A People's History of the United States: Teaching Edition

Howard Boone's Zinn

Description

The Abridged Teaching Edition of A People's History of the United States has made Howard Zinn's original text available specifically for classroom use. With exercises and teaching materials to accompany each chapter, this edition spans American Beginnings, Reconstruction, the Civil War and through to the present, with new chapters on the Clinton Presidency, the 2000 elections, and the "War on Terrorism."

Sujets

• Histoire
• United States
• History

Informations

• Publié par: eBookIt.com
• Date de parution: 21 février 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781456610814
• Langue: English

Extrait

A PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
Teaching Edition
 
Revised and Updated
HOWARD ZINN
 
Teaching materials by
 
Kathy Emery and Ellen Reeves
Copyright © 1980, 1995, 1997, 2003 by Howard Zinn. Teaching materials © 1997 by Katherine Emery, and 2003 by Ellen Reeves.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form, without written permission from the publisher.
To Noah and his generation
Rise like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number!
Shake your chains to earth, like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you—
Ye are many, they are few!
            — Percy Bysshe Shelley
 
Why do you stand
            they were asked, and
                        Why do you walk?
Because of the children, they said, and
      because of the heart, and
      because of the bread.
            — Daniel Berrigan
Contents
 
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Columbus, the Indians, and Human Progress
2. Drawing the Color Line
3. Persons of Mean and Vile Condition
4. Tyranny Is Tyranny
5. A Kind of Revolution
6. The Intimately Oppressed
7. As Long as Grass Grows or Water Runs
8. We Take Nothing by Conquest, Thank God
9. Slavery Without Submission, Emancipation Without Freedom
10. The Other Civil War
11. Robber Barons and Rebels
12. The Empire and the People
13. The Socialist Challenge
14. War Is the Health of the State
15. Self-help in Hard Times
16. A People’s War?
17. “Or Does It Explode?”
18. The Impossible Victory: Vietnam
19. Surprises
20. The Seventies: Under Control?
21. Carter-Reagan-Bush: The Bipartisan Consensus
22. The Unreported Resistance
23. The Coming Revolt of the Guards
24. The Clinton Presidency
25. The 2000 Election and the “War on Terrorism”
Afterword
Appendices
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
To André Schiffrin and Ellen Reeves of the New Press, for imagining and undertaking this special edition.
To Kathy Emery, for her heroic work in enriching the book for high school students.
To my two original editors, for their incalculable help: Cynthia Merman of Harper & Row, and Roslyn Zinn.
To Rick Balkin, my literary agent, for provoking me to do the original “People’s History.”
To Hugh Van Dusen of HarperCollins, for wonderful help and support throughout the history of this book.
To Akwesasne Notes , Mohawk Nation, for the passage from Ila Abernathy’s poem.
To Dodd, Mead, & Company, for the passage from “We Wear the Mask,” from The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar .
To Harper & Row, for “Incident,” from On These I Stand by Countee Cullen. Copyright 1925 by Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc.; renewed 1953 by Ida M. Cullen.
To Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., for the passage from “I, Too,” from Selected Poems of Langston Hughes .
To The New Trail , 1953 yearbook of the Phoenix Indian School, Phoenix, Arizona, for the poem “It Is Not!”
To Random House, Inc., for the passage from Langston Hughes’s “Lenox Avenue Mural,” from The Panther and the Lash: Poems of Our Time .
To Esta Seaton, for her poem “Her Life,” which first appeared in The Ethnic American Woman by Edith Blicksilver, Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company, 1978.
To Warner Bros., for the excerpt from “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” Lyrics by Jay Gorney, music by E. Y. Harburg. © 1932 Warner Bros. Inc. Copyright Renewed. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
Introduction
 
