If pigs could fly

A list from Katie Couric Media, “10 American History Books Every Citizen Should Read” (26 June 2023) caught my attention when it was shared last month on Society for U.S. Intellectual History’s Facebook Page. I had read three of the ten, and had a fourth on my shelf. I quickly added a fourth I had read: Ijeoma Oluo, Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America (2020). It is a good book worth recommending, but I think it could have gone much further unpacking unmerited privilege and its consequences. Oluo does an excellent job of bringing forth example of oppression through compelling anecdotes well-written.

Other books on the list that I had read previously are Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (1980); James Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me (1995); and Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (2005). I bought with intentions to read another, but then my teaching schedule became busier than expected and sent my reading in other directions. Now, however, I may find the time to read Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (2016). Zinn, of course, is part of the initial focus of Patriots and Peoples (see “Patriots' and Peoples' Histories”). I have referenced Mann several times.

Last week, I started into the Kindle sample of Jill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States (2018). The sample had been sitting idle in my app for two years. Early in the book was an egregious error that gave me considerable doubts about reading further.

In a paragraph that begins, “In 1492,” Lepore wrote:

…most people in the Americas lived in smaller settlements [Tenochtitlán is mentioned as having at least a quarter-million] and gathered and hunted for their food. A good number were farmers who grew squash and corn and beans, hunted and fished. They kept pigs and chickens but not bigger animals. (8)

They did not keep pigs. Lepore should know this. If she does not, perhaps there is a great deal about the Columbian Exchange that she is missing as well (see “The Columbian Exchange”). In the same paragraph is a confident assertion that the population of the Americas in 1492 was 75 million. It is a plausible number and within the range of what I consider likely, but should have been presented with more nuance. We do not know. All figures for the aboriginal population of the Americas are speculative, but some are far better estimates than others. There is a footnote, but the sample does not offer access. Now that I have the book, I can find the reference is to Mann, 1491. I would prefer a reference to scholarship by a specialist in the field of American Indian studies.

Chickens, too, came to America via the Columbian Exchange, although turkeys originated in the Americas. 

Even so, I pressed on through the sample. As I was doing so, I kept musing about how pigs, originally from Eurasia, made it to the Americas ahead of Columbus. Maybe they had wings and could fly.

A few pages later, Lepore begins to describe the Columbian Exchange, albeit without deploying the term (it is absent from the index, as well). She correctly credits Columbus with introducing pigs:

When Columbus made a second voyage across the ocean in 1493, he commanded a fleet of seventeen ships carrying twelve hundred men, and another kind of army, too: seeds and cuttings of wheat, chickpeas, melons, onions, radishes, greens, grapevines, and sugar cane, and horses, pigs, cattle, chickens, sheep, and goats, male and female, two by two. Hidden among the men and plants and the animals were stowaways, seeds stuck to animal skins or clinging to the folds of cloaks and blankets, in clods of mud. (18)

The process of ecological transformation that was fundamental to the European conquest is described well as this paragraph continues, including the astounding destructive success of eight pigs who quickly became thousands, spreading well ahead of Europeans. That paragraph rescued the book from its earlier error and I placed the order. Having the book in hand, I can also confirm the paragraph’s footnote offers Alfred Crosby’s two vital books on the subject: Columbian Exchange (1972) and Ecological Imperialism (1986).

Lepore's focus in the book concerns the political ideals expressed during the American Revolution and in the Constitution. Small errors about pigs arriving ahead of Columbus are a minor distraction.

Embracing Bias

When I began Patriots and Peoples, I had a clear notion to read and reread two books. Neither A People's History of the United States nor A Patriot's History of the United States pretend to be objective. As an historian who has challenged presumptions of and ambitions towards objectivity, the openly expressed ideological positions of these two books refreshed me.

Many friends and colleagues over the years have praised Howard Zinn's approach in A People's History. Others have condemned it. More often than not, the opinions expressed revealed when Zinn's biases were shared or when they were anathema. My hope was to examine his claims more carefully. To what extent does his bias help illuminate neglected history? To what extent does his bias distort facts and interpretations?

