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Summary Of The Other Civil War By Howard Zinn

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Howard Zinn’s unique perspective on American history and the beloved American heroes makes for an interesting story. His book, A People's History of the United States, paints history in a whole new light. While most teachers tell the story of the Jacksonian “era of the common man”, the other side is rarely looked at, the side that Zinn shows in the 10th chapter of his book “The Other Civil War”, and the era of the elite using the middle class to push the lower, working classes down. He also uses other like-minded historians like Christman, Miller, Myers, and Horwitz and historical events to support his claims. These claims are that throughout the 1830s and 1860s there was a class struggle going on between the poor workers of the nation and …show more content…

As Henry Christman details in his work Tin Horns and Calico, this movement was against the patroonship system, created in the 1660s when the Dutch ruled New York and that was a place where “a few families, intricately intermarried, controlled the destinies of three hundred thousand people and rules in almost kingly splendor near two million acres of land.” This is impactful, as it shows the …show more content…

Throughout the usual, Civil War, more actions added to the growing injustice. For example, the Homestead Act, and afterwards came more laws passed by Congress to benefit the landowners and merchants, Myers tells of this injustice and especially the case of the growing Astr family fortune from the rents of New York tenements, in his History of the Great American Fortunes, when he stated that “law did not represent the ethics or ideals of advanced humanity; it exactly reflected, as a pool reflects the sky, the demands and self-interest of the growing propertied classes.” This directly supports Zinn’s ideas that this society was one where the workers would end up being exploited while the rich benefitted from the labor. During the war however, the psychology of patriotism and the love of adventure created by the politicians worked to lower anger against the rich and

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