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.
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".
His memoir is literally titled: "You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train"
The above OP quite literally said, “>the< truth” immediately followed by “>a< truth not often told.”
I find it baffling that the general HN/Reddit sentiment is anti-Zinn given the oft cited ideals of “contrarianism” that much of the community holds.
That doesn’t mean take everything said a face value but rather assign some worth to a work that told the stories of people that were hidden from the usual, “winner writes the tales” style of history writing.
I know, for me personally, Zinn’s work was a lot more engaging to read while balancing scholarly repute. This is certainly something from which other history books could learn.
Studying history (even as a non-historian) is impossible unless you are constantly revising your views, and that's not possible if you only know one source.
I'm sure there are plenty of people who read Howard Zinn critically, as part of a "balanced diet" of other sources. However, I think that among the type of people who have only read one general history of the U.S. since high school, but are still happy to preach to you from it, A People's History of the United States is probably the most popular selection.
See also: people who watched a Ken Burns documentary
For starters, presumably, the founding documents, but after that (and Zinn) I haven't come across a lot of accessible general histories in general discussion. One could perhaps compensate with the AAA biographies of famous presidents and the like (David McCullough, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Robert Caro etc) but that doesn't really get you an alternate narrative arc.
In Sapiens, Yuval Harari makes the point that one of the most powerful things human society does is make myths.
One of the most powerful myths in American society has been the idea that the United States was based on a belief in human freedom and equality from the beginning.
While, definitely not completely true, it was powerful enough that it actually catalyzed the fight against a lot of the injustices. See for example Abraham Lincoln's speeches or Martin Luther King, Jr's speeches where they are always appealing to people to live up to the ideals of America's founding[0].
Zinn directly attacked that myth in his work. And he attacked it at the point where he could do the most damage, in the early education of American youth.
The loss of this myth has had profound consequences. Before, we had a shared myth that everyone American, across all faiths could appeal to. Now there really isn't one. A significant portion believes that America was never great because it was hopelessly oppressive and all of American success is based on oppression. I am worried we are starting to see the emergence of another faction. One that is proud to be American, but justifies American greatness through "might makes right", and not through any appeal to principles of freedom. Thus this second group would say American became great, because it was oppressive. Both of these views are in contrast to the previous view that America was great, because of the founding principles of freedoms, despite the history of oppression which is to America's shame.
With no appeal to either religion or a founding myth that unites people, I feel American divisions will get even more nasty in the future.
0. "In a sense we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."
You can readily find left, class-centered histories of the United States that aren't criticized the way Zinn is. You can yourself scorn ideologically-motivated superficial criticism of Zinn from the right, if that's your thing! But you shouldn't dismiss the substantive critiques. Sometimes, being a good read is a tip-off that something's amiss.
> Curious how so many self styled "contrarians" and "free thinkers" dislike his work without reading it.
There is a lot less of this here than you think. I think the name of site is misleading you.
At no point have I seen anyone point out a factual error that Zinn has made, only that people don't like the conclusions he draws from those facts. Another commonly repeated point is that there are other historical works that do a better job than A People's History. That is almost certainly true as well, but that claim is no more relevant than pointing out that there are better scientific works that do a better job than Einstein's "Relativity: The Special and General Theory".
Having read A People's History, the very beginning of the book explicitly states that he is biased, that bias is something very hard to escape in almost any social study and is present among almost all historical literature whether the author admits it or not, and that the difference between his book and other historical works is that he makes the conscious decision to be biased from the point of view of the people who were conquered as opposed to writing from the point of view of the people who did the conquering.
Certainly Zinn has likely made some errors, but none of them are in the link you provided (as far as I could tell).
This is not the limit of criticism of history scholarship. Braudel's Civilization and Capitalism isn't considered dated because of factual errors but instead because it over-represents a particular narrative and analysis style that fails to paint a detailed picture of things.
History scholarship is absolutely not a list of facts. It is the construction of a narrative from source material. A text that is 100% truthful to fact can still be entirely bogus scholarship (I'm not saying that Zinn's is).
I happen to disagree with a lot of his political opinions but I think it's very important that APHUS exists.
Come to think about of it actually, it's also similar with the criticism of David Graeber's (RIP) book "Debt", which usually focus on "well, he wrote something really wrong paragraph about Apple, so you can't believe anything he writes really"
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.
GP may have phrased it a bit dismissively but I read that comment as making the same argument you do: no given history book contains the final truth.
As for GP's comment that Zinn has no place today -- you offer a more nuanced take. But we're in a moment replete with valorizing paeans to Zinn (like TFA) and calls for using People's History more widely as a _textbook_. Maybe, given that we are 40 years on from it's writing, that's not the best move.
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.