I have neglected this critical reading of Zinn in favor of the same questions posed towards Larry Schweikart and Paul Allen's A Patriot's History of the United States. Their book is close to three times the length of Zinn's and offers better documentation. As I examined the sources they cite, I learned a lot that I did not know.* I also discovered a consistent pattern of distortion. Too few of their sources make the arguments that they allege (see especially "America was not a disease-free paradise").

I was hoping for better research in support of conservative ideology. Zinn's distortions appeared to be of a different sort than those by Scheikart and Allen.

The difference provoked disillusionment. My interest in this project waned. Increasingly, I put my energy into my Chess Skills blog (now 1001 published posts). In chess, fabricated evidence and analysis holds no sway. Checkmate cannot be faked.

I would like to return to this project--comparing right-wing and left-wing histories with equal scrutiny. There are plenty of lies and distortions on all sides of the American political spectrum. These lies and distortions affect public policy and they affect our understanding of a shared past. Recently, however, it has become increasingly clear that the pursuit of evidence-based history is less bipartisan than one should expect.


*I am particularly excited about how the work of Richard Steckel and his colleagues have expanded my understanding of early America. I remain indebted to Schweikart and Allen for bringing this work to my attention. See "Footnote to Larry Schweikart's Claim".

Is History is the Memory of States?

No significant conclusions are possible in the study of foreign affairs—the study of states acting as units—without an awareness of the historical context. For societies exist in time more than in space. At any given moment a state is but a collection of individuals, as positivist scholars have never wearied of pointing out. But it achieves identity through the consciousness of a common history. This is the only "experience" nations have, their only possibility of learning from themselves. History is the memory of states.
Henry A. Kissinger, A World Restored (1957)

Henry Kissinger presumes the existence of nationalism. Nationalism requires a collective memory, a set of shared experiences among disparate individuals.

In "History is the Memory of States" (2009), I extracted a longer passage from Kissinger's A World Restored (1957). My concern there was to pose some questions concerning Howard Zinn's use of Kissinger's assertion, "History is the memory of states," as a foil against which to develop his People's History. Zinn quoted the statement accurately, obscured the context, and produced a history that is vastly different in emphasis than anything written by Kissinger.

The Columbian Exchange

The Columbian Exchange (1972) by Alfred W. Crosby is among a small number of texts with which every American historian has some familiarity. Although many historians, perhaps even most, have read Crosby's text by extract, few are ignorant of its thesis.*

Crosby expresses the thesis succinctly: "the most important changes brought on by the Columbian voyages were biological in nature" (xiv). He then proceeds to elucidate the impact of disease, the spread of Old World flora and fauna in the Americas, and examines the impact of New World plants on the Old World. He also offers a reconsideration of the origins of syphilis, although others have reconsidered it since the publication of his seminal work.

Efforts to minimize the significance of the Columbian Exchange characterize A Patriot's History of the United States, as I have expanded upon at length in this blog. Michael Allen and Larry Schweikart dispute the significance of disease, while almost wholly ignoring the impact of pigs, cows, wheat, peaches, Russian thistle, and so on. Howard Zinn errs another way. In A People's History of the United States, he uncritically accepts and transmits the crude and almost certainly exaggerated population estimates of Bartolomé de Las Casas (see "Fragments from Bartolomé de Las Casas"). He does little better than Schweikart and Allen on the history of the peach, as well as cows, pigs, wheat, and thistle. Both A People's History and A Patriot's History are driven by politics. One serves the cause of today's conservatives, while the other serves socialist-leaning liberals.

Among the enduring impacts of the Columbian Exchange:

• The peppers in General Tso's chicken
• Tomato sauce on spaghetti
• The Irish Potato
• Kansas Wheat
• Lakota horses, the American rodeo, and everything associated with cowboys
• Mullein along the Spokane River (see photo)

*"Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention. Some books also may be read by deputy, and extracts made of them by others..." Francis Bacon, "Of Studies" (1597).

