[HN Gopher] We Still Need Howard Zinn
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We Still Need Howard Zinn
Author : rbanffy
Score : 86 points
Date : 2020-09-17 21:17 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (lithub.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (lithub.com)
| pnw_hazor wrote:
| I think we have had quite enough of Zinn.
|
| "Objectivity is impossible," Zinn once remarked, "and it is also
| undesirable. That is, if it were possible it would be
| undesirable, because if you have any kind of a social aim, if you
| think history should serve society in some way; should serve the
| progress of the human race; should serve justice in some way,
| then it requires that you make your selection on the basis of
| what you think will advance causes of humanity.
|
| https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/1493
| sbilstein wrote:
| This is true of all history, regardless of political viewpoint.
| There is no such thing as objective explanation of history.
| pnw_hazor wrote:
| Is it undesirable to aim for objectivity? Zinn seemed to
| believe it was his job to shape American society not record
| its history.
|
| Reshaping American society may be a fine goal. And, Zinn
| certainly has been successful at that, but it does not sound
| like history to me.
| tbihl wrote:
| Your comment reacts to the wrong part of the quote. It is not
| controversial to say that all history is biased. The
| controversy is stating that perfect truth (objectivity), were
| it achievable, would not be desirable because the author
| believes that he serves a higher value than truth. That is a
| basic (and abhorrent) tenet of communism, and probably amoral
| leadership generally (see Trump vis-a-vis suppressed Covid
| information in early 2020.) If you don't hold truth as a
| central value, you will often find yourself discarding it in
| situations where it is clearly inconvenient.
| littlemerman wrote:
| Nice to see an article about a history professor at the top of
| HN. :)
|
| As a former history major, I can confirm that Zinn's work, while
| well intentioned, isn't much respected in academia. He brought a
| useful new perspective but didn't back up his arguments with
| strong evidence.
|
| Poor evidence, however, doesn't discredit Zinn's central thesis
| about American history.
|
| For more rigorous approach American history I would recommend
| Eric Foner:
|
| http://www.ericfoner.com/books/index.html
|
| Although his focus is more global, Eric Hobsbawm is one of the
| most influential historians of the twentieth century. His "The
| Age of..." are worth a read"
|
| https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/eric-hobsbawm-t...
|
| The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848 The Age of Capital: 1848-1875
| The Age of Empire: 1875-1914 The Age of Extremes: 1914-1991
| 0xB31B1B wrote:
| I don't really understand the hate for Zinn by some folks. He
| tells the truth, a truth not often told. Curious how so many self
| styled "contrarians" and "free thinkers" dislike his work without
| reading it. Anyway, it's a good read.
| pnw_hazor wrote:
| Zinn explicitly disregards objectivity -- he is telling his own
| truth with a goal to shape society to be more Marxist.
| rayiner wrote:
| Because it's not the truth, and is in fact propaganda. There
| was a purpose to it back when it was published, because it was
| a response to books that were also propaganda. But there is no
| place for it today, where better scholarship exists and the
| Internet provides ready access to a plethora of view points.
| tmh79 wrote:
| >>> "But there is no place for it today, where better
| scholarship exists and the Internet provides ready access to
| a plethora of view points"
|
| Thats now how history works at all man. Pretty much all
| writing on history goes into the metaphorical dust bin maybe
| 20-40 years after it is created but the "dust bin" isn't a
| dead place that no one should ever explore, its the world of
| historiography, and understanding how people understood their
| point in time at different points in time. No one should read
| a history book like its the bible handed down from on high,
| they should read it knowing the authors biases, the
| contemporary views on the authors work from other experts in
| the field, and an understanding of their own knowledge level
| and context. The reality is that a huge amount of K-12
| American history education is propaganda and for someone with
| a K-12 American history background this book is a very
| compelling read that provides a useful counter narrative to
| what they have been taught, the main function of which is not
| to blindly trust the words in the book, but to understand the
| practice of history not as a recitation of facts but an
| analysis of past events with a specific point of view, and
| how different points of view from authors with different
| motivations can give different views of the past. IMO, this
| really brought the field of history to life for me.
