I see that the pseudoscholarly pretend-historian polemicist Howard Zinn has passed away. Ron Radosh sums up the man’s sad legacy: a funhouse mirror look at America as nothing but a racist, sexist, oppressive, imperialist monster. Sadly, there are people who still take his work seriously, although one suspects that within another generation or two he’ll be as curious and obscure a figure as Lyndon LaRouche or Pat Buchanan: once interesting to a few, but utterly irrelevant to the future.
Defending the liberal tradition in history, science, and philosophy.
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I think that people would argue that the mainstream history we’re taught in school is also a funhouse mirror. I think unless you can marry all the different viewpoints you can’t get an accurate picture of what was going on.
Mainstream historians have been looking at history from multiple angles and perspectives and class/racial/sexual outlooks for decades now; the fact is that Zinn’s politics are about as zany as anything out of the LaRouchies, the Buchananites, the John Birchers, the Pat Robertsons, and so on. Looking at ignored perspectives makes sense; acknowledging things perviously unacknowledged makes sense; rethinking and reanalyzing makes sense. Looking through only one distorted looking glass doesn’t. I don’t know how to explain that to fans of the likes of Zinn, but there you have it.
Is his death even newsworthy?
I read an article he wrote around 1981-82, and pretty much wrote him off as a nut (and I was 16 then).
I gave him another read or two every so often, but my opinion never changed.
It’s hard for me to imagine that some people took him seriously.
Oh no, his book “A People’s History of the United States” is still read in High School and college classes all over the country. Although I suspect that will change over time, his influence is there.
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