Sam Wineburg on A People's History

Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States has few peers among contemporary historical works. With more than 2 million copies in print, A People's History is more than a book. It is a cultural icon. "You wanna read a real history book?" Matt Damon asks his therapist in the 1997 movie Good Will Hunting. "Read Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States. That book'll ... knock you on your ass."

read more at
Where Howard Zinn's "A People's History" Falls Short | History News Network

Howard Zinn

Today is Howard Zinn's birthday. Were he still alive, he would be 90. Here is a tribute from Democracy Now!

Thomas Jefferson: Oenophile

During his first term as President, Jefferson spent seventy-five hundred dollars—roughly a hundred and twenty thousand dollars in today’s currency—on wine, and he is generally regarded as America’s first great wine connoisseur.
Patrick Radden Keefe, "The Jefferson Bottles"

Thomas Jefferson has long been one of the most interesting American leaders. He wrote the Declaration of Independence with a small amount of editing help from his colleagues. He designed his own home, a marvel of architecture. He argued persuasively with Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, perhaps the leading theorist concerning evolution a century prior to Charles Darwin, but who made some astounding statements concerning the deficiency of North American air and its lack of large fauna. Jefferson gathered specimens of fauna that dwarfed those in Europe to prove Buffon wrong. Jefferson played the violin, studied languages, experimented with agriculture, and maintained a life-long correspondence with his rival in the most fiercely contested election in the early national period of United States politics, John Adams.

Thomas Jefferson also loved wine.

In keeping with the focus of Patriots and Peoples, I scanned the indices of A Patriot's History of the United States and of A People's History of the United States for references to Jefferson's oenophilia. The term wine is not indexed in either book, but both contain ample references to Jefferson. Howard Zinn focuses on Jefferson's contribution to politics, saying nothing about his architecture, science, or social views with two exceptions: he credits the spirit of the times rather than personal views of the man for the fact that Jefferson remained a slave owner to his death (see "Thomas Jefferson: Abolitionist?"). The second reference to his cultural values comes in a section concerned with the "cult of domesticity," where Zinn notes Emma Willard contradicting Jefferson's views that women's education should emphasize "the amusements of life ... dancing, drawing, and music" (as quoted in A People's History, 118).

Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen offer a thumbnail sketch of Jefferson the man in A Patriot's History. They mention his interest in wine in a single sentence: "After the war, as American ambassador to France, he developed a pronounced taste for French food, wine, and radical French politics" (133). For much of the targeted audience of the ultra-conservative Patriot's History, this sentence is sufficient to damn Jefferson.

My interest in Jefferson and wine was provoked last week when I started reading The Billionaire's Vinegar (2008) by Benjamin Wallace. There are indications scattered around the web that a film based on Wallace's book is in development. Reports of the movie rights being optioned were released in January 2008 before the book's release. Movie Insider gives 2012 as the tentative date for the movie's release. There's certainly plenty of drama in the story as William Koch spends more than a million dollars hiring former FBI investigators and similar sleuths to build evidence against Hardy Rodenstock, the man behind the sale of dozens of bottles reputedly once owned by Jefferson. Kip Forbes bid 106,000 pounds for the alleged 1787 Château Lafite Bordeaux that instantly became the most expensive bottle of wine in history. Koch spent many thousands less for the bottles that he bought.

The Billionaire's Vinegar opens with a description of the auction where Forbes set a record bid. Much of the story of the auction itself derives from "A Piece of History" in The New Yorker, 20 January 1986. This opening chapter narrates the development of the wine expertise of auctioneer Michael Broadbent, whose opposition to his portrayal later in the book led to a lawsuit that led to Random House agreeing not to distribute the book in the United Kingdom (one wonders whether the film will suffer similar barriers).

