Are Americans Who We Say We Are?

Howard Zinn, The 5 Immortals, & the 6th Player, Offer Insight into Our Ideals.

Photo by Matthias Cooper on Unsplash.

I have been looking into the background of historian and political scientist, Howard Zinn, learning that many say he was not always historically honest, or thorough in his citations and sources. That his interpretations were slanted towards socialism, and consistently shaming the United States for its faults and failures. In one instance he supposedly explains how during WWII many Black Americans were against going to war, using only a few secondary sources like personal letters, and such, as evidence. From my non-exhaustive Google searches, I can find no references to that claim of an anti-war sentiment by a large portion of Black Americans. However, at the same time there is a historical tangent in a somewhat similar direction, about our unconscionable problem of segregation and racism, and doubly reprehensible because WWII was fought to protect freedom and liberty — and the postwar aftermath of failures in the U.S. due to that glaring and ongoing hypocrisy.

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Another supposed problem is the widespread use of Zinn’s American history book in schools throughout the nation. Conservatives seem to be the biggest critics of his take on U.S. history. Bluntly, I am not going to do the exhaustive research others have done on his historical and political works. Neither will I provide a sentence by sentence critique of his most [in]famous publication, A People’s History of the United States. Instead let us say in that book Zinn has ten serious discrepancies, and 50 shavings of the truth, or half that, or twice that. Every historian who has written anywhere a tome of similar length, 729 pages, or that covers over two centuries, will have critics who see many mistakes or misinterpretations. None of this exonerates Zinn, or should allow his book to be bandied about in our schools if these inaccurate parts are not brought up, and discussed, unless of course, his supposed history-fouling is wholly refutable.

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His socialism, and perspective on the abuse the American system has so far dispensed against people of color, and people with socialistic views, are two ways Zinn hates America, according to the conservative pundit class. Why is advocating for socialism a bad, anti-American thing? Why is it…