3 ms·

Different sides are great, but at least in my AP US class, the actual textbook we used had biases pretty similar, or at least in a similar direction, to Zinn, i

by tikhonj 11y ago

Different sides are great, but at least in my AP US class, the actual textbook we used had biases pretty similar, or at least in a similar direction, to Zinn, if I'm recalling it correctly. (Despite doing well in that class, I don't remember many details from the book, but that was definitely my impression at the time. Also, my comparison to Zinn is limited to reading part of his book in an earlier class; I haven't read all of it.)

azernik 11y ago
Ah. Interesting. Maybe my teacher was just particularly good at picking contrasting material. In our non-Zinn textbook, there were semi-hagiographies of each president as they showed up (including, funnily, a mention of the height of every single one), as well as some interpretations of US policy decisions (e.g. the Mexican-American war) that bent over backwards to give the benefit of the doubt to politicians who were likely very aware of what they were doing. Things like its unequivocal endorsement of the nuclear bombing of Japan, for instance, were nicely offset by Zinn's unequivocal condemnation.
- _delirium 11y ago
  That's also how I remember the standard U.S. History textbooks (which were the only ones, we definitely didn't use Zinn). Fairly patriotic tone, lots of focus on important presidents, all generally presented positively. Most of the labor/populist stuff was skipped or glossed over. William Jennings Bryan did get a mention (mostly in the context of a silver vs. gold standard debate that just seemed confusing to me at the time), but you wouldn't learn who Bill Haywood or Eugene Debs were, or why they once had a lot of supporters, or that the "labor wars" included decades of intermittent violence and actual pitched battles (e.g., the Battle of Blair Mountain). Even World War I was more heroic-Allied-victory than tragic-waste-of-lives in tone. There were some exceptions to the general approach: the oppression of black Americans was covered in some detail, during both the slavery and Jim Crow eras, as was Indian removal. I did go to high school in Texas, though, which has made a deliberate effort to keep a "pro-American" tone in their textbooks.

by tikhonj 11y ago

azernik 11y ago

Ah. Interesting. Maybe my teacher was just particularly good at picking contrasting material. In our non-Zinn textbook, there were semi-hagiographies of each president as they showed up (including, funnily, a mention of the height of every single one), as well as some interpretations of US policy decisions (e.g. the Mexican-American war) that bent over backwards to give the benefit of the doubt to politicians who were likely very aware of what they were doing. Things like its unequivocal endorsement of the nuclear bombing of Japan, for instance, were nicely offset by Zinn's unequivocal condemnation.

_delirium 11y ago
That's also how I remember the standard U.S. History textbooks (which were the only ones, we definitely didn't use Zinn). Fairly patriotic tone, lots of focus on important presidents, all generally presented positively. Most of the labor/populist stuff was skipped or glossed over. William Jennings Bryan did get a mention (mostly in the context of a silver vs. gold standard debate that just seemed confusing to me at the time), but you wouldn't learn who Bill Haywood or Eugene Debs were, or why they once had a lot of supporters, or that the "labor wars" included decades of intermittent violence and actual pitched battles (e.g., the Battle of Blair Mountain). Even World War I was more heroic-Allied-victory than tragic-waste-of-lives in tone. There were some exceptions to the general approach: the oppression of black Americans was covered in some detail, during both the slavery and Jim Crow eras, as was Indian removal. I did go to high school in Texas, though, which has made a deliberate effort to keep a "pro-American" tone in their textbooks.