Zinn, Howard. The Politics of History. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990. 1-368. (368)
Howard Zinn, a generationally acclaimed historian and political scientist, dissects, in his text The History of Politics, the intricacies of the juxtaposition of the fields, their source of power through academia, and the “business” of history through the compilation various pieces that highlight different eras in American history. Zinn, best known for his work with highlighting lesser known story lines through history, explains in his opening chapter, that “[t]he earth has for so long been so sharply tilted on behalf of the rich, the white-skinned, the male, the powerful, that it will take enormous effort to set it right”.268 This quotation, though more than obvious within the realm of social scientists and social activists, nearly twenty-five years later is still not widely understood among the masses. This assumption, perhaps, is what makes Zinn’s work so necessary and so continuously crucial. Breaking down the rhetoric of American history into three comprehensible sections – class, race, and nationalism – it is easy to see that, though the breakdown may seem simple, the issues surrounding the topics are dynamic, deeply rooted and fairly constant throughout the decades.
Though ultimately Zinn calls into question the various roles of he historian in detailing history, he also becomes more and more critical throughout the text in the effects of history upon the general public and their ideas of the “facts”. Pulling great influence from Nietzsche-ist ideals, Zinn details, “there are no facts, only interpretations”, and, perhaps, inside this sentiment, houses the entirety of Zinn’s text.269 As historians, he highlights, there is some sort of responsibility that we imagine towards the public, some sort of criteria of truth telling which is believed must be fulfilled. In reality, to a certain extent, this ideal can create a flawed society, as “[m]an, wounded by his history already, then tends to be transfixed by it”.270
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