| sbilstein wrote:
| Quite a bit of the people's history of the united states is
| primary sources.
|
| Zinn decided to bias the viewpoint towards oppressed people,
| the same way many textbooks bias it in favor of the 'winning'
| party. While I felt like I got a pretty decent education in
| high school history, Zinn didn't invalidate what I learned
| but showed quite clearly how these things affected others.
|
| When I was in school it would have been highly controversial
| to compare chattel slavery or the conquering of the New World
| to the holocaust but the reality is the severity is similar,
| just on a different timeframe.
| rayiner wrote:
| Except that one of the primary criticisms is that the
| primary sources are edited heavily and misleadingly. I have
| particularly little sympathy for that, because one of the
| things you learn as a lawyer is that using a misleading
| quote or omission destroys your credibility in an
| adversarial system like legal proceedings. Your opponent
| will invariably provide the missing context in response and
| make you look like a liar. If a history book takes
| liberties (for example, in one passage, using an ellipses
| to connect sentences in two completely different documents
| written two days apart) that I wouldn't in legal practice,
| that's a huge red flag.
| jolux wrote:
| Which parts of it are untrue?
| tildedave wrote:
| Sorry to point you to more references, but the
| AskHistorians subreddit has a pretty good survey of views
| on the issue. https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/search
| ?q=zinn&restric...
| jolux wrote:
| I ask for specifics because I know all the general
| arguments around it. I asked about what was specifically
| untrue, I have not read solid criticisms of it that cast
| serious doubt on its factual claims, only that it shows
| history from a certain perspective, which (to be fair to
| Zinn here) is evident in the title.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| leftyted wrote:
| Your comment explains the hate.
|
| There is no such thing as history without a political
| philosophy. Herodotus had one, Thucydides had one and Zinn has
| one. This is all fine and good. The issue is when people come
| along and say "He tells the truth, a truth not often told".
|
| It's not _the truth_. It 's a _contribution_. In the medium-to-
| long run, parts of Zinn 's writings will be accepted and other
| parts will be rejected. In fact, this has already happened. The
| problem is people selling Zinn as "the last word," as if we can
| all stop thinking about history now because Zinn finished the
| job. In reality, history is a never-ending process. Historical
| theses can be _more right_ than others but none of them are
| "the truth".
| andrewprock wrote:
| If anyone thinks that Zinn is not offering precisely a
| counterpoint to history as written by the victors, they have
| not understood his message.
|
| His memoir is literally titled: "You Can't Be Neutral on a
| Moving Train"
| hirundo wrote:
| > Zinn's approach to history essentially inverted the traditional
| approach that placed the rich and powerful ... To tell history
| from the perspective of the oppressed and marginalized
|
| The mirror image of Ayn Rand. I wonder if there is anyone at the
| intersection of their fandoms.
| oivey wrote:
| Rand wrote fiction, not even anything purporting to be history.
| hirundo wrote:
| She is best known for fiction but was also a prolific
| essayist. They expound on her theories of history, economics,
| and philosophy. See https://aynrand.org/novels/, bottom of
| the page for the non-fiction.
| m0zg wrote:
| People don't understand what Ayn Rand's writings are. It's
| basically a deliberate anti-communist screed from someone who
| experienced it in real life, whereas e.g. Marx's work is a
| deliberate pro-communist screed. Both are meant to be extreme,
| and neither presents a viable blueprint for a society.
| WaxProlix wrote:
| Rand wrote fiction novels, and Marx was - irrespective of
| your views on his output - a well respected philosopher and
| well known, if controversial economist.