The second chapter focuses on Jefferson. I started this book as one of several Kindle samples dealing with history and culture of vitas vinifera cultivation, wine production, and consumption of the beverage that led to Benjamin Franklin's frequently corrupted line, "Behold the rain which descends from heaven upon our vineyards, and which incorporates itself with the grapes to be changed into wine; a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy!" Freakonomics has a brief entry by the editor of The Yale Book of Quotations (2006), Fred R. Shapiro, concerning the origins of Franklin's quote, the process of authenticating this little detail of the past, and the corruption of Franklin's expression by beer-swilling enthusiasts.

The Kindle sample offers a few pages of this chapter, just enough to hook this angler. I shelled out the $12 needed to get to the end of the chapter and gain access to the notes. Having done so, I read the rest of the book. I learned more about the world of rare wines and forgeries than I had anticipated as among my interests. Having read this book, there's a lot more that I'll be attentive to when the next issue of Wine Spectator arrives in the mail box. Meanwhile, I'm now attending to more Kindle samples:


John Hailman, Thomas Jefferson on Wine (2006)
Charles A. Cerami, Dinner at Mr. Jefferson's: Three Men, Five Great Wines, and the vening that Changed America (2011)
Tyler Colman, Wine Politics: How Governments, Environmentalists, Mobsters, and Critics Influence the Wines We Drink (2008)

Another book of interest is not available as an ebook, but may arrive via the mail in hardcover sometime in the near future.

James Gabler, The Wines and Travels of Thomas Jefferson (1995)

The Haymarket Affair: Contrasting Histories

On this day in 1886, thousands of people gathered for a protest rally at Haymarket Square in Chicago. The previous day, police had fired into a crowd of strikers who had been confronting strikebreakers at the McCormick Harvester Works. Two striking workers were killed, perhaps more. The Chicago Daily News reported six deaths, and this figure was repeated by August Spies in his circular calling workers to arms (Paul Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy [1986], 190).

Howard Zinn reports four deaths in his A People's History of the United States (1980) and quotes part of Spies' leaflet:

Revenge!
Workingmen to Arms!!!
...You have for years endured the most abject humiliations, ... you have worked yourself to death ... your Children you have sacrificed to the factory lord--in short: you have been miserable and obedient slaves all these years: Why? To satisfy the insatiable greed, to fill the coffers of your lazy thieving master? When you ask them now to lessen your burdens, he sends his bloodhounds out to shoot you, kill you!
... To arms we call you, to arms!
as quoted in Zinn, 270-271 (ellipses in Zinn)

This circular was published and distributed the evening of 3 May 1886 and set the stage for tensions the following evening at Haymarket Square. According to Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen, A Patriot's History of the United States (1994), "August Spies set the table for more violence" (439). Schweikart and Allen quote the first three sentences of the circular, "Revenge! Workingmen, to arms! Your masters sent out their bloodhounds!" (439).

Tensions had been building for months. On one side were the police, the state militia, the leaders of industries, a "Citizens' Committee" that met daily to plot strategy. On the other side were members and leaders of labor unions. The Chicago Mail, Zinn tells his readers, had suggested on 1 May watching and making an example of Albert Parsons and August Spies of the International Working People's Association: "Keep them in view. Hold them personally responsible for any trouble that occurs. Make an example of them if trouble occurs" (as quoted by Zinn, 270).

Despite the militant rhetoric, the protest at Haymarket Square was peaceful. As it was nearing its conclusion, 180 police marched towards the speakers stand. Then a bomb exploded, "wounding sixty-six policemen, of whom seven later died" (Zinn, 271). One died instantly (see summary at "The Dramas of Haymarket").

Police reacted quickly to the blast, firing into the crowd, killing at least four demonstrators. There are accounts that suggest many of the wounds suffered by the police were due to friendly fire.



