The Politics of History

Howard Boone's Zinn

Description

This book presents a series of case studies and thought-provoking essays arguing for a radical approach to history and providing a revisionist interpretation of the historian's role. In a new introduction, the author responds to critics of his original work and comments further on the radicalization of history.

Sujets

• Histoire
• Historiography
• History

Informations

• Publié par: eBookIt.com
• Date de parution: 21 février 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781456609900
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Politics of History
SECOND EDITION With a New Introduction
HOWARD ZINN
© 1970, 1990 by Howard Zinn. Reprinted by arrangement with "The Howard Zinn Revocable Trust".
A Note on the Contents:
The essay “Knowledge as a Form of Power” has appeared in the Saturday Review , “History as Private Enterprise” appears in the Festschrift for Herbert Marcuse, The Critical Spirit , edited by Kurt H. Wolff and Barrington Moore, Jr., published by Beacon Press. “LaGuardia in the Jazz Age” is drawn from various material in my book LaGuardia in Congress , published by Cornell University Press and the American Historical Association, © 1958 by Howard Zinn, © 1959 by the American Historical Association, used here by permission of Cornell University Press. “The Limits of the New Deal” is the introductory essay in my book New Deal Thought , copyright © 1966 by the Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., published by Bobbs-Merrill. “Abolitionists and the Tactics of Agitation” appeared in the Columbia University Forum . The part of Psychoanalyzing the Dissenter: Two Cases” that deals with Lewis Feuer was a review in The New Republic . “Vietnam: The Moral Equation” and “The Prisoners: A Bit of Contemporary History” appeared as articles in The Nation . The Hiroshima part of “Hiroshima and Royan” is an adaptation of an article in the Columbia University Forum . “Freedom and Responsibility” is an adaptation of an essay that appeared on page two of The New York Times Book Review .
Titles in Print by Howard Zinn
 
ARTISTS IN TIMES OF WAR (Open Media/Seven Stories Press, 2003)
 
THE BOMB: Essays (Open Media/City Lights Publishers, 2010)
 
DISOBEDIENCE AND DEMOCRACY: Nine Fallacies of Law and Order (Vintage 1968, reprint edition South End Press, 2002)
 
EMMA (South End Press, 2002)
 
FAILURE TO QUIT: Reflections of an Optimistic Historian (Common Courage Press, 1993; reprint edition South End Press, 2002)
 
THE FUTURE OF HISTORY: Interviews with David Barsamian (Common Courage Press, 1999)
 
HOWARD ZINN ON DEMOCRATIC EDUCATION, with Donald Macedo, (Paradigm, 2008)
 
HOWARD ZINN ON HISTORY (Seven Stories Press, 2001)
 
HOWARD ZINN ON WAR (Seven Stories Press, 2001)
 
JUSTICE IN EVERYDAY LIFE: Eyewitness Accounts (Beacon Press, 1977; reprint edition South End Press, 2002)
 
A JUST WAR, with Moises Saman & Gino Strada (Charta Press, 2006)
 
LAGUARDIA IN CONGRESS, (Cornell UP, 1959; reprint 2010)
 
LA OTRA HISTORIA DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS (Seven Stories Press, 2001)
 
MARX IN SOHO: A Play on History (South End Press, 1999)
 
NEW DEAL THOUGHT, Ed. By Howard Zinn (Bobbs-Merrill, 1966, reprint edition Hackett Publishing Co., 2003)
 
ORIGINAL ZINN: CONVERSATIONS ON HISTORY AND POLITICS, with David Barsamian (HarperCollins/Perennial, 2006)
 
PASSIONATE DECLARATIONS: ESSAYS ON WAR AND JUSTICE, formerly DECLARATIONS OF INDEPENDENCE (HarperCollins/Perennial, 1990, 2003)
 
A PEOPLES HISTORY OF EMPIRE; written with Paul Buhle & illustrated by Mike Konopack,(Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2008, graphic edition)
 
A PEOPLES HISTORY OF THE U.S., updated edition 2003 (HarperCollins/Perennial)
 
A PEOPLES HISTORY OF THE U.S., Abridged Teaching Edition, (New Press, 1997)
 
A PEOPLES HISTORY OF THE U.S., the wall charts (New Press, 1995)
 
THE PEOPLE SPEAK: American Voices, Some Famous, Some Little Known (HarperCollins/Perennial, 2004)
 
THE POLITICS OF HISTORY, second edition (University of Illinois, 1990)
 
POSTWAR AMERICA: 1945-1971 (Bobbs-Merrill, 1973; reprint edition South End Press, 2002)
 
A POWER GOVERNMENTS CANNOT SUPPRESS (City Lights Publishers, 2007)
 
SNCC: THE NEW ABOLITIONISTS (Beacon Press, 1964; reprint edition South End Press, 2002)
 
THE SOUTHERN MYSTIQUE, (Knopf, 1964; reprint edition South End Press, 2002)
 
TERRORISM AND WAR, with Anthony Arnove (Open Media/Seven Stories Press, 2002)
 
THREE PLAYS: THE POLITICAL THEATER OF HOWARD ZINN – EMMA, MARX IN SOHO, DAUGHTERS OF VENUS (Beacon Press, 2010)
 
THREE STRIKES, with Dana Frank and Robin D.G. Kelley (Beacon Press, 2001)
 
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: A PEOPLES HISTOR, updated. 2003 (HarperCollins/Perennial)
 
UNCOMMON SENSE: FROM THE WRITINGS OF HOWARD ZINN (Paradigm Press, 2009)
 
