ipl-logo

Howard Zinn A People's History Analysis

1637 Words7 Pages

“In that inevitable taking of sides which comes from selection and emphasis in history, I prefer to try to tell the story of the discovery of America from the viewpoint of the Arawaks, of the Constitution from the standpoint of the slaves, of Andrew Jackson as seen by the Cherokees…” (Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, pg. 10). Society as a whole expects historians to be impartial, to report the events of the past as they happened, without incorporating their own thoughts into these events. We choose to believe that they are politically neutral, that they have no bias, and that they report history fairly and that everything occurred the way they say. However, as historian Howard Zinn points out in A People’s History, most historians have succumbed to the disturbing trend of glossing over and sugarcoating some of history’s most horrific events, excusing them as necessary for “progress,” and then moving on. …show more content…

Over the years, in historians’ quest to stay “neutral,” this glossing over has become normalized and resulted in society seeing this writing as “impartial,” when it actually gives us an incredibly slanted and incomplete view of history. As a result, Zinn’s recognition of his personal biases when analyzing history and telling it from the side of the victims instead of the victors is very important. Through Zinn, we see a side of history that is not usually shown, that is hidden and practically ignored because it makes some uncomfortable. Zinn’s personal experiences also make the events more

Show More
Related
417 Words | 2 Pages

In his fourth chapter titled "Tyranny is Tyranny," of his book A People's History of the United States, author Howard Zinn presents a ground breaking interpretation of motives for the American Revolutionary War. Zinn asserts that the leaders of our nation found, by creating their own nation, "they could take over land, profits and political power" held by the British Empire. What's more, the founding fathers could subdue rebellions in their own land and create "popular support for the rule of a new, privileged leadership." In other words, though the history books have always taught that, through the revolution, America overthrew the tyranny of the British privileged ruling class, Zinn is asserting America really only created its own new privileged class.

Read More
326 Words | 2 Pages

Consensus history is a nationalistic and homogenized narrative composed by white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, New Englander elites that aimed to minimize some of the errors of our nation’s past (p.20). Books composed in this manner frequently exaggerated, omitted, or falsified information to make the history of America look less shameful and more valiant than it really was. Some of those omitted were women, Native Americans, and African Americans because they did not fit this positive narrative. Two of the major authors of consensus history were George Bancroft and Francis Parkman.

Read More
1363 Words | 6 Pages

Howard Zinn Douglass Healey USU Salt Lake City Campus Spring 2015   The life of Howard Zinn spans across many decades and has much to be discussed. What challenges did Zinn and the colleagues of these times face. As well we will talk of his individual biography and the educational ideas he presented and what makes him and these ideas so influential. Howard Zinn was born August 1922 and died January 2010 in his lifetime there was the civil rights movement, World War 2, Vietnam war along with so many other issues in human rights and peace which led to the way Zinn saw the world and acted in it.

Read More
1098 Words | 5 Pages

The American Revolution was a political outbreak that changed the face of the nation. American colonies became independent and broke out of British rule to become its own country and formulated its own government to become what is known as The United States of America. The cause of the Revolution was to become independent and get out of the British’s treatment and rules and to develop their own method of ruling a nation. Howard Zinn had his own point of view and arguments on the events of the Revolution and what occurred behind the scenes. He opens a new angle to what actually happened and argues that the revolution was a substitution of one tyranny for another.

Read More
564 Words | 3 Pages

However wretched it might be, human beings seem to thrive on the brutalization and abusement of others below them. If there is no one below them, history is an indicator that a caste system will be created in order for someone to be. Whether you hear "history does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme," or "man learns from history that man never learns from history", the message remains the same- the human race has a tendency to repeat the same mistakes in all kinds of creative, innovative ways. For instance, the United States has a tendency to enslave, massacre and exploit marginalized groups; whether it is the Japanese, the homosexual, African, female; or even the disabled-in this way the United States is history's greatest poet. If human

Read More
251 Words | 2 Pages

“Columbus, the Indians, and Human Progress”, chapter one of “A People’s History of the United States”, written by professor and historian Howard Zinn, concentrates on a different perspective of major events in American history. It begins with the native Bahamian tribe of Arawaks welcoming the Spanish to their shores with gifts and kindness, only then for the reader to be disturbed by a log from Columbus himself – “They willingly traded everything they owned… They would make fine servants… With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.” (Zinn pg.1) In the work, Zinn continues explaining the unnecessary evils Columbus and his men committed unto the unsuspecting natives.