The Chicago History Museum's website offers a good synopsis of the effects of the melee:

Acting with overwhelming public support, the police arrested dozens of political radicals. In the trial that followed, eight anarchists were found guilty of murder. After appeals to the Illinois and United States Supreme Courts failed, four of the defendants were executed on November 11, 1887.
"The Dramas of Haymarket," http://www.chicagohistory.org/dramas/overview/over.htm

Howard Zinn list those executed: "Albert Parsons, a printer, August Spies, an upholsterer, Adolph Fischer, and George Engel" (271). Schweikart and Allen mention the conviction for murder and the governor's pardon of three. A Patriot's History does acknowledge, "trials produced evidence that anarchists only loosely associated with the Knights had been involved" (439). Zinn is more specific:

Some evidence came out that a man named Rudolph Schnaubelt, supposedly an anarchist, was actually an agent of the police, an agent provocateur, hired to throw the bomb and thus enable the arrest of hundreds, the destruction of the revolutionary leadership in Chicago.
Zinn, 271-272.

Patriot's and People's Contrasts

Howard Zinn does not list specific sources for quotations, but has an extensive bibliography for each chapter. Larry Schweikart and Paul Allen source every quotation. Absent from their citations are the standard left-wing labor histories found in Zinn's list, such as Philip Foner, A History of the Labor Movement in the United States, 4 vols. (1947-1964). Neither text cites The Haymarket Tragedy (1986) by Paul Avrich, which was published several years after Zinn's text. Avrich credits the compositor, Hermann Pudewah, for the word "revenge" at the beginning of Spies' circular.

More telling differences emerge in the spin of these two texts. A Patriot's History offers minimal information concerning the labor movement, and credits the well-known Knights of Labor for the protest activities. A People's History crafts a more detailed account of a multitude of organizations, naming Spies' International Working People's Union, one of several engaged in organizing the strike at McCormick Harvester Works. It highlights the struggle for the eight-hour work day, while A Patriot's History manages to discuss union organizing and strikes without naming a single issue. A Patriot's History does manage, however, "High wages also diminished the appeal of organized labor" (438). In contrast, A People's History emphasizes immigrant labor, noting, "There were 5 1/2 million immigrants in the 1880s, 4 million in the 1890s, creating a labor surplus that kept wages down" (266).

Neolithic Revolution and American Indians

In Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States (1999 [1980]), we read:

On their own, the Indians were engaged in the great agricultural revolution that other peoples in Asia, Europe, Africa were going through about the same time. (18)

Zinn proceeds to observe the contrast between the "egalitarian communes" of hunter-gatherers with the development of "divisions of labor among men and women," the rise of priests and chiefs, and other aspects of the cultures of settled populations of agriculturalists. Although he hints of an underside of the development of agriculture, his focus notes the achievements of civilization in the Americas prior to the European invasion.

He dwells less upon the differences between "nomadic hunters" and agricultural peoples in the Americas than upon describing social relations among the Haudenosaunee (he uses the term League of the Iroquois). Zinn describes property values and gender relations in such as way as to support a generalization.

So, Columbus and his successors were not coming into an empty wilderness, but into a world which in some places was as densely populated as Europe itself, where the culture was complex, where human relations were more egalitarian than in Europe, and where the relations among men, women, children, and nature were more beautifully worked out than perhaps any place in the world. (21)

Zinn mentions in passing the Moundbuilder Culture, but omits discussion of their religion--some form of sun worship,--and neglects elaboration of its hierarchical arrangements aside from the passing phrase, "more surplus to feed chiefs and priests" (18-19).



Just as he faults Samuel Eliot Morison, Zinn opens himself to criticism. He observes that Morison's Christopher Columbus, Mariner (1954) mentions genocide as a consequence of policies initiated by Columbus, but then moves on to emphasize positive achievements. Zinn opines:

To state the facts, however, and then to bury them in a mass of other information is to say to the reader with a certain infectious calm: yes, mass murder took place, but it's not that important--it should weigh very little in our final judgements; it should affect very little what we do in the world. (8)

As Morison quickly brushed past the issue of genocide, Zinn brushes past the hierarchical arrangements and theocratic states that emerged along the trail of corn in order to romanticize the American Indian past.


