Last night i finished reading A People’s History of the United States. In some places it was a pretty easy read. The challenging chapter was pretty much only Chapter 4. What boggled my mind was trying to understand whether it was pre or during Revolutionary times.
I honestly enjoyed reading this book. I loved how the author wrote from more of the oppressed people’s point of view rather than just staying a third person observing the situations. At time I felt the emotions that many of the people experienced such as anger and hurt. Compared to previous knowledge of history and what we have learned in school, the information I extracted from reading from this historian was awesome. I didnt realize how much our elementary history books were hiding from us. I started to feel that Christopher Columbus was more antagonistic and sinister than a heroic figure in the exploration of the world. There is not much to question in Zinn’s writing. Zinn states that his goal was not to obscure or briefly mention the tragics of history, but to talk about it in detail because he thought it was important. I believe Zinn’s thesis to be the following: “My viewpoint, in telling the history of the United States, is different: that we must not accept the memory of states as our own. Nations are not communities and never have been, The history of any country, presented as the history of a family, conceals fierce conflicts of interest (sometimes exploding, most often repressed) between conquerors and conquered, masters and slaves, capitalists and workers, dominators and dominated in race and sex. And in such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, as Albert Camus suggested, not to be on the side of the executioners. ”
He says that history is just like any story. Their is always a conflict. He says that his goal was not to present history as it honestly was, nothing sugarcoated.
Race affects a person’s judgment and viewpoint on history. For example, African American would be more passionate about the history of slaves than than I personally would be. His culture and heritage is rooted within these brutally treated slaves, where as my culture never experienced slavery from a white man. Social class would also be of significance, for example some one at the bottom of the social class in present time would more likely side with the poor in the revolutionary period where as some one of the upper class in modern society might not really care to take sides at all. They might admit that the rich in the past were unfairly powerful, but they would never understand the grievances of the poor because they never experienced poverty. Zinn states this issue very well in the book such as what says in the following:
-“My point is not to grieve for the victims and denounce the executioners. Those tears, that anger, cast into the past, deplete our moral energy for the present. And the lines are not always clear. In the long run, the oppressor is also a victim. In the short run (and so far, human history has consisted only of short runs), the victims, themselves desperate and tainted with the culture that oppresses them, turn on other victims. ”
He in particular is not taking the side of any man when he presents history but rather what history honestly was. Nothing obscured of mentioned with brevity.
Flynn states that Zinn’s writing is like that of Marxist Propoganda. I do feel that sometimes Zinn was being a little to biased towards a subject but he still presented the evidence honestly. He showed the true sides of different people. I would rather have Zinn as a history teacher because he presents both sides of a case. I would rather have a teacher who is slightly biased in a perspective but presents both sides of the case.
Ethan Do's Blog 