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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 t

• rayiner 6y ago
  Because it’s not the truth, and is in fact propaganda. There was a purpose to it back when it was published, because it was a response to books that were also propaganda. But there is no place for it today, where better scholarship exists and the Internet provides ready access to a plethora of view points.
  • jolux 6y ago
    Which parts of it are untrue?
    • tildedave 6y ago
      Sorry to point you to more references, but the AskHistorians subreddit has a pretty good survey of views on the issue. https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/search?q=zinn&restrict_sr=on https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/search?q=zinn&restric...
      • jolux 6y ago
        I ask for specifics because I know all the general arguments around it. I asked about what was specifically untrue, I have not read solid criticisms of it that cast serious doubt on its factual claims, only that it shows history from a certain perspective, which (to be fair to Zinn here) is evident in the title.
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        • sanderjd 6y ago
          Right, so go check the thread that you were linked to. It's clearly going to be a more holistic treatment than you're going to get in this thread on hacker news, a site for programmers and software entrepreneurs, not historians.
          • jolux 6y ago
            I've read them, and I've also read Michael Kazin's criticism in particular numerous times.
      • Kranar 6y ago
        I made what I think is a good faith effort to review the link you provided, but I don't see any indication of factual errors Howard Zinn makes. It appears the criticism of him is that he is biased, he makes heavy use of secondary sources (a quantifiable claim which as best as I can tell is false given that Zinn's sources are enumerated and mostly primary) and engages in something called "presentism", which is to make moral judgements of historical acts based on modern moral standards, a claim I don't have any particular issue with but even if I did it has no bearing on the factual content of his work. 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).
        • UncleMeat 6y ago
          > factual errors 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).
          • jolux 6y ago
            I will accuse Zinn of many things but not constructing a narrative from his facts is not one of them :) I happen to disagree with a lot of his political opinions but I think it's very important that APHUS exists.
  • tmh79 6y ago
    >>> "But there is no place for it today, where better scholarship exists and the Internet provides ready access to a plethora of view points" 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.
    • elefanten 6y ago
      It seems like the spirit of your comment is in accord with GP. GGP put forth that Zinn is "the truth." 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.
  • sbilstein 6y ago
    Quite a bit of the people's history of the united states is primary sources. 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.
    • rayiner 6y ago
      Except that one of the primary criticisms is that the primary sources are edited heavily and misleadingly. I have particularly little sympathy for that, because one of the things you learn as a lawyer is that using a misleading quote or omission destroys your credibility in an adversarial system like legal proceedings. Your opponent will invariably provide the missing context in response and make you look like a liar. If a history book takes liberties (for example, in one passage, using an ellipses to connect sentences in two completely different documents written two days apart) that I wouldn’t in legal practice, that’s a huge red flag.
      • jahaja 6y ago
        Well, since you so lackadaisically dismiss a rather impressive book with a single paragraph, and remembering that you're one of HN's resident status-quo apologist that really like to google up heavily cherry-picked links to your arguments - it would surely be appropriate to do so now as well?
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• leftyted 6y ago
  Your comment explains the hate. 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".
  • andrewprock 6y ago
    If anyone thinks that Zinn is not offering precisely a counterpoint to history as written by the victors, they have not understood his message. His memoir is literally titled: "You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train"
    • UncleMeat 6y ago
      Sure. But there are gazillions of people who didn't even take a single history class in undergrad who clearly haven't understood his message and hold up his text as the last word when scholarship, even leftist scholarship, has added so much more in the intervening decades. Zinn gets more recognition than other scholars among laypeople, not experts. It becomes frustrating watching truly excellent scholarship go unnoticed.
      • andrewprock 6y ago
        That phenomenon is not in any way unique to Zinn. You can see parallel behavior across the political spectrums.
        • UncleMeat 6y ago
          Of course. And plenty of scholars also have things to say about Sapiens or whatever other hot popular scholarship is happening on a given day. Zinn's flaws are not unique and the fact that Zinn has overzealous fans is not unique. That still doesn't mean that scholarly criticism isn't valuable.
• pnw_hazor 6y ago
  Zinn explicitly disregards objectivity -- he is telling his own truth with a goal to shape society to be more Marxist.
• anm89 6y ago
  Because you see your politics as the truth. What more needs to be said?
• karaterobot 6y ago
  I can't speak for anybody else, but I am bothered by the idea that people read A People's History largely uncritically, and then, their studies complete, go on to act as though they were de facto experts on U.S. history. 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.
  • UncleMeat 6y ago
    It isn't necessarily about balance. One can carry a leftist view of history and still find that there is way more to modern scholarship than Zinn provided.
  • andrewprock 6y ago
    In my experience, you'll find more uncritical experts in the realm of WWII aficionados. The number of WWII buffs who are unable to grasp history dwarf the relative minority who use Zinn as their singular lens of understanding. See also: people who watched a Ken Burns documentary
  • InitialLastName 6y ago
    What else would you recommend as part of this balanced diet of sources on US history? 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.
• mieses 6y ago
  If the OP had led with the book titled "Debunking Howard Zinn" the post would have been flagged. Calling one truth and the other a lie puts us back to the beginning of the 20th c. Soon we will be chanting "viva la muerte".
• RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
  I think there is a deeper reason to this. 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."
  • malandrew 6y ago
    Really great comment. I wish I could upvote this multiple times as you've done a great job articulating something I've failed to communicate to others.
• disown 6y ago
  He gets hate for the same reason he gets love. Because he doesn't toe the state history propaganda line we are all spoonfed. That doesn't mean he isn't biased. After all history is interpreted propaganda. But he does point out some "inconvenient truths". > 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.
  • tptacek 6y ago
    That's obviously not true, since many of the historians who criticize Zinn are themselves leftists.
• tptacek 6y ago
  Plenty of people who scorn Zinn agree directionally with his politics. Historians dislike him due to the poverty of his sourcing, about which you can read a lot just by casually Googling, and because of his flattening of US history into a totalizing class struggle that ignores race, immigration, religion, culture, and the goals and attitudes of the people who actually lived in the 19th and 20th century. 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.