Bill McClay writes here about the influence that Howard Zinn’s 1980 book, A People’s History of the United States, has wielded on the teaching of U.S. history in the U.S.: “Less for its originality or plausibility than through its rhetorical simplicity and its undeniable narrative drive, Zinn’s People’s History has helped cause two generations of young Americans to believe that their nation is among the most culpable and unjust entities in human history.”
Howard Zinn was not a historian, but a progressive political science activist, a “tenured radical” and an able polemicist who knew how to use cherry-picked facts from history with a tone that Sam Wineburg described as speaking “directly to our inner Holden Caulfield.” The problem with Zinn’s book is not so much that his facts are wrong (though many are) but that they are specifically chosen to prop up a relentlessly negative narrative about U.S. history.
Even worse, Zinn’s book has been hugely influential in the teaching of U.S. history. McClay again: “It is no exaggeration that, to the extent that young Americans are being taught their history at all, Zinn is likely to be what they are being taught.” He (McClay) also describes a 2007 incident in which he was a Fulbright Professor at the University of Rome in which the only general account of American history in the university library was Zinn, and one of his colleagues there, a professor of American literature, likewise only possessed Zinn on her shelves. All this at the only institution in Italy offering a Ph.D. in American Studies.
To be sure, polemic tracts on all sides of various issues have been written since time immemorial, but rarely have they displaced actual historical narrative so thoroughly without being officially supported and having alternatives officially suppressed. I’ve mentioned this before, but it bears repeating here: as Glenn Reynolds has said, this sort of history is “the sort of thing a conqueror might impose on a defeated people to break their spirit.” Zinn’s narrative is so one-sided that it’s really hard to imagine that oikophobia isn’t the goal.
Resources
Good accounts of Zinn’s many errors (of both omission and commission):
- Mary Grabar’s book, Debunking Howard Zinn as well as her essay on the Smithsonian’s uptake of Zinn’s polemics and her essay specifically on Zinn’s distortions of Columbus.
- Bill McClay‘s review of Grabar’s book (referred to earlier).
- Ron Radosh’s review of Grabar’s book
- Sam Wineburg’s 2012 assessment of Zinn in American Educator.
What to do about it?
Zinn’s book has been largely ignored by academic historians – I suspect they either were ideologically allied with Zinn’s goals or found it difficult to imagine that such a transparently thinly-sourced, one-sided work could ever have any influence. Its early use in classrooms was probably unnoticed by parents – I certainly couldn’t tell you what books were used by my children, though I suspect that I would have noticed a book with “…People’s History…” in the title.
It’s not completely clear to me what precisely we (as parents) should have done to blunt the impact of Howard Zinn’s book. Perhaps we should have inoculated our children with a more “warts and all” (yet balanced) version of U.S. history rather than the arguably excessively patriotic version that we grew up with.
In any event, forewarned is forearmed: the parents in USA version 2 must be more vigilant than we were about the version of history that is being taught to their children.
Addendum: I should mention here that Zinn’s work is not the only influential-but-poor-quality work of polemic-masquerading-as-history. Much earlier (1934), Matthew Josephson wrote The Robber Barons, a work of “history” whose uptake into the collective consciousness was strong enough that is only fairly recently being thoroughly debunked (see Burton Folsom’s 1991 book, The Myth of the Robber Barons for example). Folsom has also written a short essay summarizing the book here that is highly recommended. The short version of the more accurate view of the Gilded Age is that there were two fundamentally different groups of entrepreneurs at work: the “market entrepreneurs” (who became wealthy by providing better products at lower prices) and the “political entrepreneurs” (who became wealthy through federal aid and subsidy). The latter could truly be described as “robber barons” but not the former!