|
| Equating the two is... super off base. Crucially, you can
| make any point you want when writing a novel, since you set
| up the world and the characters and get to choose the
| reactions of everything. Marx at least wrote about the real
| world, and our ability to critique that work rests at least
| in part upon its claims about the real world.
| m0zg wrote:
| Be that as it may, his work is still an extreme pro-
| communist screed. It is not viable as a consistent view of
| the world, just like Atlas Shrugged isn't. I'm not equating
| the two in other aspects.
|
| As to writing whatever you want, Marx did write the most
| insane and damaging things in his work. His work, in fact,
| led directly to tens of millions of deaths in 20th century,
| and the way I see it, the damage is not yet over, as some
| idiot somewhere will always be tempted to live off somebody
| else's money, just like Marx himself did.
| jolux wrote:
| He wasn't describing an ideal but problematic society
| like you claim Rand was though. Have you read Marx? He
| was developing philosophical technique for analyzing
| history, politics, and economics.
| herbstein wrote:
| > his work is still an extreme pro-communist screed
|
| Marx, for all intents and purposes, created what we today
| would consider "communism". That is, from a academic
| perspective, and not whatever goes as "communism" in
| American pop culture.
|
| > the damage is not yet over, as some idiot somewhere
| will always be tempted to live off somebody else's money
|
| The above is a terribly ironic criticism, considering how
| Ayn Rand lived out her life living off of the dime of the
| government.
|
| > His work, in fact, led directly to tens of millions of
| deaths in 20th century
|
| If we presuppose that any death, as a result of the
| actions of a state claiming to be using a given economic
| system, is attributed to said economic system we should
| be counting honestly. Every death caused by Capitalist
| countries, both domestically and abroad, should also be
| counted.
|
| Every person that has ever starved to death under
| capitalism should be counted. Whether there's a direct
| shortage of food, or the person can't afford the food
| available, doesn't really matter. A person isn't
| receiving food when acting inside the system and thus
| died.
|
| Then consider the imperialism carried out by these
| capitalist states. Millions upon millions of native
| inhabitants of Africa, South-East Asia, Southern America,
| and North America have been all but wiped out by
| capitalism.
|
| What about WWII? Because in the of-cited number of "100
| million killed by Communism" several wars are counted. In
| WWII a major contributor was the failure of the
| capitalistic system in Europe after WWI.
|
| I could go on, but I think the point has been made.
| m0zg wrote:
| > Every person that has ever starved to death under
| capitalism should be counted
|
| You can count, but I can tell you right now, you wouldn't
| like the comparison. :-)
| lazugod wrote:
| Who are his contemporaries?
| jolux wrote:
| Noam Chomsky and the other elements of the Cantabrigian
| intelligentsia of his generation mostly.
| lazugod wrote:
| Oh, I see, "contemporaries" is the opposite of what I meant
| to ask.
|
| Who are current writers like him?
| temptemptemp111 wrote:
| You all need to read: Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake
| History That Turned a Generation against America
| rayiner wrote:
| https://news.stanford.edu/news/2012/december/wineburg-histor...
|
| > Wineburg, one of the world's top researchers in the field of
| history education, raises larger issues about how history should
| be taught. He says that Zinn's desire to cast a light on what he
| saw as historic injustice was a crusade built on secondary
| sources of questionable provenance, omission of exculpatory
| evidence, leading questions and shaky connections between
| evidence and conclusions.
|
| A similar warning needs to be leveled at the 1619 Project, which
| likewise focuses more on rhetoric than careful scholarship:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_1619_Project
|
| In particular, the lead essay originally stated that protecting
| slavery was "one primary reason the colonists fought the American
| Revolution."
|
| After extensive criticism from scholars, the Times edited that
| sentence to read that protecting slavery was "one primary reason
| some of the colonists fought the American Revolution."
