Yeah, the only Zinn I’d heard of up until now is the “Invader” one.
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Ah well, as Rilke wrote, obviously forecasting Trump, mit mir verlierst du deinen Zinn (almost)
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I’ve been meaning to check this out at my local library. After reading this I decided to just buy a copy of “People’s History…”
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This is the first I’ve heard of him or his works. Off to Amazon…
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Really?
Sad but not surprising
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The only good professor is an evil liberal professor.
That includes all fields, even aerospace engineering.
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Isn’t Arkansas one of the “teach the controversy” states about "Evil-lution? You’d think they’d enjoy doing that for other things.
I’ll admit to not having read the book in question as I’ve gained the impression it is about five feet to the left of Karl Marx but I do not, have not and never will support book banning or making someone almost a “non-person” simply because they espouse or write from a point of view I do not like.
(I seem to be one of the last genuine conservatives (the kind that once existed before the Republicans went batsh*t crazy) left in the country which makes me a middle of the road liberal these days without my opinions actually changing much…)
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Nope, not the only one.
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It is a much, much better read than Marx 
Give it a read some time, it goes pretty quick, and you don’t have to agree with Zinn.
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There’s also a somewhat condensed version of Zinn’s history of the US for younger readers, The Young People’s History of the United States. It’s available in two hardcover volumes or in paper or hardcover in one volume.
And, in the same series, there’s a young readers version of Ronald Takaki’s History of Multicultural America for Young People, A Different Mirror:
While these books are not great core reading books for middle school students, they are excellent companion volumes to various standard texts. Used alongside standard texts and with, say, Voices of a People’s History of the United States used for primary sources, they give kids a richer understanding of American history and introduce them to important source documents and ideas that, at seems to me, everyone in the US should be exposed to. You don’t have to be a hippie Marxist to understand that, say, the history of labor in the US is an important part of US history.
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This obviously doesn’t make the fact that they are trying any better; but I have to wonder why these fine specimens have chosen approximately the most legally vulnerable strategy one can possibly imagine.
There are a great many ways to give a curriculum a nudge, or a nice hard shove, without actually banning anything or taking an overt ideological position(obviously, an implied ideological position is unavoidable, since it’s the whole point of giving the curriculum a shove). Fiddling with the numbingly tedious and arcane details of textbook purchasing gives you lots of room to choose what flavor of homeogenized learning content gets extruded into the final product; if people still persist in wandering off into primary sources too often, you can add additional material to curriculum standards(since there is more than enough ‘American History’ to consume an entire academic career, you aren’t going to run out of options that are both more pleasing that what you are trying to crowd out and pretty much beyond dispute as adequate historical scholarship any time soon); and if that doesn’t work you can always carry the banner of “Local educational freedom” or “parents’ choice” or something and work to make it easier for any parent, local politician, school admin, etc. who thinks that a book looked at them funny to hound the teacher about it. You won’t get 100% effectiveness; but you’ll get most of the results without any overt censorship; which leaves any legal challenge grovelling around in the ugly statistical mire of attempting to prove that you intended the resulting mess; rather than it merely being an incidental and content-neutral byproduct.
Are they just that stupid? Is this purely for pose value? I’m deeply unsurprised that they would be gunning for Zinn; I’m just not sure why they’d use a strategy that could hardly have been more mustache-twirlingly unconstitutional had it been written to spec by central casting.
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I hope the university charged $1,000,000,000 a page for their trouble, like the FBI does.
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Does anyone have UGA library credentials? Her dissertation on-campus only and I’d be curious to know if she did better work before she started pandering to the public; or whether the smarm runs deep with this one.
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I would just like to know which ivy league university she teaches at. Liberty is in Virginia, so I guess it isn’t that.
She’s from Slovenia and escaped communism, so she sees it everywhere in the US, I guess. I knew a Russian guy at work who had the same viewpoint; communism was terrible, so far right wing conservatism is OK. I once said “our biggest problem is global warming.” He replied, “no, it’s the destruction of our culture.” I wondered if he meant Russian or American culture, but sighed and didn’t ask.
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The fact that she was an adjunct at the time pushes the situation into ‘utterly baffling’.
Perhaps if you have no actual contact with ‘liberal academia’ you might imagine that getting the good stuff requires your full keyboard warrior skills; but someone who has enough experience, past and ongoing, to be teaching in it? How could they possibly not know that the primary obstacle to obtaining most course documents is the market dominance of Blackboard, the learning management system from the bowels of the 9th circle, not any actual attempts at secrecy.
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Obligatory xkcd:
Title: Saying ‘what kind of an idiot doesn’t know about the Yellowstone supervolcano’ is so much more boring than telling someone about the Yellowstone supervolcano for the first time.
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I notice it’s also one of her reports - The “Bad History” of Howard Zinn and the Brainwashing of America
Which is in the dustbin of dead links now.
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Fuckwits will be fuckwits.
And here’s some bona fide American exceptionalism - the US makes some of the best fuckwits in the world!
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None that I can find online. Though I haven’t been teaching for a few semesters.
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Her report The “Bad History” of Howard Zinn and the Brainwashing of America makes strange reading. Although she claims:
a critique of the errors of Zinn’s History would fill several volumes
when she does start quoting his text she often leaves them devoid of any academic criticism as if to imply the flaws in his statements and analysis are self evident.
And his admission is stiking in it’s honesty and eloquence:
[I wanted to write] a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of peoples movements of resistance. That makes this a broad account, one that leans in a certain direction. I’m not troubled by that because the mountain of history leans in a certain direction, so tremblingly respectful of states and statesmen and so disrespectfully, by inattention, to peoples movements that we need some counterforce to avoid being crushed into submission.
Despite Zinn’s frankness, Mary Grabar’s report references David Horowitz who somehow sees an up-front declaration of personal bias as some kind of ruse:
Zinn’s statement, “’Objectivity is impossible,’” is a typical ploy of the postmodern academic to deflect criticism.
As to the…
…according Mary Grabar
a more accurate title would have been Hollywood Stars Speak for the Little People (With a Lot of Feeling).
adding that Zinn’s
approach is emotional—and more accurately, emotionally exploitative.
I’m amazed how often journalism and academia in general ignore what Reinhold Niebuhr so succinctly pointed out:
Reason, to be accurate, must be supplemented by emotion.
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