Posted on 02/02/2009 3:28:06 PM PST by Bob017
As was recently posted here, Howard Zinn's Marxist history book, 'A People’s History of the United States' is sometimes used in history classes.
Try to figure out whether 'A People’s History' is being used in history classes in your school district or state—it will be used in upper-level classes, especially AP US history classes. There is a good chance that you will find it, since the book is quite popular in the education establishment.
If the book is in use, send the model e-mail below or one of your own composition to your local school board, your state education department, or both. If they ignore you, be persistent and contact them again. If you still get no response, or they refuse to act on your protest, start writing letters to the local newspaper based on the letter below.
I recently learned that our school district uses Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States in history classes. It shocks and angers me you are teaching such crude and biased propaganda as history. It is perfectly appropriate, indeed commendable, to expose students to critical perspectives on American history, as long as they are balanced and intelligent. But Zinn’s book is neither. Rather, for him, American history is nothing more than one long series of crimes committed by the haves against the have-nots and by whites against non-whites. Zinn’s fanatical resentment against America causes him not only to make numerous errors of fact and interpretation, but also to glamorize murderous extremists.
The target of Zinn’s ire is the “Establishment,” which he defines as a group of privileged white people who prey on the rest of the American population for generation after generation. He summarizes the book’s thesis when he says that American society is:
like a circle of covered wagons on the western plain, from inside of which the white, slightly privileged American could shoot to kill the enemy outside—Indians or blacks or foreigners or other whites too wretched to be allowed inside the circle. The managers of the caravan watched at a safe distance, and when the battle was over and the field strewn with dead on both sides, they would take over the land, and prepare another expedition, for another territory. As Georgetown professor of history Michael Kazin has written, this “premise better suited to a conspiracy-monger’s Web site than to a work of scholarship.”
Indeed, so crudely negative is Zinn’s perspective that he sees no moral difference between the two sides of World War II, presenting both Nazi Germany and capitalist America as incarnations of “the Apparatus—the bureaucracy, the police, the military… that calls itself our protector and makes us its slaves.” Absent is any but the most grudging recognition of the epochal accomplishments of American society, the tale of increasing prosperity and liberty of which Americans are justly proud.
As numerous critics have revealed, Zinn’s radical leftist animus leads him to make many errors of fact and interpretation. Zinn claims that unemployment rose during Reagan’s term in office; in fact, it declined. We are told that George Washington was the richest man in America, but this is not true. More seriously, Zinn promulgates the theory, long discredited among historians, that the American Constitution was an expression of the class greed of the Founding Fathers, rather than their idealistic belief in a free society and civil rights. Zinn presents the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings as a callous and unnecessary slaughter, ignoring the fact that Truman chose this option because his administration, after carefully evaluating many scenarios, decided this method was the most humane way of bringing the war to a close.
The flip-side of the demonization of white Americans is the absurd glamorization of non-white peoples, all of whom are cast in the mould of the Noble Savage. For example, pre-Columbian American Indian culture was one “where human relations were more egalitarian than in Europe, and where the relations among men, women, children, and nature were more beautifully worked out than perhaps any place in the world.” Anyone acquainted with anthropological scholarship on American Indians will see how distorted this account is. In fact, the Indian societies of the time were far crueler and far more war-like than contemporary Western societies. And the same goes for the culture of Africans in the 17th century and Southeast Asians in the 20th, which Zinn glorifies in similar terms.
Zinn’s book is harmful not only because of its slanderous portrait of America, but also because it glamorizes radical figures who preached hatred and violence. Take his chapter on the Civil Rights Era. It’s bad enough that Zinn, in his coverage of black radical figures of the time, makes no mention of their murderous and hateful side—after all, the Black Panthers were responsible for murdering dozens, including 15 police officers, and Malcolm X believed that white people were devils created by an evil sorcerer. Even worse, Zinn makes it clear that he favors the preachers of violence over the peaceful activism of Martin Luther King. He quotes approvingly a Malcolm X speech asserting that King was a “sell-out” for defusing the violent “black revolution” that ought to have been a result of racial conflict in that period. Zinn’s book thus encourages young people to follow in the supposedly heroic footsteps of these bloodthirsty extremists.
