Howard Zinn Died

dudalb said:
And I don't buy this "All Historians are Slanted" BS either. Yes, they are, but a good Historian does try to be fair.
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"Fairness" does not mean trying to pretend that you don't have an opinion. "Fairness" means being forthcoming about it. And find any citation from "People's History" that even remotely suggests what you are stating and we could have an intelligent discussion about it instead of dismissing him out of pocket because you don't agree with his politics.
 
grunion said:
"Fairness" does not mean trying to pretend that you don't have an opinion. "Fairness" means being forthcoming about it. And find any citation from "People's History" that even remotely suggests what you are stating and we could have an intelligent discussion about it instead of dismissing him out of pocket because you don't agree with his politics.
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That is not the definition of Fairness I learned while getting my degree in history. It's not playing fast and loose with the evidence to support a political view.
Zinn's whole thesis is that America was corrupt from day one, and the only way Americans can make up for it and wipe the stain from their record is by getting rid of the Free Market system and adapting a Cuba like economic system.
 
The question is really: do you want to understand the political background and cultural history of socialist politics in America?

Then, regardless of whether you think Zinn is right or wrong on certain points, his work is invaluable.
 
dudalb said:
Zinn's whole thesis is that America was corrupt from day one, and the only way Americans can make up for it and wipe the stain from their record is by getting rid of the Free Market system and adapting a Cuba like economic system.
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More of a caricature of his thesis than anything else.
 
Not really. As Oscar Handlin showed, his "history" is more or less a "deranged fairy tale". Handlin's original article is not online, but it's even more devastating than the excerpts in the online article I linked to. As the quote in my link notes:

It simply is not true that “what Columbus did to the Arawaks of the Bahamas, Cortez did to the Aztecs of Mexico, Pizarro to the Incas of Peru, and the English settlers of Virginia and Massachusetts to the Powhatans and the Pequots.”

It simply is not true that the farmers of the Chesapeake colonies in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries avidly desired the importation of black slaves, or that the gap between rich and poor widened in the eighteenth-century colonies.

Zinn gulps down as literally true the proven hoax of Polly Baker and the improbable Plough Jogger, and he repeats uncritically the old charge that President Lincoln altered his views to suit his audience.

The Geneva assembly of 1954 did not agree on elections in a unified Vietnam; that was simply the hope expressed by the British chairman when the parties concerned could not agree. The United States did not back Batista in 1959; it had ended aid to Cuba and washed its hands of him well before then.

“Tet” was not evidence of the unpopularity of the Saigon government, but a resounding rejection of the northern invaders.
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Et, I may add, very much cetera, as Handlin shows.

Zinn was a charlatan, but one whose "heart was in the right place" -- namely, he hated America (and civilization, or, as he usually calls it, "civilization") -- so he became a hero of the left, and, with that, the oracle of historical education.

Zinn's work is on the same level of cringe-inducing biased pseudo-history as the "politically incorrect guides" series of books. Neither of them are really history books; they're rather, as Martin Gardner calls them, history "ooks" -- books that make no attempt to tell us something new or true, but merely to cater to the prejudices and vanities of the target audience. Gardner feels that such trash doesn't deserve the name "book", which should be a honorific.

But, unlike those rightward-biased books, Zinn's leftward-biased book is, as I noted above, the article I linked to also says, and numerous articles prove (just check google scholar, for instance), one of the most commonly assigned works in history classes on high school (and college) level, because it fits with the goal of "teaching equality" or "rejecting the dominant narrative" (e.g., "blame America") of most "progressive" historians.

Zinn was yet another hero of the left who, like so many of them, was essentially a fraud.
 
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Not really. As Oscar Handlin showed, his "history" is more or less a "deranged fairy tale". Handlin's original article is not online, but it's even more devastating than the excerpts in the online article I linked to. Zinn was a charlatan, but one whose "heart was in the right place" -- namely, he hated America (and civilization, or, as he usually calls it, "civilization") -- so he became a hero of the left, and, with that, the oracle of historical education.
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Zinn was heavily into the Nobel Savage concept as well,which alone should send warning flags flying about his reliability as a historian.
Zinn was sort of a bizarre Marxist....he loved Marxism as an Revolutionary force, but disliked the regimes they created,probably because they were inevitably modern industrial states....and Zinn disliked modern industrial states. Zinn's problem was he hated Capitalism, but never seemed to get beyond Glittering Generalaties about what should replace it. He seemed to favor a woozy sort of Back To the Earth type Anarchism most of the time.
I don't know if he saw it before he died, but he would have LOVED Avatar.
 
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Skeptic said:
Zinn was a charlatan, but one whose "heart was in the right place" -- namely, he hated America (and civilization, or, as he usually calls it, "civilization") -- so he became a hero of the left, and, with that, the oracle of historical education..
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Section in bold highlighted to demonstrate the continuance of caricature. A People's History is filled with examples of Americans he finds inspiring and American stories he thinks should be told. Zinn is American and fought for his country in WWII. Most everyone he knew was American, his life was American - and the solution for addressing the problems he highlighted would be an American directed and implemented solution.

This "hates America" BS is just that, BS - and has about as much currency with me as the tired "self-hating jew" epithet.

I have yet to see anyone EVER back up an accusation towards a fellow American that they "hate america" with evidence that proves their accusation.

Criticizing certain facets of the American power structure does not equal "hates America". To be honest, outside of foreigners like OBL, I'm not really sure what "hates America" even means...
 
