What exactly is it about Barton's and Zinn's versions of history that inspire such uncompromising, take-no-prisoners fervor?
And how do they manage to wield so much influence, given the widespread skepticism about their accuracy? Partisanship is the first answer that comes to mind. Barton and Zinn have served as eloquent and vocal supporters of right- and left-wing causes respectively, and both have reworked the past for transparently political purposes. Each has offered conclusions that resonate with his audiences' beliefs. Whatever the validity of their claims, in other words, many readers apparently think they should be true.
It's also likely that partisanship accounts for some proportion of votes against Barton and Zinn's credibility. But that's only part of the explanation. There's a more insidious mechanism that helps explain both the passionate support these authors inspire and the well-founded suspicion that they are fudging the record. Nearly everyone knows the basic plotline of that bestselling Dan Brown novel, which leads readers via a highly dubious series of clues to the previously undisclosed origin of Christianity while unraveling the malicious web of deception that concealed it for centuries.
Adapting this gripping storytelling approach, Barton and Zinn offer audiences the illusion that they have been hoodwinked by undisclosed authorities -- Ivy League academics, textbook authors, the New York Times , eighth-grade social studies teachers, parents. They give readers the intellectual self-assurance that accompanies expertise without the slog of unglamorous study required to attain it.
The message is that you, dear reader, know something that the vast majority of unenlightened chumps do not. Young historians of the Left defined their work in deliberate opposition to what they thought of as detached liberalism and superficially objective history. Instead of merely interpreting the past, these historians wanted to change the present. Zinn was not alone in his belief that historical narratives should provoke change, but he broke with other leftists of his generation including Eugene Genovese, a Marxist historian of slavery through his strong commitment to history as a way to move people forward.
For Zinn, this goal supplanted loyalty to any ideology or professional norm. Because the stakes were so high, he thought there was no time to waste.
The National Book Award finalist stood as an antidote to conventional school textbooks that left out social movement figures and events that cast the political establishment in a bad light. Heroic social movements are so egalitarian and idealistic that they never actually succeed; temporary victories are simply used to build tension before an inevitable defeat.
Consider how Zinn treats the Populist revolt of the late 19 th century. A democratic movement of black and white farmers, the Populists supported rural Americans against the emerging corporate-financial system, from Wall Street and London to small-town merchants in Texas and North Carolina.
There are many educators who enthusiastically use Zinn in the classroom. The Zinn Education Project , formed in , designs and disseminates curriculum that supports the work of Zinn; there are currently 33, teachers registered to download teaching resources from their website. Was there an undercurrent of reluctance; were there unpublicized signs of resistance?
Wineburg states:. He [Zinn] asserts that black Americans restricted their support to a single V: the victory over racism. The Navy lets us serve only as messmen. The Red Cross refuses our blood. Employers and labor unions shut us out. Zinn asks us to rethink majority behavior and patriotic sloganeering, to look both deeper and within the margins of community to find resistance, to reevaluate the efficacy of choices of the past in order to prepare us to make our own choices today and in the future.
Wineburg continues this critique by claiming that Zinn neglects precious information that would provide a more honest assessment of black American attitudes toward WWII. For example, Wineburg claims that Zinn omits the number of conscientious objectors to WWII; his argument is that if Zinn had included these numbers then the reader would see that there was a disproportionately low representation of African Americans among conscientious objectors, thus proving that African Americans were not as disenchanted with the war as Zinn would like us to believe.
There is no direct correlation between draft refusal and support for war; many draftees may not want to fight but nevertheless report for duty due to a variety of reasons. Wineburg does not inform the reader about the complex and expensive process of being certified as a conscientious objector.
He is conflating draft refusal with conscientious objection, which are not the same categories. Draft refusal could include a wide variety of antiwar activities. TOP: German bombers set the whole inner city of Rotterdam ablaze, killing of its inhabitants.
Images: Wikimedia Commons. There was a mass base of support for what became the heaviest bombardment of civilians ever undertaken in any war: the aerial attacks on German and Japanese cities.
Rather, he is addressing the hypocrisy implicit in most textbook treatments of WWII — that the Germans were monsters and Americans and Brits were the saviors; a just fight of good vs. Zinn asks us to think about civilian casualties, to think about the Unpeople,[29] the majority of dead in this war and every other one who are overwhelmingly civilians, the ones who are killed en masse and become mere statistics, recorded in books and shelved for future research.
Wineburg is either ignoring what Zinn actually wrote or is practicing sloppy scholarship. Such distinctions are figments of a militaristic imagination that then get recorded in state-sponsored history textbooks and regurgitated as facts, leaving citizens without the intellectual tools necessary to think critically about how the government frames current and future war rhetoric.
Is referencing something that happened one year after the beginning of a six-year war really a sign of flagrant scholarly abuse? Wineburg is right: Zinn left out any reference to Poland. But it does not matter, because Zinn is not arguing that the Nazis were peaceniks, nor is he attempting to write a complete history of WWII.
Wineburg, one of the world's top researchers in the field of history education, raises larger issues about how history should be taught. He says that Zinn's desire to cast a light on what he saw as historic injustice was a crusade built on secondary sources of questionable provenance, omission of exculpatory evidence, leading questions and shaky connections between evidence and conclusions.
Wineburg's critique focuses on the part of Zinn's narrative that covers the mid-thirties to the Cold War. That claim, Wineburg explains, is based on three anecdotal bits — a quote from a black journalist, a quote from a black student and a poem published in the black press — and excludes any evidence to the contrary. Indeed, says Wineburg, while Zinn pulled his anecdotes from a secondary source, Lawrence Wittner's book Rebels Against War , Zinn ignored evidence in that same book that undermines his claim.
Among the examples Zinn overlooks is Wittner's point that 24 percent of the registrants eligible for the war were African American, while the percentage of draft-evasion cases involving blacks was only 4. And a similar trend held with conscientious objectors. Similarly, Zinn roots his argument that the Japanese were prepared to surrender before the United States dropped the atomic bomb on a diplomatic cable from the Japanese to the Russians, supposedly signaling a willingness to capitulate.
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