It is unconscionable for our schools to present such a biased and violent tract as a credible perspective on American history. Such crude propaganda as A People’s History does not stimulate intelligent reflection, but rather inculcates a narrow and ignorant contempt for our great nation.
For more information on Howard Zinn, see:
Larry Schweikart, 48 Liberal Lies About American History Michael Kazin, “Howard Zinn’s Disappointing History of the United States” (http://hnn.us/articles/4370.html) Dan Flynn, “Master of Deceit” (http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=AF58ACF5-41E1-4B4E-A829-DA05D63021EF)
Sincerely,
We would say rude things about him in the back of the lecture hall. He was derisively referred to as "Chairman Howe". Hell some of my fondest memories were of us ridiculing this loony. Still, I plead guilty of regurgitating his crappola and getting an A. Some people are indeed easy to fool.
We used this book at University of Missouri Columbia where I got my degree in history. It was a piece of junk, but it was scary to wonder how many of the people in the class (I believe it was a large low-level history class) took it at face value.
For the record I also had a history professor who told out class that the CIA had sold crack in inner cities to fund operations abroad. Another history professor made us watch one, possibly 2 days of a documentary about the Berkely sit-ins of the 60’s. The CIA-crack professor won an award with a cash prize that year (I kid you not) for her teaching. So anyway, that’s what I think about when I pay my loan.
One of my technicians was given that book at work today. The tech looked up the other on the web and read his bio. He returned the book to the giver unopened and told the guy that he doesn’t poison his mind with propaganda. The giver was not very happy. I guess he lost another convert to the liberal cult of Obama.
“He returned the book to the giver unopened and told the guy that he doesn’t poison his mind with propaganda. The giver was not very happy.”
Haha, good to hear.
Don’t feel bad. When I was getting my BS I was almost done when I was told that somehow I was one “social science” class short of graduating. I just grabbed the first class I could find to fill that out and picked up a class called “Environmental Science”
It was exactly what it sounds like. It was a class with a nutty tree-hugging Earth Firster at the helm. We were split into groups for the assignments so we had to work together.
At the time I was riding a 4.0 GPA and I told the guys in my group that I was not going to lose that because of having to put up with this idiot professor. So I told the guys in my group to follow my lead and I would get us all A’s in this class.
We were her stars. I would bring my papers into work and show them to my co-workers. They were an artistry of extremism. We were going to change the world. We were also completely full of crap. None of us bought a word of what we wrote, but we were righting to our audience. I kept my 4.0.
I hope you used recycled paper ... especially something you might have used once in the smallest room in your home.
It was all on my laptop. E-mailed the papers to the prof. I was paper-free since I was worried about the rainforests.
In a particularly disgusting development, Zinn’s deceptive & misleading book has been turned into a documentary.
“Premiere of The People Speak takes place at the Toronto International Film Festival
“Howard Zinn taught us to look at history with fresh eyes. His landmark book A People’s History of the United States, first published in 1980, has sold one and a half million copies around the world and inspired innumerable fresh approaches to reflecting on the past. Now comes a unique documentary collaboration between Zinn and others. They have enlisted an extraordinary lineup of actors, including Viggo Mortensen, Danny Glover, Marisa Tomei and Kerry Washington, who contribute live stage performances of historical testimonies.”
The days of suspension of disbelief are fast approaching their end with all these actors etc shooting their mouths off on politics at every breath.
I am sad to hear this crap is in schools.