Skeptic Ginger said:
Too bad. He was able to look critically at history, a truly important skill.
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Translation: He was a terrible historian.

Cicero said:
Zinn's political ideology overwhelms "A People's History" to the point of rendering the book useless as an accurate account of American history. His recollections of his time in the 490th Bomb Group during WWII, particularly the raid on Royan, France, strain credulity.
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Translation: He was a brilliant historian.

Now I'm confused. I guess I'll have to investigate for myself.
 
I have yet to see anyone EVER back up an accusation towards a fellow American that they "hate america" with evidence that proves their accusation.
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Well, his view of the founding fathers were essentially scam artists, creating the USA in the first place just in order to preserve their own privileges and exploit everybody else.

Or his contradictory view of the civil war: on the one hand, since it portrays America in a bad light, Zinn naturally makes a lot of hay about slavery being evil, which it certainly was. But does he then praise the North for ending slavery? No! For Zinn, the North's campaign against slavery was really just a cover -- just an attempt to make the exploitation of blacks more profitable.

How about WWI? Why did the USA join? Of course, that, too, is evil capitalistic scheming, an attempt to create "international rivalry" so that "American capitalism" will continue to exploit the workers state-side.

Okay, how about WWII? Well, America provoked Japan to attack; and the war was -- waaaaaaaaaaaaaait for it -- yet another attempt by the evil capitalists to control everything.

Oh, how about 9/11? Well, that's not in A People's History, of course, but Zinn went on record after the attack claiming the US was the terrorist state, and the Jihadis merely, you guessed it, reacting to American exploitation.

Practically every major event in American history -- from its founding in 1776 to the terrorist attacks in 2001 -- is, for Zinn, either simply evil (slavery), or, when it is clearly good (the Constitution, the civil war ending of slavery, WWII's defeat of fascism) merely a "cover" for the real, evil reasons that the evil USA does what it does -- namely, exploiting the workers and stopping the communist revolution.

If this is not hatred of America, what is? What would you say about someone who considers anything and everything you do to be evil? Won't you say that person hates you?

What does Zinn does like, then? Well, Zinn is on record claiming objectivity is "not desireable" for an historian (it gets in the way) and praising Mao to the skies. So you get the idea about the kind of things he does consider praiseworthy: propaganda and mass murder.
 
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dudalb said:
Nope, he just hated Modern Civilization in general and Capitalism in particular.
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Yes, well, and America as well, as my previous posts showed, I think. He considered practically every significant event in American history to be the result of evil people doing evil things for evil purposes.

As Basil Fawlty said, "I think we've got something there".
 
The Central Scrutinizer said:
Translation: He was a terrible historian.



Translation: He was a brilliant historian.

Now I'm confused. I guess I'll have to investigate for myself.
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Now you're confused? You mean you just realized your natural state at this moment. The fact you are conflicted about Zinn's obvious failure as a true historian means you never heard of the guy until today?
 
These right-wing tantrums are funny.

Cicero:
Zinn's political ideology overwhelms "A People's History" to the point of rendering the book useless as an accurate account of American history.
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Um, Zinn has always argued any account of a subject as broad as American history inevitably contains bias because there are so many events and people to choose from and so few pages. This is why he self-consciously set out to construct a narrative that counter-balances the self-congratulatory nonsense that has been taught in schools. People who are looking for any book (or author) to offer a definitive account of broad subject X are the sort of people who either have the church's reading list on their book shelf (singular) or Ayn Rand.

Yes, Zinn's book gets on assigned reading lists, just as Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman makes reading lists, because
it's an articulate and respected expression of a point of view. One point of view of many.

The insecure people crying he hated America, capitalism, modern civilization insult rather than educate because, as their posting history demonstrates, they're capable of doing little else. It's a good thing Zinn was a gentle, self-effacing, moral person or they couldn't even pretend to attack his work. Of course they're reduced to charging hatred of this, that or the other thing; the strongest statement against Zinn casts him in a favorable light: he had an almost naive love for humanity. Whereas your tribal loyalties lie with nation-states or economic systems, he had a fundamental affection for people everywhere, believing we deserved nothing short of justice.
 
Um, Zinn has always argued any account of a subject as broad as American history inevitably contains bias because there are so many events and people to choose from and so few pages.
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This is the cheater's usual excuse: "hey, everybody does it!". Which is, of course, not true.

There is a huge difference between selecting evidence, which all historians must do, and deliberately distorting the truth, which is what Zinn (and other pseudo-historians, like David Irving, for instance) did.

This is why he self-consciously set out to construct a narrative that counter-balances the self-congratulatory nonsense that has been taught in schools.
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Which is what David Irving and Michael Behe do, too: setting out to show the opposite point of view from the "self-congratulatory nonsense" that claims America was on the side of the good in WWII for defeating fascism, or that humans are more evolved than apes and not doomed to hell.

"Self-consciously setting out to construct a narrative" has another, simpler name: "lying".
 
Cicero said:
Now you're confused? You mean you just realized your natural state at this moment. The fact you are conflicted about Zinn's obvious failure as a true historian means you never heard of the guy until today?
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No, what is confusing is that I use posters like you and skeptigirl (among others) as my forum "canaries in a coal mine". Meaning, that if I am unfamiliar with an issue, I can always count on my canaries to post the opposite of what is true. It saves me from having to research every topic. I can know the correct position without time consuming research. So when 2 canaries post opposing opinions, it creates a logical conundrum. Now I have to investigate it myself. If I have the time. And the interest. Which I don't.
 
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