Howard Zinn. (photo: The Progressive)
Howard Zinn. (photo: The Progressive)
Bill Introduced to Ban Howard Zinn Books From Arkansas Public Schools
By Max Brantley, Arkansas Times
04 March 17
he deadline for new legislation is fast approaching and it can't come too
soon. Just in from Sen. Rep. Kim Hendren: Legislation to prohibit any
publicly supported schools (you, too, charters) from including in
curriculum or course materials any books or other material authored by
Howard Zinn.
(Actually, anything Zinn wrote before 1959 is not covered.)
Zinn, who died in 2010, was a Ph.D. historian, social activist and more who
wrote the best-selling "A People's History of the United States." A version
for young readers came out in 2007.
His New York Times obituary probably gives you a taste of the danger Kim
Hendren sees in Howard Zinn:
Proudly, unabashedly radical, with a mop of white hair and bushy eyebrows
and an impish smile, Mr. Zinn, who retired from the history faculty at
Boston University two decades ago, delighted in debating ideological foes,
not the least his own college president, and in lancing what he considered
platitudes, not the least that American history was a heroic march toward
democracy.
Almost an oddity at first, with a printing of just 4,000 in 1980, "A
People's History of the United States" has sold nearly two million copies.
To describe it as a revisionist account is to risk understatement. A
conventional historical account held no allure; he concentrated on what he
saw as the genocidal depredations of Christopher Columbus, the blood lust of
Theodore Roosevelt and the racial failings of Abraham Lincoln. He also
shined an insistent light on the revolutionary struggles of impoverished
farmers, feminists, laborers and resisters of slavery and war.
Such stories are more often recounted in textbooks today; they were not at
the time.
"Our nation had gone through an awful lot - the Vietnam War, civil rights,
Watergate - yet the textbooks offered the same fundamental nationalist
glorification of country," Mr. Zinn recalled in a recent interview with The
New York Times. "I got the sense that people were hungry for a different,
more honest take."
Even some on the liberal side thought Zinn's revisionism went too far.
That criticism barely raised a hair on Mr. Zinn's neck. "It's not an
unbiased account; so what?" he said in the Times interview. "If you look at
history from the perspective of the slaughtered and mutilated, it's a
different story."
He inspired a movie, documentaries and song. Dangerous stuff for the
Arkansas student in one legislator's
