Howard Zinn and the Politics of Popular History

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BidenPresident

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In April 1987, the conservative economist and public intellectual Thomas Sowell wrote a widely syndicated newspaper column about the problem of bias in American higher education. Imagining a situation in which like-minded Americans were seeking college places for their children, he asked, “Since nothing serious is being done about the continuing degeneration of education into propaganda, what can students and their parents do?” The answer was to engage in “comparison shopping,” by probing chosen universities to discover how deep the influence of left-wing faculty members ran.

One measure of this influence was whether Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States was a visible presence on campus. “If you go to a college bookstore during your visit and find this textbook,” Sowell suggested, “that tells you all you need to know.”

https://www.chronicle.com/article/howard-zinn-and-the-politics-of-popular-history?cid=gen_sign_in
 
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"How, then, should the historical profession reassert the importance of its contributions to the world of popular history? One approach is to embrace controversy, which is what drove Zinn, and which he used to advance the cause of his discipline. When conservative critics lampooned his historical perspective, they only drew more attention to his famous book.
 
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Debunking Howard Zinn
Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America

The most widely read historian in the United States today is Howard Zinn, whose A People’s History of the United States has sold over 2.6 million copies. Zinn’s vision of American history is creeping into curricula across the country and, Mary Grabar warns, is becoming the “dominant narrative” in many places. The narrative is relentless and blunt: the people should be ashamed of their history. The history of the powerful abusing the weak is at America’s core. America is not, as Abraham Lincoln intoned at Gettysburg, a nation “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Rather, it was conceived in oppression, was born of oppression and has always been dedicated to oppression.

Zinn’s influence has been spurred by groups like the Zinn Education Project, which supplements his book with documentaries, role-playing activities, workshops for teachers and librarians, and dozens of spin-off volumes. There are graphic adaptations, such as Zinn for Beginners, dramatic public readings of Zinn, and a Zinn book fair. When there is pushback against the Zinnification of the educational system, such as when a state legislature considered a bill to keep Zinn’s materials out of taxpayer-funded schools, these groups mobilize. One might call it the Militant Zinndustrial Complex

The purpose of Grabar’s book is to unmask the blatant, destructive lies that pervade Howard Zinn’s history. As she convincingly summarizes, Zinn presents the United States, “the freest nation in world history, as a tyrannical, murderous, and imperialistic regime. ... He has done this by lying, distorting and misusing evidence, hijacking other historians’ work, and falsifying the facts, as we have seen again and again. The problem is not that, as Zinn liked to pretend in this own defense, he wrote a ‘people’s’ history, telling the bottom-up story of neglected and forgotten men and women. The problem is that he falsified American history” (p. 250, emphasis added
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https://www.independent.org/publications/tir/article.asp?id=1486
 
BidenPresident lies constantly.....if you are too dim to figure this out then you deserve what is coming as America and all of the West collapses.

I however dont.
 
Nordberg said:
So rightys learn by avoiding any ideas that may not fit the ones they walked in with. Yeah, we know why you guys cannot be reached with facts.
America is not the freest nation on the planet. It is not in the top 10. There are 180 countries with rights quite similar to ours. We keep repeating this freedom crap and our people do not even question it.
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Good point. Well said.
 
BidenPresident said:
"How, then, should the historical profession reassert the importance of its contributions to the world of popular history? One approach is to embrace controversy, which is what drove Zinn, and which he used to advance the cause of his discipline. When conservative critics lampooned his historical perspective, they only drew more attention to his famous book.
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What drove Zinn was writing a politically correct radical Leftist history of the US using mostly cherry picked irrelevancies. Of course, the Left gobbled it up as a great book because it said and confirmed what they already believed. Zinn portrays the US as a tyranny of an imperialistic and often murderous regime. For example, native Americans are always portrayed as being oppressed, robbed of land and wealth, and systematically slaughtered by Europeans. The Aztec and other Central American cultures have their continuous religious wars, slavery, mass human sacrifice all glossed over or never mentioned in favor of painting them as idyllic societies brutally conquered by Europeans.

On slavery, Zinn calls American slavery the worst in history, ignoring the much greater use of slaves by Spain and Portugal, among others. He ignores entirely how utterly brutal many other nation's practices were regarding slaves and that by comparison the American version was fairly mild. Or, later in his book Zinn claims that farmers became heavily indebted because of the use of farm machinery. This is clearly an outright lie. The US became the world's breadbasket because farmers could afford machinery that allowed them to massively increase the size of their crops making it profitable to sell large quantities of whatever they raised at reasonable prices. By the early 20th century, US farms were vastly larger than ones in Europe or Asia. Machinery made that possible and didn't burden farmers with never ending debt as Zinn proposes.

It just goes from one failed Leftist notion, to a Leftist lie about something, to another. Zinn's whole book is based on pretty much bullshit.
 
Nordberg said:
So rightys learn by avoiding any ideas that may not fit the ones they walked in with. Yeah, we know why you guys cannot be reached with facts.
America is not the freest nation on the planet. It is not in the top 10. There are 180 countries with rights quite similar to ours. We keep repeating this freedom crap and our people do not even question it.
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-co...9/these-are-the-freest-countries-in-the-world
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Wrong. The Left fits their "facts" (aka propaganda and beliefs) to match their chosen political narrative. The far Right doesn't bother with books and such for the most part. Everyone else ignores both as the idiots they are.