|
| Of course the "one primary ... some of..." construction dilutes
| they assertion beyond recognition. The Times defended this as
| just the addition of "two words" but it undermines the central
| thesis of the lead essay. Think of the evidence required to
| support the first assertion, compared to the second assertion. To
| support the first assertion, you needed evidence that protecting
| slavery was a primary reason for the colonists as a whole. To
| support the revised assertion, you need only find _some_
| colonists, among millions, with that motivation.
|
| The 1619 articles on the economic importance of slavery,
| moreover, are not written by an economist and do not represent
| the consensus views of economists. See:
| https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-1619-project-tells-a-false-...
| sbilstein wrote:
| he has a whole book of primary
| sources...https://www.amazon.com/Voices-Peoples-History-United-
| States/...
| amirkdv wrote:
| From OP:
|
| > We need Howard Zinn now more than ever. Not for the sake of
| romance or to construct another hero in history. We need his
| insights, his politics, and his commitment to the struggle for
| a better world.
|
| Unless your position is that there is such a thing as an
| unbiased history or that Zinn presented historical falsehoods
| (not a usual position even among Zinn's critiques), I don't
| think the valid points you raise on the 1619 project rebut the
| thesis of the OP.
| Gimpei wrote:
| This feels like a reduction to either/or thinking. Sure all
| history is biased. Everything is biased. But I think you
| probably believe that some things are more biased than
| others. The argument above seemed to be that Zinn is more
| biased and this is perhaps less worthy of our attention than
| somebody who makes more of an attempt to reduce bias. Not
| taking a position on Zinn btw.
| jeffbee wrote:
| If you're concerned about Zinn's sourcing you could read Takaki
| instead. Takaki is a bit like the undergrad-level Zinn, if you
| think of Zinn being suited to high school.
| alecb wrote:
| Damn, a millionaire professor at Stanford has issues with
| Howard Zinn. Funny coincidence!
| squidlogic wrote:
| Argument ad hominem.
| forgotmysn wrote:
| you think history professors are paid in millions?
| zasz wrote:
| Considering the median price of a house in Palo Alto is now
| 3.1 million dollars, it's a plausible assumption this
| professor is indeed a millionaire.
| forgotmysn wrote:
| what makes you assume he owns a home in Palo Alto? what
| makes you assume he owns a home at all?
| scarmig wrote:
| > Over time, however, a problem emerged as Zinn's book became
| the single authoritative source of history for so many
| Americans, Wineburg said. In substituting one buttoned-up
| interpretation of the past for another, Wineburg finds, A
| People's History and traditional textbooks are mirror images
| that relegate students to similar roles as absorbers - not
| analysts - of information. Wineburg writes that a heavily
| filtered and weighted interpretation becomes dangerous when "we
| are talking about how we educate the young, those who do not
| yet get the interpretive game."
|
| I kind of hated a People's History, but if you take it as a
| project to show that you can write multiple narratives of
| American history that are true if you squint at them at just
| the right angle, it more or less succeeded in its aim. American
| high school textbooks are just as terrible if not moreso.
| rayiner wrote:
| Yes, of course. And in 1980 that was a really important
| contribution. But in many cases it's just become a different
| narrative that's accepted uncritically as truth.
| joshuamorton wrote:
| Indeed as someone who wasn't ever shown the book, and who is
| reading it now, the primary sources and stories shown reveal
| events that were glossed over and even looking at them in
| isolation show that the history I was taught in school,
| especially of early America was highly romanticized.
| google234123 wrote:
| Well, if you want a far-left and deeply pessimistic
| interpretation of history, he's you guy.
| novajeeper wrote:
| Yep, I'd rather the rosy Disney-fied version of history that
| hides the truth behind indigenous/minority struggles and keeps
| the impoverished in their place.
| peterthehacker wrote:
| Did you even read his book? Calling it "far-left" or
| "pessimistic" is pretty far off. If you have critiques then
| present them clearly with evidence.
