned as one of two textbooks in a college level U.S. history class I took. It provided an alternate view point that helped understanding U.S. history as more than a story of the presidents and a great country getting better all the time.
Several years back there was a book that was put out as a response to Zinn’s. It was called A Patriot’s History of the United States, written by Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen. Their stated purpose was to present an alternative view to Zinn’s (an Alternative View, that is, to an Alternative View). The very title implied the opposition, and they even chose the typeface to be an exact duplicate of the one Zinn used on his cover.
So I started reading the book, to see how they treated the case of Columbus. Surely this must be the most interesting part – the section on Columbus was pointed out by many as a key section of Zinn’s book. He wasn’t the first or only to point out Columbus’ atrocities (discussed at length on this Board), but his work was one of the most prominent. How, i wondered, would Schweikart and Allen treat this? Would they defend Columbus’ actions, or imply that we ought not to judge his actions by modern standards, or would they question the sources and interpretation?
They did none of these. They essentially ignored all the accusations against Columbus, writing instead about his achievements. The book isn’t really a rebuttal at all, but an alternative that dwells on the parts they deem interesting.
THIS is why things like Zinn’s book are necessary.
I’ve read Zinn’s book. It’s not by any means a complete history – he really only spends time on a few selected events. as he says, he looks at them from an untraditional point of view. Zinn may be a Marxist historian, but his book is not a collection of accusations against rich people for all the wrongs of the country’s history. But when they did do something that hurt others, especially if there was no need to – you do have to ask why they made those choices.
I read the book in high school. I totally get what Zinn was trying to do, and certainly agree there were parts of U.S. history that most mainstream books overlooked or gave short shrift to (Native Americans, the labor movement, women’s suffrage and ex-Confederates’ violence during Reconstruction, off the top of my head) at the time he wrote it, but as I recall, he was so relentlessly critical of the United States that it really irritated me after awhile. There was not a single person or an important historical event that he couldn’t find something snarky to say about it. History should be true, but it also should not be a hatchet job.
Interesting. I think much of US history is taught hagiographically: the founding fathers are presented as saints (the worst thing I learned about Washington, even in AP history, was that he cussed a lot). Zinn wanted to give the other side of the story–not to present a fair and balanced portrait, but to teach the stuff you wouldn’t otherwise learn. Necessarily that meant focusing on the dark side of these supposed heroes.
As far as the NA thing goes, Dee Brown covered that quite thoroughly in Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, which really ought to be part of every American history course from 6th grade up.
I mostly agree with both @Left_Hand_of_Dorkness and Elendil_s_Heir for the most part. I think it was a necessary corrective to most U.S. History textbook. The one part that stuck out to me as over correction was in the discussion of WWII. He rightly pointed out the cynicism of the U.S.'s Japan policy, but he had to really work to try to show that at least some portion of the working class was against the war. If any foreign war in U.S. history is a just war, it is WWII. There are plenty of things about what the U.S. did before, during, and after the war that are glossed over in standard textbooks without trying to suggest that the war was carried out against the will of the people.
I pretty much looked for myself to find out about the run-up to WWII in the US when someone posted a heart-string-tugging picture of the Arizona memorial. My experience has been that for most Americans, 1940/41 is a big dark place where nothing much really happened until, arrgh, the Japanese attacked the US just out-of-the-blue.
It really helps the narrative if the listener/reader is led to believe that they did it for no reason, because that just means they were evil and deserved to be destroyed. It appears that Americans are largely an incurious people willing to accept that some geopolitical things happen for no reason.
And I feel like the hard-ass rote manner in which history has been taught in the past may have been structured to discourage children from exploring the subject. History is a story, and kids love stories: it should be the easiest thing ever to get them to learn it. Heaven forfend that they might want to understand it.
Zinn is unapologetically anti-war, and World War 2 is the greatest test to an anti-war ideologue in history. It’s been a quarter century since I read his writings that opposed WWII, but I still remember they were the first time I’d ever read anyone arguing the US shouldn’t have entered the war. If nothing else, I think it’s worth reading him to familiarize yourself with a cogent defense of that position.
I disagree with him, but it’s helpful to read how someone can reach that conclusion.
A couple of months ago, I got around to remedying my weakness in post Civil War, pre-WWI history. While Wikipedia has a nice article, I couldn’t find a book length treatment. So I settled for an old edition of a US history textbook Give Me Liberty Vol 2 by Eric Foner (2014). Cheap on Amazon. Covers 1865 to 2014.
How did it do? I’m only 1/6th of the way through, but the index lists Wilmington and has about 2 inches of entries devoted to the Populist (People’s) Party. I perceive that the text was intended for an audience more multicultural than the one of the 1970s. Contrast with The National Experience (1977). No entry on Wilmington. Populism gets less than an inch in the index, though the People’s Party is mentioned. It gives maybe 1.5 inches to unions, in contrast with Foner’s 5.7 inches.
Maybe it’s good to refresh your understanding of history every 20-40 years or so, though I agree with Mabes it won’t help much when speaking with Trumpists. Paradigms don’t shift that way.
I still haven’t gotten around to reading Zinn (1980), though I own a copy. I may have dipped into it a little.
What’s interesting about our treatment of history is that it is not linear. As part of a class I read a part of a high school text book from the mid 1920s. The section on the Philippines occupation was written as critically as an examination of Vietnam from 1990s. All the lessons we forgot about how bad things can get when occupying a hostile country where there. We just stopped talking about it because we wanted to replace the image of a brutal U.S. occupation with the image of the U.S. saving the world in WWII. Leaving us to be completely shocked by what happened in Vietnam.
For a guy who’s been dead for over a decade, Howard Zinn sure gets up some people’s noses. A small cottage industry denouncing his work has sprung up of late. Most of his critics are not very accurate. Those interested in assessing Zinn and his critics may want to look at David Detmer’s Zinnophobia: The Battle over History in Education, Politics, and Scholarship
Also, fun fact: Howard Zinn’s son Jeff is an actor and was a double for John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. Those are, allegedly, his feet in the opening credits