It was when my eldest son was a junior in high school taking American history that we first became aware of Howard Zinn. Who is Howard Zinn? He is the author of “A People’s History of the United States, 1492-Present”. This book is the #2 best seller on the Social History list of Amazon’s American History section. First published in 1980, this book has sold over 1.5 million copies, which ironically has made Zinn, one of American capitalism’s most vicious critics, quite wealthy. It is not a best seller because it has blazed new trails in historical research. In fact, there are no primary sources given in this book. It consists of the use of secondary sources without individual citation interspersed with Zinn’s own stream-of-consciousness commentary. It is not a best seller because it covers history in breadth and/or depth. In fact, it only covers twenty-five historic events and movements in finite time-spans. Often, in spite of its 680+ pages, we are left to wonderful how the story ended. It is not a best seller because it best supports one of the traditional approaches to America’s story, such as “Great Man” or “Great Idea” theories. In fact, the connection of the pieces of American history he covers is best summarized by the thesis that “America is not a republic but an empire controlled by white men, but only certain white men and its heroes are anti-establishment protestors and those in the trenches of class warfare.” This book is a best seller because it is required reading in most colleges and an increasing number of high schools. Because this is the only book in American history that many students will read, Howard Zinn has become one of the most dangerous men in America. Most insidiously, the power of this man’s thinking will only expand because new versions of his book have come out in comic-book form (which is great for teens who have limited critical reading skills or limited attention-spans) as well as a multi-volume set re-written for upper-elementary and middle-school students. Who is Howard Zinn, anyway? Howard Zinn was born in 1922 in Brooklyn, the son of Russian immigrants and much of his attitude to American history was shaped by the time and place he grew up. He was one of four sons, one of whom died before Zinn’s birth while the family was on a “cheap vacation in the country”. The child died of spinal meningitis on the trip, forcing the parents to ride home holding their deceased child. Although he did not know this brother, Zinn retells the story often and its importance in shaping his attitude toward their poverty cannot be underestimated. His parents were poor but he remarks on how much he was loved. In fact, he reflects that no child who is loved ever feels poor. During the Depression, his father, a factory worker, saved 25-cents to get Howard a complete set of the works of Charles Dickens. He was a voracious reader but from reading Zinn, one would think that the nineteenth-century British world of rigid class structure and static economic conditions still dominate 21st-century America. He was an avid basketball player in high school and it was on the public courts that he met a group of young communists who helped formed his worldview, crystallized by his participation in an anti-Hitler march where he was hit in the head by a policeman. He writes, “I woke up, perhaps half-an-hour later, with a painful lump on my head. From that moment on, 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.” His attitude toward class struggle was also traceable to a New Year’s Eve that he helped his father as a waiter in a restaurant where the father worked. About the job, he writes, “I hated it. All his life he [his father] worked hard for very little. I’ve always resented statements of politicians, media commentators, corporate executives who talked of how, in America, if you worked hard you would become rich. The meaning of that was, if you were poor, it was because you hadn’t worked hard enough. I knew it was a lie, about my father and millions of others, men and women who worked harder than anyone, harder than financiers and politicians, harder than anybody if you accept that when you work at an unpleasant job, that makes it very hard work indeed.” Prior to the war, Zinn worked for three years at the Brooklyn naval shipyard where he was a union organizer in his spare time. Fans of Howard Zinn believe that his military service during WWII gives him credibility in his anti-war sentiments. He enlisted and became a bombardier riding in the nose cone of the B-17 Flying Fortress operating the Norden Bombsight. During this time, he met a tail gunner who convinced him that WWII was a war for empire, not a war against totalitarianism. When he asked the tail gunner why he was there if he felt that way, the tail gunner replied that he was there to “talk to guys like you”. Two weeks later, the tail gunner was killed in action. Zinn’s war experience contributed his opinion that “US policy is rarely, if ever, driven by anything other than corporate interests” and politicians use war as a way to distract citizens from domestic problems. After the war, using the GI bill he received his BA from New York University, his MA and PHD from Columbia, and was a post-doctoral fellow in East Asian Studies at Harvard. He was a professor at Spellman but was dismissed because of his involvement in creating student dissent at that institution. From Spellman, he moved to Boston University, with which he has been affiliated since 1964. He was involved in the civil rights movement while at Spellman and the anti-war movement during Vietnam. He counted among his friends Noam Chomsky as well as the Berrigan brothers and Daniel Ellsburg, with whom he went to Hanoi to escort three returning POW’s. The North Vietnamese wanted liberal sympathizers to be the escorts and he received official approval from the US