UNRAVELING OF THE BUSH PRESIDENCY (Seven Stories Press, 2009)
 
VIETNAM: THE LOGIC OF WITHDRAWAL (Beacon Press; 1967; Reprint edition South End Press, 2002)
 
VOICES OF A PEOPLES HISTORY OF THE U.S., with Anthony Arnove (Seven Stories Press, 2004; second edition 2010)
 
YOU CAN’T BE NEUTRAL ON A MOVING TRAIN: A PERSONAL HISTORY OF OUR TIMES, second edition (Beacon Press, 2002)
 
A YOUNG PEOPLES HISTORY OF THE U.S.: Adapted by Rebecca Stefoff (Seven Stories Press, 2007)
 
THE ZINN READER: WRITINGS ON DISOBEDIENCE AND DEMOCRACY (Seven Stories Press 1997, second edition 2010)
 
To, for, with Roslyn
“Other historians relate facts to inform us of facts. You relate them to excite in our hearts an intense hatred of lying, ignorance, hypocrisy, superstition, tyranny; and the anger remains even after the memory of the facts has disappeared.”
 
—DIDEROT, WRITING OF VOLTAIRE
Contents
 
       Introduction to the Second Edition
 
       Introduction to the First Edition
 
PART ONE ∙ APPROACHES
 
   1   Knowledge as a Form of Power
 
   2   History as Private Enterprise
 
   3   What Is Radical History?
 
PART TWO ∙ ESSAYS IN AMERICAN HISTORY
 
       CLASS:
 
   4   Inequality
 
   5   The Ludlow Massacre
 
   6   LaGuardia in the Jazz Age
 
   7   The Limits of the New Deal
 
       RACE:
 
   8   Abolitionists and the Tactics of Agitation
 
   9   Psychoanalyzing the Dissenter: Two Cases
 
10   Liberalism and Racism
 
11   Albany, Georgia, and the New Frontier
 
       NATIONALISM:
 
12   Aggressive Liberalism
 
13   Vietnam: The Moral Equation
 
14   The Prisoners: A Bit of Contemporary History
 
15   Violence: The Double Standard
 
16   Hiroshima and Royan
 
PART THREE ∙ THEORY AND PRAXIS
 
17   Freedom and Responsibility
 
18   The Historians
 
19   The Philosophers
 
20   Philosophers, Historians, and Causation
 
       Notes
 
       Index
 
Acknowledgments
 
To the American Philosophical Society, the Louis Rabinowitz Foundation, and the Graduate School of Boston University for support during the various stages of writing this book. To Ernest Young, Marilyn Young, and Hilda Hein for critical readings of certain sections of the book. To all the Magraws for the peaceful beauty of the Cobbles, where I could finish my writing. To the librarians of Royan for their kindness. To Joan Agri, Marion Lee, and Judith Mandelbaum for invaluable assistance. To Jim Miller, for constant help and encouragement. To anonymous friends for anonymous spiritual support. To Myla and Jeff, for being themselves.
Introduction to the Second Edition
 
In Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass , we find this brief exchange:
“‘The horror of that moment,’ the King went on, ‘I shall never, never forget!’
“‘You will though,’ the Queen said, ‘if you don’t make a memorandum of it.’” 1
Yes, we will forget if we don’t make memoranda. But there is disagreement on exactly which moments in history we should make memoranda of, since we can’t recapture all of the past, and profound conflict on how we should treat those moments we decide to remember.
Two decades have passed since The Politics of History was written, but its concerns remain alive: What are the uses of history? Can historians, should they, be “objective,” “disinterested”? What is the point of teaching or writing history?
In this book I argue against “history as private enterprise” and for the idea that it is the social responsibility of the historian to do work that will be useful in solving the critical human problems of our time. That kind of statement arouses the ire of some professional historians. (Christopher Lasch, for instance, worried about the “drastic simplification of issues… strident partisanship.” 2 So it might be useful for me to illustrate what I mean, though from a vantage point of twenty years after the publication of this book, and to illuminate some historical issues.
The eighties were a Republican party decade dominated by the presidency of Ronald Reagan, whose affinity for the rich went even beyond the normal friendliness of our government toward corporate wealth. His administration seemed to feel no shame in proposing budgets that spent two to three hundred billion dollars for what was already the most swollen military machine in human history, while cutting allocations for health care, children’s lunches, food stamps for the poor, housing for the homeless, and weekly payments to the unemployed.
One of Reagan’s early budgets (for fiscal year 1983) was analyzed by New York Times reporter Robert Pear: “The President’s budget … proposed that military spending alone should rise by $33.6 billion. Under Mr. Reagan’s budget, the absolute level of Federal spending would be lower in 1983 than in 1982 for three major programs that help poor people: Aid to Families with Dependent Children, Medicaid, and food and nutrition assistance, including food stamps. The same is true for social services, job training, low-income energy assistance and compensatory education.” 3
The human consequences were devastating. In 1982 over three million children had been ruled ineligible for school lunch programs by new requirements. By the spring of 1983 two million children joined the ten million already classified as “poor.” By mid-1984 the Boston Globe was reporting: “Infant mortality, which had been declining steadily in Boston and other cities in the 1970s, shot up suddenly after the Reagan Administration reduced grants for health care for mothers and children.” 4 Not long after the Reagan budget cuts it was disclosed that in parts of Detroit one-third of the children were dying before their first birthday.
The rich, however, were doing bet