Refuting Zinn
Posted: December 14th, 2012 | Author: Michael Goldstein | | 4 Comments »
Provocative essay in American Educator, which is the American Federation of Teachers’ quarterly.
Undue Certainty
Where Howard Zinn’s A People’s History Falls Short
By Sam WineburgWhile most historians aim to examine the full historical record, Zinn picks and chooses from it. Writing persuasively, he hides the fact that many of his claims are unsubstantiated, presents his views as the truth, and leaves students with a distorted sense of historical reasoning.
Thanks for posting this link, Mike. It was a provocative article.
My take is that Wineburg seems to be collapsing two critiques into one. That makes for a good takeaway for the reader (“Zinn is a hack and we should stop teaching him in schools!”), but I think he’s actually confusing what’s at stake in the teaching of history in the classroom by conflating the teacher’s use of Zinn with the quality of Zinn’s scholarship.
Let’s try to parse the two.
First, for Wineburg to criticize Zinn’s work on methodological grounds is fine. Zinn wrote the book, so he deserves the credit or the critique.
However, this argument against Zinn’s “undue certainty” seems aimed at the people who haven’t read Zinn and who are already predispossed to disagreeing with Zinn’s less-than-celebratory historiography. I say this because in A People’s History’s… first chapter, Zinn himself acknowledges that his goal is not the perfect reconstruction of the past. Rather, it is to illuminate voices and perspectives that have been trampled upon in the writing of American History. Here I quote Zinn.
“I don’t want to invent victories for people’s movements. But to think that history-writing must aim simply to recapitulate the failures that dominate the past is to make historians collaborators in an endless cycle of defeat. If history is to be creative, to anticipate a possible future without denying the past, it should, I believe, emphasize new possibilities by disclosing those hidden episodes of the past when, even if in brief flashes, people showed their ability to resist, to join together, occasionally to win. I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the past’s fugitive moments of compassion rather than in its solid centuries of warfare.”
Like or loathe his scholarship (and for Wineburg, it’s clearly the latter) but fidelity in A People’s History… is not Zinn’s overriding goal; it’s about creating a historical past that imagines the downtrodden showing their capacity to unify and fight oppression. As Zinn observes, this a different kind of history, overtly political and aspirational. It is a response to histories that parade themselves as neutral reconstructions of past events through an objective historical eye.
I want to take a moment to speculate on why I think Zinn style and scholarship irks Wineburg. In his critique of Zinn’s lack of archival sources, Wineburg seems to come from the historical school of thought that Zinn is responding to, the one that believes there is a capital T “Truth” out there and that it is the historian’s job to go out and find it (in the archives, of course).
Wineburg’s problems with Zinn are not merely methodological, but epistemological. He believes that this historical Truth lies in the archives. Zinn’s failure to use the archives therefore makes his conclusions spurious. While this may be true, it’s also a bit of a catch 22, if you understand archives to be – as Zinn does – conservative projects designed to remember certain memories and forget others. This is precisely the kind of historiography Zinn is trying to write against in his first chapter.
Wineburg’s criticism of Zinn’s use of the archive touches upon the problem of truth in historiography, one that postmodern “shilly-shallying” (as Wineburg derides it) has done laudable work to complicate. Here Wineburg would do well to heed historian (and Stanford colleague) Hayden White’s caution on the search for Truth in the archive; he observes that the archives themselves are highly politicized constructions. Archives do not simply exist, but are made by institutions with vested interests in which stories are able to be told and how. These archival records are then interpreted by historians who are beholden to contemporary sensibilities in their (re)animating of past events. From this point of view, no historian, not even Wineburg’s archival fossil hunter, can escape being trapped in speculative, interpretive inquiry.
Questions of archival truth aside, Wineburg’s logic seems to fall apart when he gets to teachers using Zinn. His syllogism seems to rest on the following being true: Zinn’s history is inaccurate. Schools should only teach accurate histories. Therefore, Zinn shouldn’t be taught in schools. Yet this presupposes there are pure histories out there and that the sole criterion for determining history’s accuracy is its faithfulness to the archive. (Wineburg will do well to question his own “undue certainty” on this count.)
