greater rights to land and resources. The way history has been written, says Zinn, does not excuse what was actually done:
Even allowing for the imperfection of myths, it is enough to make us question, for that time and ours, the excuse of progress in the annihilation of races, and the telling of history from the standpoint of the conquerors and leaders of Western civilization (Zinn 22).
Zinn also addresses what happened in the era of slavery and finds that "Everything in the experience of the first white settlers acted as a pressure for the enslavement of blacks" (zinn 24). The whites had a need for labor just to survive, and there were economic forces pressuring the settlers to adapt through slavery. Zinn notes that the black societies of Africa were as advanced as European society in many ways but that the blacks d
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