Perhaps now is not the time. And so I'll gladly time stamp this for any future date that readers find more appropriate. But with Howard Zinn's passing this week I think we need to keep one salient fact in mind: He just was not a very good historian.
Zinn was an incredibly popular historian whose advocates somehow pretended had been overlooked despite the fact that he wrote one of the all-time best-selling works of history in A People's History of the United States. But popular is not the same as good. Bad books sell all the time while good books languish on shelves and in Amazon's warehouse. This is especially the case with works of history, where the best-selling book on a subject has literally nothing to do with its quality as a work of history.
A People's History is not only not very good, it is quite bad (this 2004 takedown by Michael Kazin in Dissent is a pretty damning indictment). It is thesis-driven history that is selective with its evidence and manages to be condescending and to deny agency to the very people it purports to celebrate (essentially: You've all been duped by corporate interests and the elites). It is cartoonish in its shallowness and lack of complexity.
Zinn was a polemicist. He could be a remarkably good reporter. (His insider's account of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee is still useful for historians even if it is not in any meaningful way a work of history.) And he wrote well. But as a historian he fell far short. And he could be an incredibly shoddy thinker. His simplistic leftism (and by any measure I am what would have been called in another time "a man of the left") substituted ideology for historiography and agitprop for scholarship.
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9 comments:
FYI:
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-miller1-2010feb01,0,834709.story
Lots of admiration for Zinn the man. Not as much for Zinn the historian. And the proof is in the pudding -- go see how many citations Zinn gets in the work of some of these masters. Kennedy is saying good things about the recently deceased. In his book on the Depression and New deal -- the best of its kind, hands down, Zinn does not exactly merit many footnotes.
dcat
Oh -- but thanks for the link. It's a good one and people should definitely check it out.
dcat
Although I would not expect many historians to cite People's History, largely because it is essentially a textbook. And it was popular, I think, because it resonated with the generation that picked it up and read it. Its real value may have been that it inspired some to go to the other sources and research in new paths.
Jim --
But of course the problem is that it is really not a textbook. It is an attempt at grand synthesis along the lines of what the Oxford History of the US does, but covering a much broader swath of time.
You are probably right about how it inspired others. The problem is that I think it inspired too many people to do the wrong sorts of things. There is no smugness quite like the "I read Howard Zinn and now I am going to tell you about it smugness." I have had more than one person who knew I was a professional historian try to lecture me on Zinn. It's not something I'd encourage anyone to do if you ever feel so inclined.
dcat
A couple of my friends (English professors) are invited to a party at the Nelson Algren foundation and told me that this year it will be held in honor of Zinn. He probably should have titled his book A Polemical Account. . .", and to his credit, he never hid his political agenda. One wonders why it is was so popular; I think it surprised many people that is was, although it easily fits into the conspiratoral mode that has gripped so many readers (in this case one for liberals). And it made many feel good. Maybe its simple message, "rich, powerful, greedy men BAD. . .all the downtrodden GOOD," touched a chord. Unfortunatley so much of popular history, no matter the political agenda, is bad history, while the well-done scholarly stuff goes unread.
Jim --
I think you hit it just about right. My biggest problem is all of the good work that goes unnoticed. But also I take issue with the implication that Zinn somehow discovered a lot of these trends in realizing, hey, the US is not merely a virtuous city on a hill.
My politics veer reasonably close to Zinn's, though not as far left, but as a historian I just have a hard time seeing him lauded as he has been. And the idea that Zinn has somehow been ignored, a favorite argument by his boosters, is simply laughable.
dcat
Love it dcat!
tramaine
Thanks Tramaine!
dcat
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