Kathy Emery
 
In every year of my twenty years of teaching, I have been responsible for teaching an American history survey course. This meant having to deal with the issue of boring textbooks. When I chose to become a teacher, I promised myself that, if nothing else, I would not bore my students. So I needed to discover a way in which my students could enjoy learning. To accomplish this task, I began to expose my students to several points of view and then teach them the skills to pick and choose among the different views. I wanted them to develop opinions about history that they cared about. For me, this involved teaching a process of moral evaluation as well as rational analysis and explication of data. At first, I used Blum’s The National Experience for its detail. 1 But it was still only one point of view and did not allow for the range of debate I was looking for. So I began assigning a different textbook to each student. This was an improvement over using only one interpretation of the past, since the standard textbooks of American history differ somewhat in their interpretations of events and selection of data. 2
But after several years of experimentation with different textbooks, I still was not satisfied with the results. The range of difference was still too small to provoke the desired degree of controversy and thus interest in the material. I tried to expand the interpretive continuum with Grob and Billias’s Interpretations of American History? 3 But I had to spend too much time in the classroom dissecting each article so the students could understand the arguments and data. I was never able to make it to the twentieth century by the end of the school year. Though I kept experimenting with a variety of secondary sources as supplements to the textbook, always looking for the perfect fit, it was only when I discovered Howard Zinn’s A Peoples History of the United States that I found the solution to the problem I had posed to myself so many years earlier.
Zinn provides what no other textbook does: the human impact, the human cost of decisions made by politicians and businessmen. With other texts, I had been asking my students to evaluate these decisions as a way to develop critical thinking. But such an exercise was only partially successful—students could not challenge generalizations made in standard texts without a significant range of data at their disposal, and they needed this full range if they were to think for themselves, to have opinions that they cared about. With the data that Zinn provides, however, the range of interpretations is wide enough for students to really have a choice in what they believe and, then, in what they know.
How to Read This Book
 
Every teacher needs to develop his or her own style and method. But no style or method can be created in a vacuum. I have provided methodological suggestions from which you may pick and choose. At the end of each chapter there are “study guide” questions, and at the end of the book there are four appendices. Appendix A includes suggestions for teaching a group paragraph, a suggested system of assessment (i.e. giving grades), a commentary on the uses and abuses of extra credit, the role of geography in a history class, useful approaches to using the debate format in teaching content and critical thinking, and techniques for class discussion. Appendix B provides a specific example of how standard American history textbooks differ. Appendix C provides a highly selective and annotated list of additional resources. Zinn allows the teacher to help students raise questions that require further research. Appendix D is an idiosyncratic but intriguing introduction to Bloom’s taxonomy.
The questions at the end of each chapter are of several kinds—some simply ask the reader to extract detail, 4 while others demand that students do more than accumulate knowledge and gain comprehension. They ask students to analyze the text, select relevant data, synthesize that data into an answer, and then evaluate the answer. The higher order questions provoke the most interesting discussions since they demand that students begin to attach meaning to the data and detail. 5
In the years I have been using history to teach critical thinking, I have discovered that moving back and forth between the concrete and the abstract (inherent in both deductive and inductive thinking) is a skill that needs to be explicitly taught. A few students are “naturals,” but most need to be shown how it is done and they need a great deal of practice doing it. Constantly asking students to define the terms 6 of their questions and statements is a crucial first step in developing this kind of thinking. Many of the questions after each chapter therefore ask the reader to define the terms Zinn uses or certain terms the historical actors used. Questions requiring analysis and synthesis require that the terms of the question be fully understood.
To illustrate this point let me examine one of the questions from the chapter on Reconstruction. I ask “After the Civil War, was the South reduced to colonial status?” Before a student even begins to look for an answer to this question, several of the terms need to be understood in a very concrete way, in particular the word “colonial.” Depending on how one defines “colonial,” the answer could be yes or it could be no. If the teacher and student share the same definition of “colonial” then the teacher is more likely to approve of the student’s answer. To explicitly define the essential terms of a question avoids misunderstanding and ensures a greater likelihood of success by the student.
A teacher might use the above question for discussion in class, as a topic for a group paragraph, or as written homework. Regardless of the actual form of an assignment, the process of completing it needs to be taught (repeatedly and consistently throughout the year). Break the question down into its discrete terms. For example, “the South”—identify the states to which the question refers; “after the Civil War”—identify the time period during which the South’s “status” is being assessed. Then tackle the thornier problem of defining “colonial.” For this, a dictionary can be useful. But use historical precedents in tandem with the dictionary. The American states used to be English colonies. What was their status in relation to England? (A politically dependent territory used as a source of raw materials and a market for manufactured goods?). Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary provides several choices of definitio