Howard Zinn's American History

Howard Zinn looks at the way history has been written and finds a high degree of conformity, with most American history beginning with a celebration of the conquest of the New World by Columbus. The emphasis is on heroic discovery, and this also involves highlighting the important characters like Columbus and either ignoring or downplaying their faults. Zinn finds that Samuel Eliot Morison, for instance, is too good a historian to ignore the truth completely, but he gives the unpleasant details no more than a mention and then passes on to something more in keeping with the emphasis on the hero and on progress.

Zinn makes the valuable point that history is generally written from the standpoint of the collective memory of the state. The state in this case is the American state, and it has been built by the white European settlers who conquered the Native Americans and created the current society. In the broadest sense, history is written by the winner, and the winner aggrandizes his or her own accomplishments and describes issues in heroic terms, with the ancestors of the present state being the heroes who produced this state. Such a history is narrow in focus, resulting from the social order in which it is written and seeing the world in divided terms, with an "us-against-them" orientation. That is, there is the state that is "remembering" history, and there are the outsiders who are seen as enemies or at best allies of the most important state. This is an internalized

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vants or Indians, and they could thus be wooed into the Revolution. Differences between the propertied class and the working class were also embodied in the Constitution in spite of its egalitarian nature. Zinn cites Charles Beard to the effect that the Constitution was structured so the rich could either control government directly or control the law by which government operates (89). The development of gender roles for women in American society was affected by a variety of factors producing the patriarchal system that created a particular place for women, a place largely in the home, separated from much of society as a protection, and relegating women to certain specific roles and no others. Women were treated in certain ways like the black slaves. Both had a certain invisibility in society. Men were the explorers, the landholders, and the merchants, and women had a submerged status based on their biological differences, much like the slaves were submerged for their racial differences. Zinn sees much of the oppression of women as taking place on the private level, within the family in a society based on private property and competition. Zinn finds evidence that the monogamous nuclear family within a society valuing priva

Category: History - H