History Book Comparison
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In Howard Zinn’s The Twentieth Century, he tries to render a history of America that includes all the warts, boils and blotches. His account of history does not show the glossy surface of nobility, pride and heroism often expressed in traditional winners-only oriented history books. Zinn is not an advocate for the poor, downtrodden, losers throughout history. Rather, he tries to present a balanced view from the non-traditional perspective that gives the reader a chance to make up their own mind about American history, and perhaps even grow a little in the process by coming to understand it from more than one group’s or historian’s perspective. After all, the country en masse still remains in denial over accepting we are on stolen land and, the acceptance of that, and retribution made to the Native American, is the only real starting place where national healing could begin before spreading to other areas of injustice. Yet, Zinn’s chapters reveal similar themes regardless of the story he is telling. More than anything they express that governments and leaders normally try to dismiss or justify murder and killing in the name of progress as being the collective will or for the collective good of a “national” interest. In fact, the chapters illustrate that never has America been a “collective” mentality, but a nation of divided interests, goals and ideologies. The chapters also show the theme that those with the most power (
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lf-interests. Hitler was a great manipulator. However, to report his history without devoting space to his contemptible moral character would be to give the impression to young minds only reading that source that, ‘Hey, this Hitler wasn’t so bad of a guy after all,’-the very impression they would get to the point of worship where Christopher Columbus is concerned would they only read the Estrin work. This prevents them from developing the awareness that no man is all great or all rotten. People are diverse and have good and bad points in their behavior and characters. Only by telling the whole account of a person-both his good and bad points-can readers determine what good aspects of the individual they should adopt and which ones are undesirable as a path to true wholeness and humanity. Otherwise, they might choose to think that Columbus’ talents as a navigator exclude him from paying any consequences resulting from his actions as a greedy, ethnocentric tyrant (perhaps like our culture chose to allow a major NFL running back to pay no criminal consequences for murder because the focus was on his greatness to the point where his weaknesses were overlooked even in the face of a mountain of incriminating evidence and past beha
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Saudi Arabia, Constitutional Rights, Christopher Columbus, Native American, Henry Kissingers, Twentieth Century, Richard Nixon, President Clinton, Howard Zinn, History Simple, american history, wealthy elite, accounts american history, american history simple, history people, human rights, jack estrin, history simple, indigenous peoples, iran-contra affair, foreign policy concerned, leaders themselves country, single source, american people themselves, christopher columbus,
Approximate Word count = 2631
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)
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