| iandanforth wrote:
| I absolutely agree. I am as lefty as it gets but having this
| ideological indoctrination shoved down my throat in highschool
| was an awful experience. It didn't feel constructive, it didn't
| feel educational, it felt like an uninterrupted lambasting. It
| totally failed to persuade and left an awful taste in my mouth
| that decades have not erased.
| tomdell wrote:
| That was my point of view when I considered myself a
| libertarian. If you actually give the stuff a chance and read
| it - it's just facts, often untold and unknown. It did shift my
| views far to the left, but the only thing holding me back from
| that was ignorance of the truth.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| As a revisionist, the great thing about Zinn is that he told
| the lesser known side of a lot of stories. However it seemed
| like he had a tendency to put a ton of weight on non-
| objective primary sources. Just like it's healthy to question
| and criticize the traditional narratives, I don't think every
| "fact" in A People's History should be taken at face value.
| amirkdv wrote:
| > To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It
| is based on the fact that human history is a history not only
| of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage,
| kindness. [...] If we remember those times and places-and there
| are so many-where people have behaved magnificently, this gives
| us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending
| this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if
| we do act, in however small a way, we don't have to wait for
| some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession
| of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should
| live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a
| marvelous victory. [0]
|
| Doesn't sound like a "deeply pessimistic interpretation of
| history" to me.
|
| [0]: You Can't be Neutral on a Moving Train, Howard Zinn
| the_benno wrote:
| This seems like a kneejerk response to a strawman version of
| Zinn. He's a pretty middle-of-the-road academic politically
| speaking and doesn't get anywhere near what I would call far-
| left.
|
| As for "pessimistic", well, I'd just say that the facts don't
| care about your feelings. Powerful institutions are (generally
| speaking) violent and uncaring towards those without power;
| ignoring that fact does us all a disservice.
| trentnix wrote:
| Zinn's own words (which are quoted in the article) confirm
| the parent's point:
|
| _From that moment on, I was no longer a liberal, a believer
| in the self-correcting character of American democracy. I was
| a radical, believing that something fundamental was wrong in
| this country . . . something rotten at the root. The
| situation required not just a new president or new laws, but
| an uprooting of the old order, the introduction of a new kind
| of society--cooperative, peaceful, egalitarian._
| jolux wrote:
| Saying that America has deeply rooted problems is not
| pessimism, it's realism. Not believing in people's ability
| to make it better is pessimism.
| trentnix wrote:
| And in that quote, Zinn explicitly mentions he doesn't
| believe in "people's ability to make it better":
|
| _I was no longer a liberal, a believer in the self-
| correcting character of American democracy_
| jolux wrote:
| You're misreading him. He's talking about the ability of
| an ideology and a system to correct itself, not that of
| the people it rules to choose a different society for
| themselves.
| ImprobableTruth wrote:
| He's literally saying that he believes that American
| democracy is fundamentally flawed and that it can't be
| fixed, therefore necessitating a revolution.
| jolux wrote:
| He said it's not self-correcting, meaning people have to
| take charge to build the country that they need and want.
| That's not the same as saying it can't be fixed.
| rayiner wrote:
| No, he says he doesn't believe in the "self-correcting
| character _of American Democracy._ " That doesn't just
| mean that people need to fix it, it means he thinks they
| need to operate outside the Democratic process to fix it.
| philipkglass wrote:
| Eric Hobsbawm's account of the "long 19th century", as told in
| his _The Age of Revolution_ , _The Age of Capital_ , and _The Age
| of Extremes_ , is something that readers who are interested in
| Zinn may also be interested in. Hobsbawm appears to have a
| significantly better reputation among professional historians
| than Zinn does.
|
| Hobsbawm still frequently appears on university reading lists. I
| remember the trilogy as engaging and easy to read for an outsider
| to the field. He is less polemical than Zinn, even if his
| political sympathies are similar.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Hobsbawm
|
| Favorable mentions of Hobsbawm from AskHistorians:
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5bcvbe/i_am_...
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/efznsq/is_er...
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