From xxxxxx <[email protected]>
Subject Will Trump's Last Fight be Against Howard Zinn?
Date November 14, 2020 4:00 AM
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[Trump’s charge that Zinn makes students feel “ashamed” of
their history is false. Zinn offers dramatic accounts of Americans
resisting oppression, promoting not shame but pride in this ongoing
and unfinished struggle for social justice.] [[link removed]]

WILL TRUMP'S LAST FIGHT BE AGAINST HOWARD ZINN?  
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Robert Cohen
November 8, 2020
History News Network [[link removed]]

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_ Trump’s charge that Zinn makes students feel “ashamed” of
their history is false. Zinn offers dramatic accounts of Americans
resisting oppression, promoting not shame but pride in this ongoing
and unfinished struggle for social justice. _

,

 

President Trump’s speech at his recent White House Conference on
American History slandered both history teachers and historians whose
writings foregrounded the role of racial and class conflict in
American history. Without evidence, he accused teachers of promoting a
“twisted web of lies in our schools,” indoctrinating their
students in a version of our nation’s history that led them to hate
America. This was, he  claimed “a form of child abuse in the
truest sense of those words.”   Referring to the mostly
non-violent nationwide Black Lives Matter protests against racist
police violence as “left-wing mobs” fomenting  “violence and
anarchy,” Trump again without evidence charged that this “left
wing rioting and mayhem are the direct result of decades of left wing
indoctrination in our schools.” The first source of this alleged
indoctrination named by  Trump was the late Howard Zinn, author of
the best-selling _A __People’s History of the United
States_ (1980), whom he depicts not as a historian but as a
propagandist: “ Our children are instructed from propaganda tracts,
like those of Howard Zinn, that try to make students ashamed of their
own history.”

This presidential tirade against history teachers and Howard Zinn
demonstrates Trump’s ignorance of both. American history teachers
in our nation’s schools do not indoctrinate their students; they
educate them via state mandated curricula and textbooks that are at
least as respectful of the Founders of our republic as any mainstream
politician, and  promote democratic citizenship not mob violence.
Howard Zinn’s _People’s History of the United States_ is a work
of history not propaganda.  Zinn’s book  does stress the role of
racial and class conflict and militarism in the American past, and so
is considered too radical to be adopted as an official textbook by
most school districts. 

Trump gets the reality of school history education completely
backwards. Far from being radical or so provocative as to seed leftist
mob violence, most  history instruction is actually too
conservative, so lacking in controversy that it too often leaves
students bored. This is why innovative teachers bring Zinn’s work
into schools,  aiming not to indoctrinate but to engage students in
authentic historical thought via  debates contrasting select
chapters from Zinn’s iconoclastic history with their official,
conventional US  history textbooks.  There are in Howard Zinn’s
papers at NYU  hundreds of letters from high school students and
teachers  attesting that history came to life in their classrooms
when they used the competing interpretations offered by Zinn and their
textbooks to argue about Columbus’ bravery as an explorer vs. the
brutality of his conquests, Andrew Jackson’s  democratic politics
vs. his responsibility for the Trail of Tears, whether the Mexican
American war was an unjust US war of aggression, whether the atomic
bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was necessary to end World War II,
and other important, thought provoking debates about American
history.   

Trump’s charge that Zinn makes students feel “ashamed” of their
history is false.  Zinn had no interest in fostering shame, but
rather wrote his _People’s History _to promote critical thinking,
especially about class, racial, and gender inequality and war-making
in America.  Zinn sought to arouse in his readers a quality Trump is
famed for lacking, _empathy_, for the oppressed. Or as Zinn put it,
“in a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is
the job of thinking people, as Albert Camus suggested, not to be on
the side of the executioners.”  Zinn so admired people’s protest
movements in their struggles for a more just and democratic America
that his _People’s History_ valorized those movements. In fact,
the book offered dramatic accounts of Americans resisting oppression,
a narrative that was at times inspiring, promoting not shame but pride
in this ongoing and unfinished struggle for social justice. 

It is absurd to think that the president read Zinn’s 688
page _People’s History_ before knocking it_ _or that he would do
so now to see how wrong he is about Zinn. But he could get to know
Zinn better without reading a thing. 

Zinn’s _People’s History_ inspired theater events and then a
movie, _The People Speak_, in which famed actors such as Danny
Glover, Marissa Tomei, Viggo Mortensen and many others read the words
of great American dissenters, from Frederick Douglass to Emma Goldman,
to Martin Luther King, Jr. This movie, when aired on the History
Channel, attracted some nine million viewers, leaving
reviewers impressed with the eloquence of America’s radical social
activists. Those speeches, and the protest music sung by Bob Dylan,
Bruce Springsteen, Randy Newman, and John Legend fostered greater
understanding of the role of dissent in the American past. Had this
movie been screened at the White House Conference on American History,
Trump’s talk about Zinn making students feel ashamed of their
history would have been refuted right before his eyes.

Like Howard Zinn, the best history teachers recognize that if students
are to be prepared for democratic citizenship, they must learn to
think critically about the world, and confront the reality that, as
James Baldwin put it, “American history is longer, larger, more
various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has
ever said about it.”  Serious study of our nation’s past involves
understanding not only America’s inspiring democratic ideals but its
failures to live up to them, and  studying the historical struggles
on behalf of those  ideals. This kind of a critical reckoning with
historical reality is far more accurate, humane, and truer to our
democratic faith than the flag waving, propagandistic version of the
American past touted at the White House Conference on American
history. 

_Robert Cohen is a professor of social studies education and history
at NYU, author of Howard Zinn’s Southern Diary: Civil Rights,
Sit-Ins, and Black Women’s Student Activism,  and coauthor with
Sonia Murrow of  Rethinking America’s Past: Howard Zinn’s
People's History of the United States in the Classroom and Beyond (in
press). _

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