"Howard Zinn’s Fake History" by Anna Abbott

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Never was a Howard Zinn fan. I’m giving his garbage book away for a copy of Stephen King’s “The Stand” at my local Little Free Library.

“Debunking Howard Zinn” by historian Mary Grabar does a wonderful job debunking his book chapter by chapter.
 
I gotta say that article got a big yawn out of me. Zinn was an anarchist, not a communist in the marxian sense. His book is flawed as any historical work is flawed. It does however raise some forgotten facts to the surface and for that is to be commended. Treated as a new standard of textbook history? No. But commended? I’d say so.
 
My AP US History teacher gave us Zinn for summer reading. I forgot what he had to say. The actual AP textbook was more interesting.
 
I’ve read Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of America.”

I disagree with the author of this article, Zinn. Zinn was not a communists, and the book she debunks in the article, Zinn for the most part used the memoirs of Fr Bartolomé de Las Casas, a Dominican Friar who wrote about what he saw when he traveled to the New World with Columbus. Las Casas was highly critical of the treatment of the Natives in America and wrote to the Pope who issued a Papal Bull prohibiting the enslavement of the Natives or their mistreatment.

This is what Zinn referenced in his book.

Howard Zinn was a bomadair as part of the 490th Bombardment Group, in WWII Europe. He was as gun ho and supportive of the war as any American was at the time. However, just two weeks before the end of the war, his squadron was called up and when he arrived at the airfield, his plane was being loaded with 50 gallon drums of gasoline, retrofitted with fins. Their target was a small village where German Soldiers held. This is what he was told. They flew there and dropped their ordinance killing everyone and destroying the entire village. After the war, he later learned that the German soldiers were young kids who were conscripted in Germany, some as young as 15 years of age, who had surrendered and were waiting to be picked up by Allied Forces. He then learned that the evil of war isn’t always committed by the enemy, but by us.

He became a professor at Boston University and he became a critic of the Vietnam War. He was right, but at the time the conservatives hated him and wanted the University to fire him.

Anyway, he’s no longer alive which allows the author of the article to take shots at him, for he’s not here to defend himself.
 
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I was forced to read Howard Zinns “history” book in college. Waste of time.
 
The whole idea of history is to tell what happened, and then to interpret what happened. Zinn’s history, as is the case with any telling of history, encompasses both. Different people come to different conclusions. I wouldn’t be worried so much with what Zinn’s interpretation is, as whether he is telling the truth, can it be substantiated independently, and what other sides to the story may exist.

Think of it this way: Protestants view the “Reformation” as an unalloyed moral good, an emergence and liberation from what they see as a thousand years of Catholic oppression, corruption, and ignorance. Catholics really shouldn’t even call it a “reformation”, except in the value-neutral sense of something have been “re-formed” — take away the hyphen, and you are making a positive moral judgment on it. From our standpoint, it was a revolution, a rebellion, a great victory for the evil one, arguably the worst thing that ever happened to the Church. Yet the facts themselves are what they are.

If you bear his biases and ideology in mind — all historians have biases and write from a given point of view — Zinn, like any other historian, could be read profitably. While I wouldn’t agree with his ideology (at least not fully), I do welcome his emphasis on the life of the common man, his defense of labor, and his telling of the stories of minorities and marginalized groups that very often get lost in the narrative.
 
Howard Zinn made an interesting and valuable contribution to American historiography. He succeeded in popularizing a broader conception and new interpretations of American history. One is not required to agree with everything that he ever wrote.
 
I liked Howard Zinn when I read “A People’s History of the United States”. I’ve not read anything more recent by him. He brought a different approach (a bit more populist on the left side) to history, and I tend to include him with Charles and Mary Beard whom I also like. They are a bit more focused on economics/a bit more structural-kind of old school Marxist.
History is always written from a perspective. Any reader should be attentive to the perspective of the author.
And, of course, ask: does it make sense? Do the arguments stand?
If you don’t like an argument, you may still benefit from your own critique of what you have read. Reading history does not have to be a zero sum game.
 
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I see from the innumerable threads here that we are an easily distracted group of beings.

Whoever this man is or was, he had human dignity and is worthy of prayer. Other than that, life is too short.
 
JimR-OCDS said:
Zinn was not a communists
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Zinn’s own testimony says otherwise:
Zinn admitted membership in numerous Communist fronts, including the Americans Veterans Committee and the American Labor Party, which employed Zinn at its headquarters in Brooklyn at a time when Communists controlled it. But he steadfastly denied membership in the Communist Party itself.
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But there’s a caveat:
Several Communist Party members said otherwise. The files paraphrase one informant’s conversation with Zinn in 1948 as the future historian traveled from a protest outside the Truman White House to a Brooklyn rally for presidential candidate Henry Wallace. According to the informant, “Zinn indicated that he is a member of the Communist Party and that he attends Party meetings five nights a week in Brooklyn.” The files summarize how another informant believed that Zinn was “selected as a delegate to the New York State Communist Party Convention.”
Click to expand...
 
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do_justly_love_mercy said:
Howard Zinn made an interesting and valuable contribution to American historiography. He succeeded in popularizing a broader conception and new interpretations of American history. One is not required to agree with everything that he ever wrote.
Click to expand...
I think the writings of Howard Zinn have sort of outlived their usefulness. My understanding is that at one time, American history textbooks presented an extremely idealized version of events that airbrushed out anything that made the US government look bad. A People’s History may have been a necessary corrective at that time.

However, in my midwestern high school in the early 2000s, our textbooks already presented a fairly nuanced, balanced view of history. They certainly didn’t shy away from discussing the uglier aspects of American history. In that context, Zinn just becomes the MSNBC of history texts. Without a Fox News to balance out, what’s the point?
 
Yes, he certainly anticipated the direction in which American historiography was traveling. Black history, women’s history, etc. are now very much part of the mainstream. The conception of history as the inexorable and glorious rise of nations and of “progress” in every field of human endeavor, which was how pretty much all countries once portrayed their history, is now very outdated. So, yes, there are now a lot of more recent texts that could replace Zinn. However, what I object to is people promoting for ideological reasons the idea that Zinn’s entire body of work was completely useless or should even be banned. It’s not unlike the way many Catholics (at any rate ones of this forum) completely dismiss Steven Runciman’s work on the Crusades.
 
The problem with Zinn is just the classic overcorrection. If the dominant narrative was utopian bliss, Zinn’s is like unmitigated horror, misery and oppression.
 
This is from the FBI in the days of Joe McCarthy. I wouldn’t put much credibility in it.

Either way, Zinn is dead and not here to defend himself against the accusations.

I don’t like everything about what he stood for, but he was a veteran who saw the evils of war and so, opposed the Vietnam War, which made anyone in those days who opposed the war, a communist sympathizer.

BTW, I served in the Marines during the Vietnam War, I was as naive about the war as many Americans were.
 
Sure, he is not my favorite scholar of American history, but I also don’t think he needs to be turned into the boogeyman that he has become for many on what is now “the right” in America.

Same goes, from kind of the other end of the spectrum, for that book Time on the Cross. Deeply flawed methodology, came to some horrible conclusions, but makes a valuable contribution to the body of scholarship on slavery.

Where it gets unreasonable is when people begin to say things like, such and such a scholar has nothing of value to say at all, his books should be banned from schools and public libraries.
 
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