Read More
1106 Words | 5 Pages

History does not always convey the absolute truth. It offers only one side of the story. The strong and powerful voices always drown out the sounds of the weak and beaten. The winner’s word will always be taken over the loser’s. The content that lies within the textbooks was not written by the defeated.

Read More
920 Words | 4 Pages

They could say that any interpretation is correct because it was a lived experience and all feelings toward it are equally weighted. However, someone who believes in objective morality would counter this argument by saying that the first account (highlighting that African Americans were fighting for equal rights after a long period of inequality), is a better interpretation of the past event (and one that is rooted in reality, truth, and morality). If we were weighing all first-hand accounts of the past the same, however, a history book would look much different than it does today. The interpretation of the Civil War would grant the beliefs of slaveholders much more grace than need-be, and could treat World War 2 as un-needed aggression from foreign adversaries on Germany’s rise to power. So with that being established, it is important to question morality and ethics when reciting past events, and pushing back against falsely held accounts of important historical events.

Read More
798 Words | 4 Pages

Christopher Christley Mrs. Simmons English 12 CP 21 February 2023 Mutability of History History is something we all know about; we learn about history from a very young age, learning about 9/11, the holocaust, etc. What we learn is what we know to be true, but what about what we don’t learn? What hasn’t been taught, what’s been hidden from us in fear of us knowing the truth? George Orwell’s 1984 perfectly encapsulates the dangers of the mutability of our history, manipulating peoples’ perceptions and seeing the effects of it today through USSR/Russian History and even the United States history. Why is history so important to us?

Read More
508 Words | 3 Pages

No historian can fully capture the conflicting viewpoints associated with a specific event. To grasp the entirety of history, one

Read More
1212 Words | 5 Pages

Then we will discuss how we know that white settlers thought these things, what stories, reading and propaganda have we looked at. This activity should take thirty to forty minutes to complete. From there the remaining time will discuss how literature plays a role in giving different, and often time biased accounts, in history. To close the lesson students will be asked to answer the following question to turn in at the end of class. “Are biases in literature still used today, and why do you think this?

Read More
490 Words | 2 Pages

Documentation of history is a reflection of the values and morals of the time, compared and contrasted with the issues of the past, by people closely connected to those values and morals. History has been spoken and written down for millennia by both ordinary and extraordinary people. American history is merely an extension of that tradition, with three defined periods of documentation: the Puritans, in the sixteenth century, a closely knit religious sect; the patricians, men educated using what the Puritans would consider pagan texts, defying the Church’s hold upon them; and the professionals, people trained and educated for the process of researching and teaching about history, who used all manner of documents for their scholarly analysis in a way to affect change. The Puritans fled to America to establish their own community, entrusting their clergymen and political leaders, true men of God, with the recording of their history.

Read More
615 Words | 3 Pages

Usually, history is written by nations with power rather than nations that have little influence. Thus, it is likely that records include exaggerations about the actions of influential countries. For example, American history textbooks carry inaccurate information about The American Revolution. American history textbooks state that the war was skillfully fought by Americans, which led to their victory. However, in fact, the major factor of America’s victory was not the American army’s tactics.

Read More
676 Words | 3 Pages

Howard Zinn: A Competing Narrative Early March in Arkansas a Republican state Representative Kim Hendren introduced a bill to ban any book produced by Howard Zinn between the years of 1959-2010 in public schools. This ban included his bestselling book A People’s History of the United States that attempts to retell the typical historical narrative taught in schools from the perspective of the marginalized. This incident was not the first time that Zinn’s material had been targeted. Former Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels had also attempted to remove Zinn’s work from classrooms in Indiana.

Read More
931 Words | 4 Pages

When colonists realized this, they dumped those bodies into the ocean. This analysis can be seen in the verse thirteen, when he says: “Bones soldered by coral to bone”. This verse supports the argument that the sea holds the history, and that we know so little about it. With Sea is History’s first strophe in mind, I can say that to a moderate extent, history is biased. My reason of saying this is because as stated before, most of the history is submerged in our oceans.

Read More

More about Howard Zinn A People's History Analysis

Related Topics

Open Document