Moreover, to critique Zinn’s use in schools is not the same as critiquing Zinn’s methods. They are two different arguments (one against Zinn and one against teachers). I understand the rhetorical value of having the one follow the other; however, for Wineburg’s argument to make sense, it would have to assume that teachers could only use Zinn in two ways – either as gospel or as a false equivalency that reduce all histories to relativism. It’s a dim view of what teachers can do and are doing in their classrooms, and it’s one worth unpacking.
Wineburg parodies teachers’ pairing of Zinn against other historical texts by suggesting that it turns the history into a gladiatorial sport between two equally “valid” readings of the past. That Fox News talking heads interpretation of what goes on in classrooms suggests more nuanced uses of Zinn aren’t happening. Yet when I taught fifth grade I used adapted versions of Zinn’s A People’s History… (along with other alternative histories) in my fifth-grade class to teach about the civil rights movement. Contrary to Wineburg’s imagined classroom, I didn’t present Zinn (or any history) as the definitive reading of historical events or as entirely relativistic. Rather, my goal was that by having students read multiple historical narratives, students would understand history as contested ground – socially constructed, contingent, and subject to revision. I do not imagine that this use of Zinn was unique. Then again, I don’t assume teachers are only capable of either parroting whatever texts are thrust in front of them or making limp relativistic arguments that neuter the past of its significance.
Using Zinn and other texts that contradict the common historical narratives isn’t to enshrine a new version of Truth but to help student and teacher embark on an interrogation of what is ultimately at stake in the writing of histories of the United States. Using Zinn or other alternative histories alongside textbooks would involve asking questions such as who counts as an American? and what is history? These are not settled-upon categories, especially among historians. Why teach our students differently?
Perhaps a more moderate, less sensational critique of A People’s History… would suffice. One that recognizes that Zinn’s history is subject to the flaws of scholarship that Wineburg’s article makes evident. Yet, it would also acknowledge that A People’s History’s… unflinching focus on those who are not normally recognized as “American” and whose untold histories are important to problematize what we take for granted when we read history. This would require the teacher to recognize that Zinn’s work, like any historical text, is perspectival, political, and is therefore contestable. In other words, in teaching history, we’d learn that it is about much more than just “what happened.”
Actually, based on his scholarship, I very much doubt Wineberg believes there is one historical Truth to be found in the archives.
His main argument, to me, is captured is this sentence in his essay: “In many ways, A People’s History and traditional textbooks are mirror images that relegate students to similar roles as absorbers–not analysts–of information, except from different points of the political spectrum.”
You may be right that he underestimates K-12 teachers’ ability to use a variety of texts thoughtfully and skillfully in the way you describe. I suspect, though, that his main goal is to caution teachers about substitution one textbook with false certainty with another.
I wrote a little about how this might play out in the Common Core here:
http://www.tuttlesvc.org/2012/12/where-would-peoples-history-of-united.html
I agree with the above comment that the strength of Zinn’s scholarship needs to be treated separately from the issue of how his book is used. The latter presents more of a problem than the former, in large part because one of the fundamental assumptions of Zinn’s project–that there is a dominant, shared narrative of American history inculcated in our students, which would benefit from the tonic of counterpoint and unheard voices–may no longer hold true for most middle school and high school students. An adult reading the book when it came out in 1980 very likely had learned in school much of the mainstream history that would have provided a context for Zinn’s critique, and could have benefited from the dialectic of the two stories. The fact that Zinn’s evidence was anecdotal wouldn’t matter as much in that instance, since providing a single counterexample can serve to show that a dominant theory doesn’t account for all the facts. But a student today seems much less likely to have received the sort of “diplomatic history” Zinn’s book was meant to complement, and is much more likely to treat its claims as having a level of generality that it’s author did not originally intend. To use Wineburg’s terminology, an anti-textbook only works in connection with the textbook it is designed to counter.