4 ms·
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 tex
by 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 agoExcept 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 agoWell, 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?