enemy. Although he is bi-partisan in his criticism, his essays stop abruptly, never telling how the reader how the rest of the story turned out. In the world of Zinn, things never evolve, economies don’t recover, victims never overcome adversity, and white men are always to blame. Once labeled as “evil”, there is no personal redemption. Robber Barons are not recognized for their own personal achievements or the risks and losses they endured, but only for their manipulation of people and money. In Zinn’s economic view where everybody is out for the most he can get, there is no room for voluntarism, charity, or philanthropy. Zinn could never explain sacrifice for a greater cause if it involves a traditional definition of “patriotism”, never justify a volunteer military, nor acknowledge that many copies of his book probably are on the shelves of libraries that bear the name “Carnegie”. His writing style is not necessarily chronological, which can be problematic for the reader. Worst of all, he interjects unrelated phrases or ideas, forcing the reader to assume connections that might not be there. For example, when discussing the Pullman strike he takes time to explain that the workers lived in houses and shopped at stores owned by the company. At the end of the unit, he writes, “A century later this would be called the Race To The Bottom and it would also become the business model for Wal-Mart,” neither of which comments is exactly true or further explained. However, this is an example of a “buzz phrase” that could become a distracting point in a discussion with an ill-informed, Zinn-educated student. Zinn’s new books for an even younger and more vulnerable audience are frightening. The comic-book format is used specifically to create the same primal reaction of cave drawings as they “lend themselves best to storytelling”…particularly when paired with shocking photographs and other drawings of the period. Furthermore, Zinn makes no apologies about his intention in presenting history exactly as he does. With regard to the new junior reader, he writes, “Is it right to take down the traditional heroes of the nation, like Christopher Columbus, Andrew Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt? Is it unpatriotic to emphasize slavery and racism, the massacres of Indians, the exploitation of the working people…? …It seems to me it is wrong to treat young readers as if they are not mature enough to look at their nation’s policies honestly. …Why should we think it heroic to do as Columbus did, arrive in this hemisphere and carry on a rampage of violence, in order to find gold? Why should we think it heroic for Andrew Jackson to drive Indians out of their land? Why should we think of Theodore Roosevelt as a hero because he fought in the Spanish-American war, driving Spain out of Cuba, but also paving the way for the United States to take control of Cuba?” For Zinn, he claims the heros are Las Casas for exposing Columbus’ behavior in the Bahamas, Cherokees for resisting Jackson’s displacement of them, and Mark Twain because “he denounced Theodore Roosevelt after Roosevelt had praised an American general who had massacred hundreds of people in the Philippines.” In the world of Zinn, these were the only things that Columbus, Jackson, and Roosevelt ever did and no other actions in their lives could compensate for their sins. In his chronology, the reader goes from one unpleasant climatic event to the next, and nothing good happens in the interim. Perhaps the most lasting effect of reading Zinn is that he deprives young readers the opportunity to feel that they are part of the greater continuing story of American exceptionalism. His book inspires guilt and forces one to feel that success must come through exploitation. He denies historical process and negates hope for the future. He belittles patriotism and never allows pride of person or place. I have no problem with students reading Zinn, as long as they have the time and equal support to read other material. One doesn’t have to read the entire book to get the picture and one should not be required to buy it and dissect it like a homiletic text. There are other books on the market that offer alternative points of view and create balance. Zinn told one interviewer that he had set “quiet revolution” as his goal for writing A People’s History. “Not a revolution in the classical sense of a seizure of power, but rather from people beginning to take power from within the institutions. In the workplace, the workers would take power to control the conditions of their lives.” Perhaps it is we who should begin a revolution of our own and take back the power that Howard Zinn has telling America’s story.
He has also brought out a comic book version, an elementary level multi-volume set, and he has written a one-man play about Marx.
Fascinating stuff & interesting to see Zinn’s background & how he came to hold his extreme views. I completely agree with your final commment too:
“Perhaps it is we who should begin a revolution of our own and take back the power that Howard Zinn has telling America’s story.”
Complain to schools that if they’re going to use his textbook, at least use another one to provide some balance.
Parents must learn to read the stuff that their children bring home from school. This is just as true in English classes, another place that the "social justice curriculum" and revisionist history is happening, as well as science. A friend's daughter was in an environmental studies class using a website. When the mother visited the website, she discovered that the environmentalist website was sponsored by the PLO, which as a Jew, she did not appreciate.
I saw David Horowitz on tv today and he has a new book about what's happening in our schools called, "Indoctrination U" and I can't wait to read it!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.