OK, I’ve said here a bunch of times that I’m not a professional historian. But the thing is, I may not have the degrees but I haven’t had my brain turned to mush by indoctrination either. If you want to denigrate me that’s fine but you’d best do it with facts or you’ll mere confirming to all and sundry that you are a fool.
“The Revolution did not just eliminate monarchy and create republics; it actually reconstituted what Americans meant by public or state power and brought about an entirely new kind of popular politics and a new kind of democratic officeholder. . . . Most important, it made the interests and prosperity of ordinary people — their pursuit of happiness — the goal of society and government. The Revolution did not merely create a political and legal environment conducive to economic expansion; it also released powerful popular entrepreneurial and commercial energies that few realized existed and transformed the economic landscape of the country. In short, the Revolution was the most radical and most far-reaching event in American history.”
Gordon Wood in the introduction to The Radicalism of the American Revolution
That’s a clear statement, and it states what to anybody has read American History is plainly visible. It doesn’t take any Doctorate to figure it out
All you have to do is look at American history, especially economic history. In less than 150 years, the United States went from a strip of subsistence farms along the eastern seaboard (and yes a few slave worked plantations) to a colossus whose output was many multiples of the world’s output when it was formed. In the course of that trajectory, it, in cooperation with Great Britain, outlawed first the slave trade and then chattel slavery itself in the western world, even though that same slavery had been the mainstay of the economy at the Revolution.
By the beginning of the twentieth century it was cheaper to feed a man anywhere in the world with American grain than it was to grow it locally.
And think about this. In the 1840s as America was just figuring out how to do this industrialization thing, from scratch, millions of Irish starved to death in Ireland, when they managed to get to the United States, they were discriminated against horribly but they made enough to eat. And eventually the discrimination more or less ended as well.
America is nothing less than the story of what happens when the common man manages to get out from under the thumbs of the aristocracy.
In reference to what we’ve been talking about here, one of those historians who can’t find the wall with their nose, Howard Zinn said this:
“Around 1776, certain important people in the English colonies made a discovery that would prove enormously useful for the next two hundred years. They found that by creating a nation, a symbol, a legal unity called the United States, they could take over land, profits, and political power from the favorites of the British Empire. In the process, they could hold back a number of potential rebellions and create a consensus of popular support for the rule of a new, privileged leadership.”
Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States
Both quotes from Practically Historical; Let the Readers Decide
Sounds like something for academia to worry about doesn’t it? It’s not and here why, we all shape our beliefs of what to do on what we believe. If we believe the claptrap that Zinn puts out, evident lies that it is, our policies will be built on false foundations. And I would add that many, many schools use Zinn’s book as a history text.
Paul Mirengoff wrote in The Power Line Blog recently
From time to time, we have noted President Obama’s lack of knowledge about American history. The most recent manifestation — his claim that Ho Chi Minh was inspired by America’s Founding Fathers — suggests that Obama’s ignorance is to some extent willful.
It is, in any event, not accidental. From Stanley Kurtz, we learn that Obama is a fan of the leftist historian Howard Zinn. Stanley cites this passage from James T. Kloppenberg’s book Reading Obama:
Obama filled out his education in American history as well as politics while he was working in Chicago. Mike Kruglik had been a doctoral candidate in American history at Northwestern before he became an organizer, and when he and Obama talked, they discussed the reasons why a nation supposedly dedicated to freedom and equality provided so little of either.
They talked about the differences between the populists and the progressives and the reasons why ordinary people never seemed to get anywhere in modern America. Kruglik recalls that Obama had a special interest in the work of the radical historian Howard Zinn.
(Emphasis added)John and Steve commented on Howard Zinn here. Steve nailed it when he wrote:
The main defect of Zinn is that he takes the deviations from the perfect realization of America’s founding principles to be the whole of America, and hence argues that America is therefore wholly fraudulent, missing the paradox that it was precisely America’s founding principles (especially individual equality) that made possible the liberal reform tradition. Once you ponder this, you recognize that Zinn, like his intellectual cousin Noam Chomsky, is simply a hater.
Continue reading The Obama-Zinn Connection
Many of you know that I’m a bit proud of being born and raised in Indiana, and more than a little proud of being one of those Purdue Boilermakers, this might have something to do with why.
It seems that the ghost of Howard Zinn needs to be exorcised yet again. The most recent siting of the late historian’s visage came earlier this month at Indiana’s Purdue University. Zinn’s magnum opus, “A People’s History of the United States,” was discussed in some emails written by Indiana’s former governor, Mitch Daniels, now president of Purdue, which recently came to light thanks to the state’s freedom of information act.
“A truly execrable, anti-factual piece of disinformation that misstates American history on every page” is what Daniels said of the book in a 2010 email to one of his staffers. “Can someone assure me that it is not in use anywhere in Indiana? If it is, how do we get rid of it before any more young people are force-fed a totally false version of our history?”
Daniels is being pilloried for this by some on the left and in the media as an opponent of academic freedom. “Mitch Daniels looked to censor opponents” was the headline of an Associated Press story on July 16. “Astonishing and shocking,” said Cary Nelson, a professor of English at the University of Illinois, as quoted by the AP.
Not really.
Zinn, a longtime professor at Boston University who passed away in 2010 at the age of 87, was one of the more visible lights of a school of New Left historians that emerged in the 1960s. “A People’s History of the United States,” the first edition of which appeared in 1980, sold in the millions and is now assigned in growing number of high school and college classes.
That itself is a scandal. Zinn certainly had his talents as a writer, but his strengths in that department are inversely proportionate to his fidelity to historical truth.
Emphasis mine.
Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/honest-history-howard-zinn-article-1.1410091#ixzz2aUHqfcDz
And so we see that history really does matter because that is what we use to inform our decisions about the future.
