Overview | What was Howard Zinn’s approach to history, and what values are inherent in it? What issues does his work raise about the purpose and significance of studying history? What are the benefits and drawbacks of his method? In this lesson, students examine Zinn’s work by comparing his writing to a typical American history textbook. They then write a reflection and/or select a document from American history to perform.
Materials | Student journals, projection equipment or handouts, copies of relevant portions of “A People’s History of the United States” and a history textbook
Warm-up | Provide the following two questions for students to respond to in their journals: In writing history, what do you think should be a historian’s goal(s)? Why do you think people should study history?
When students are finished writing, invite them to share their ideas and record them on the board.
Next, hand out, project and/or read aloud the following quotation from Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States”:
I don’t want to invent victories for people’s movements. But to think that history-writing must aim simply to recapitulate the failures that dominate the past is to make historians collaborators in an endless cycle of defeat. If history is to be creative, to anticipate a possible future without denying the past, it should, I believe, emphasize new possibilities by disclosing those hidden episodes of the past, when, even if in brief flashes, people showed their ability to resist, to join together, occasionally to win. I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the past’s fugitive moments of compassion rather than in its solid centuries of warfare. That, being as blunt as I can, is my approach to the history of the United States. The reader may as well know the before going on.
Ask: How would you paraphrase this historian’s approach to U.S. history? What does he seem to value and why? What does he seem to think the purpose and function of history is? How does this approach seem similar to and different from how you have studied history in school? What are the connections between what you wrote earlier in your journals and these ideas?
Tell students the source of the quotation and that they will take a closer look at the work and philosophy of this historian, Howard Zinn, and the controversy over his approach.
Related | In the obituary “Howard Zinn, Historian, Is Dead at 87,” Michael Powell notes that Zinn’s book “A People’s History of the United States was a “best-seller that inspired a generation of high school and college students to rethink American history”:
Almost an oddity at first, with a printing of just 4,000 in 1980, “A People’s History of the United States” has sold nearly two million copies. To describe it as a revisionist account is to risk understatement. A conventional historical account held no allure; he concentrated on what he saw as the genocidal depredations of Christopher Columbus, the blood lust of Theodore Roosevelt and the racial failings of Abraham Lincoln. He also shined an insistent light on the revolutionary struggles of impoverished farmers, feminists, laborers and resisters of slavery and war.
Such stories are more often recounted in textbooks today; they were not at the time.
Questions | For discussion and reading comprehension:
- What does it mean that Howard Zinn “delighted … in lancing what he considered platitudes, not the least that American history was a heroic march toward democracy”?
- Why did the book meet with some skepticism and opposition? How did Zinn respond to critics?
- How has Zinn and his work penetrated popular culture? Why do you think that is?
- How do you think Zinn’s life might have contributed to his world view and historical approach and vice-versa? Why?
- What “personal philosophy” do you think is expressed in the title of Zinn’s memoir, “You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train”?
- How do you think the way you study history is different from how it was taught to your parents and grandparents?
