Today our book club discussed Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States". It is a well-known book and is possibly the most well-known revelatory history of our country. As a college history professor, Zinn felt that the usual history taught in schools and colleges was too white, too self-congratulatory, too nice and too much of a lie. As I looked up the book to download it, I was informed of two other books that were explicitly anti-Zinn's book. I didn't read either of them but it appears that both are written by conservatives who feel Zinn's account needs balancing.
A friend who has a history degree mentioned that no one can paint a picture or write a description or history without choosing what to include and what to omit. There are an infinite number of facts that can be included and an infinite number of ways to describe and relate them.
Zinn's first chapter is about Columbus and the group mentioned "Columbus Day" and asked whether the US should celebrate his arrival in the western hemisphere. We discussed various alternatives to the holiday and the practice in some US states to make October 12 "Indigenous Peoples" Day in honor of the sacrifices and prices paid by native Americans when Europeans arrived and stayed.
Zinn makes clear that his own background and experiences before specializing in US history had a strong effect on his views and interests.
But my partisanship was undoubtedly shaped even earlier, by my upbringing in a family of working-class immigrants in New York, by my three years as a shipyard worker, and by my Air Force duty as a bombardier in the European theater (a strange word for that—"theater") in the second World War. That was all before I went to college under the GI Bill of Rights and began to study history.
Zinn, Howard. A People's History of the United States (Modern Classics) (p. 820). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
One of my very favorite books about education is "Uptaught" by Ken Macrorie. Professor Macrorie taught English and he emphasizes the difference getting WWII veterans in his classes made for him, his teaching and for the nature of the classes.
