Zinn's book is definitely NOT anti-American, but those who disagree with what he is doing -- who want the truth suppressed -- often resort to calling it that. It is profoundly PRO American, and details many facts about how progress has been made in this country. It also does not hide the terrible atrocities committed by the powers-that-be throughout our history. That is why so many "established" historians are so critical of the book -- it tells things they have omitted from their own studies, and in doing this shows them to be biased and/or superficial.
Oner of my criticisms of your source's statement that you chose to repeat is that it really consists of generalizations with specific demonstrations of what it claims.
Let me get specific about this, since I am criticizing your source for not going deeply enough into facts. Where have you heard about the opposition to the Spanish-American War in the pages of conventional history books. You find descriptions of this in Zinn's chapter 12, pp 306 - and on. Have you ever seen Mark Twain's comment on the Phillipine War ?
"We have pacified some thousands of the islanders and buried them, destroyed their fields, burned their villages, and turned their widows and orphans out-of-doors; furnished heartbreak by exile to some dozens of disagreeable patriots; subjugated the remaining ten millions by Benevolent Assimilation, which is the pious new name of the musket; we have acquired property in the three hundred concubines and other slaves of our business partner, the Sultun of Sulu, and hoisted our protecting flag over that swag.
"And so, by these Providences of God -- and the phrase is the Government's, not mine -- we are a World Power."
You are obviously afraid to read the book itself. Don't. Better for you to continue to get your sense of history from some of those dated elementary school movies they used to show in the 1950's, where the United States was one big "melting pot" and everything was hunky dory.
Of course, yyuou don't want to read the book. You accept someone else's say-so and don't want to think for yourself.
If you can read sections pof this book and then tell us what things Zinn says are incorrect, then we can believe you. But I can find any number of fools on the Internet (and in The American Scholar) who believe all kinds of nonsense. Actually, I have some personal; experience in seeing at least one "scholar" who knew next to nothing about what he was writing about in that publication. I spent ten years of my life studying Samoan culture, and did a transcultural psychiatric study of certain things in the Samoan way of life. Margaret Mead wrote a book (Coming of Age in Samoa) which Samoans dislike because it is filled with nonsense. Derek Freeman and I and a few other people found Mead to be absolutely wrong. Yet the gentleman writing about Samoa in The American Scholar accepted her version of life there.
You would do best to go to the original source -- Zinn's book itself -- read it, and do your own research about whether what he states is true or not. Don't let some learned gentleman historian do your thinking for you. You do not need a license (a Ph.D.) to think.
As for this last remark, I would bet that most people in this forum, Republican, Democrat, conservative, liberal, right-wing, left-wing accept that fact. Think for yourself. And if the subject matters to you, do a little homework.
Bmac wrote:
Mike Pence is the governor of Indiana now, not Mitch Daniels, who is president of Purdue. I suppose you realize that now, thanks for the link. 8-)
"Hence the deranged quality of this fairy tale, in which the incidents are made to fit the legend, no matter how intractable the evidence of American history. It may be unfair to expose to critical scrutiny a work patched together from secondary sources, many used uncritically (Jennings, Williams), others ravaged for material torn out of context (Young, Pike). Any careful reader will perceive that Zinn is a stranger to evidence bearing upon the people about whom he purports to write. But only critics who know the sources will recognize the complex array of devices that pervert his pages... On the other hand, the book conveniently omits whatever does not fit its overriding thesis... It would be a mistake, however, to regard Zinn as merely Anti-American. Brendan Behan once observed that whoever hated America hated mankind, and hatred of mankind is the dominant tone of Zinn's book... He lavishes indiscriminate condemnation upon all the works of man that is, upon civilization, a word he usually encloses in quotation marks. "
Handlin, Oscar, "Arawaks", review of A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn, The American Scholar, Vol. 49, Issue 4 (Autumn 1980), pp. 546-550.
Oscar Handlin (September 29, 1915 in Brooklyn, New York September 20, 2011 in Cambridge, Massachusetts) was an American historian. As a professor of history at Harvard University for over 50 years, he directed 80 PhD dissertations and helped promote social and ethnic history. Handlin won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1952 with The Uprooted. Handlin's 1965 testimony before Congress was said to "have played an important role" in abolishing a discriminatory immigration quota system in the U.S.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_HandlinI have no desire to read an anti-American history book by socialist Howard Zinn, but I do thank you for the link to it as others may wish to read it. :D
Mike Pence is the governor of Indiana now, not Mit... (
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