I like the list you chose. Hong Kong is the freest nation on the planet? You are shitting me right? New Zealand was one of the most onerous totalitarian states with regard to Chinese Disease with mandatory lockdowns, arresting anyone who dared break any government edict regarding it, among other tyrannical actions. Canada? Trudeau is turning it into a dictatorship.
In the Netherlands, the Leftist government just took a total smackdown for trying to crush their nation's farm industry.

In the UK you have no right to not incriminate yourself if arrested, cannot carry so much as a pocketknife in public, face onerous rules and regulations about virtually everything. How is that freedom?

The scoring by the Cato Institute is specious at best. https://www.cato.org/search/category/human-freedom-index
 
T. A. Gardner said:
Wrong. The Left fits their "facts" (aka propaganda and beliefs) to match their chosen political narrative. The far Right doesn't bother with books and such for the most part. Everyone else ignores both as the idiots they are.

I like the list you chose. Hong Kong is the freest nation on the planet? You are shitting me right? New Zealand was one of the most onerous totalitarian states with regard to Chinese Disease with mandatory lockdowns, arresting anyone who dared break any government edict regarding it, among other tyrannical actions. Canada? Trudeau is turning it into a dictatorship.
In the Netherlands, the Leftist government just took a total smackdown for trying to crush their nation's farm industry.

In the UK you have no right to not incriminate yourself if arrested, cannot carry so much as a pocketknife in public, face onerous rules and regulations about virtually everything. How is that freedom?

The scoring by the Cato Institute is specious at best. https://www.cato.org/search/category/human-freedom-index
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The WOKE believe what they want to believe, and they are so stupid that they dont know how much this hurts.

They are now going to learn.
 
T. A. Gardner said:
What drove Zinn was writing a politically correct radical Leftist history of the US using mostly cherry picked irrelevancies. Of course, the Left gobbled it up as a great book because it said and confirmed what they already believed. Zinn portrays the US as a tyranny of an imperialistic and often murderous regime. For example, native Americans are always portrayed as being oppressed, robbed of land and wealth, and systematically slaughtered by Europeans. The Aztec and other Central American cultures have their continuous religious wars, slavery, mass human sacrifice all glossed over or never mentioned in favor of painting them as idyllic societies brutally conquered by Europeans.

On slavery, Zinn calls American slavery the worst in history, ignoring the much greater use of slaves by Spain and Portugal, among others. He ignores entirely how utterly brutal many other nation's practices were regarding slaves and that by comparison the American version was fairly mild. Or, later in his book Zinn claims that farmers became heavily indebted because of the use of farm machinery. This is clearly an outright lie. The US became the world's breadbasket because farmers could afford machinery that allowed them to massively increase the size of their crops making it profitable to sell large quantities of whatever they raised at reasonable prices. By the early 20th century, US farms were vastly larger than ones in Europe or Asia. Machinery made that possible and didn't burden farmers with never ending debt as Zinn proposes.

It just goes from one failed Leftist notion, to a Leftist lie about something, to another. Zinn's whole book is based on pretty much bullshit.
Click to expand...

leftist bad
 
T. A. Gardner said:
Wrong. The Left fits their "facts" (aka propaganda and beliefs) to match their chosen political narrative. The far Right doesn't bother with books and such for the most part. Everyone else ignores both as the idiots they are.

I like the list you chose. Hong Kong is the freest nation on the planet? You are shitting me right? New Zealand was one of the most onerous totalitarian states with regard to Chinese Disease with mandatory lockdowns, arresting anyone who dared break any government edict regarding it, among other tyrannical actions. Canada? Trudeau is turning it into a dictatorship.
In the Netherlands, the Leftist government just took a total smackdown for trying to crush their nation's farm industry.

In the UK you have no right to not incriminate yourself if arrested, cannot carry so much as a pocketknife in public, face onerous rules and regulations about virtually everything. How is that freedom?

The scoring by the Cato Institute is specious at best. https://www.cato.org/search/category/human-freedom-index
Click to expand...

Not my list. I find no list that puts America in the top 15. Yeah, in UK they are not subject to mass shootings and their children do not get active shooter drills in school.
 
Nordberg said:
Not my list. I find no list that puts America in the top 15. Yeah, in UK they are not subject to mass shootings and their children do not get active shooter drills in school.
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What does that have to do with how free a nation is? That's a crime issue.

It's like claiming France is freer because they have a near 25% unemployment rate due to onerous labor laws and unions as the unemployed have more freedom somehow because of all that free time on their hands...
 
How could a 600-page textbook synthesis of left-wing historical writing cause such consternation on the right, while generating such devotion on the left? Zinn’s book emerged amid the “culture wars” of the 1980s and 1990s, a moment in which conservatives pushed back against the liberal and radical agendas forged by activists and intellectuals during the 1960s. These were debates about national history, and whether the purpose of learning about that history was to make students more patriotic about, or more critical of, their nation’s past.

https://www.chronicle.com/article/howard-zinn-and-the-politics-of-popular-history
 
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