Pandora's Seed

Spencer Wells does not romanticize Neolithic peoples in Pandora's Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization (2010). Wells presents data from a 1984 study of skeletal remains in the eastern Mediterranean by J. Lawrence Angel that demonstrates substantive indices of health decrease--pelvic inlet depth, average stature, and median life span--during the Mesolithic (9000-8000 BCE), Early Neolithic (7000-5000 BCE), and Late Neolithic (5000-3000 BCE). Wells notes similar patterns in the Americas, "the data shows that the transition to an agricultural lifestyle made people less healthy" (24).

How can we explain the massive increase in human population and the dominance of agriculture, which has pretty much completely replaced hunting and gathering in every inhabited corner of the world, when it didn't improve people's lives? (24)

It would seem that hunter-gatherers had an evolutionary advantage, yet agriculturalists prevailed. How was this victory achieved?

Although Wells poses this question, his focus concerns more centrally the long-term consequences of the Neolithic upon modern society, including the impact of a carbohydrate based diet upon general health and even how such changes so long ago contribute to global climate change. Along the way, however, he discusses the work of William H. McNeill (Plagues and Peoples [1976]) and Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs, and Steel [1997]). These works address how peoples from Europe prevailed over peoples in the Americas. Although the Neolithic Revolution transformed the Fertile Crescent, MesoAmerica, and southern China approximately the same time, the revolution in the Americas was principally plant oriented, while elsewhere domestication of animals proceeded apace. From these animals came the diseases that devastated the Indians when Europeans arrived.


People's versus Patriot's

Although Zinn skirts past the unpleasant side of the Neolithic Revolution in the Americas to advance his excoriation of the heroes of conquest, Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen take a different tact. A Patriot's History of the United States (2004) draws upon other studies that document deleterious effects of the Neolithic Revolution to argue for an insignificant demographic impact of the European invasion. There is no need to repeat here all that I have written concerning the claims of Schweikart and Allen and how they distort the science they cite. I address elements of their fantastic edifice in "Larry Schweikart's Claim" (looking at his History News Network plug for the book), "Footnote to Larry Schweikart's Claim" (examining his source, The Backbone of History, and how he distorts its findings), and "Death in Jamestown" (investigating A Patriot's most outlandish claim). "Origins of Malaria" adds some solid science to the refutation of Schweikart's claim that malaria originates in America.

I note in "Origins":

Civilization made us sick, but it also made us more numerous so we could impose our will on those otherwise more fortunate. The maladies that afflicted Europeans contributed in significant measure to their global expansion.

As a working hypothesis, I am prepared to put forth the claim that Zinn's history distorts through conscious and open bias that romanticizes Indians, while Schweikart and Allen distort either through abysmal scholarship or through flagrant dishonesty.

Zinn on Slavery

During an argument on Facebook concerning observations of racism in the Tea Party movement, a putative historian opined:

Maybe you got your history from Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States--the most assigned history textbook in our schools. Howard Zinn, Communist Party Member, said that, "objective history was undesirable if it is to serve a social purpose." He also explained that if you ask 100 different people who lived through an event or time what happened you'll get 100 different answers. So he sought to teach history through the perspectives of the victims of history. That makes me wonder who decided who the victims were and how accurate can we expect his books (our history textbooks) to be? One example of how Howard Zinn was wrong: he claimed that European whites brought slavery to the Americas, when in fact there was already an abundant slave trade in place between the Indian tribes well before the white Europeans came. [spelling and punctuation errors in original corrected]

Zinn's discussion of slavery in the first two chapters of A People's History is not quite as represented by this Tea Party apologist. I urge my readers to read Zinn more carefully.

Assumptions

This message came in an email titled "New from an author you love."

Since you've bought something by Larry Schweikart in the past, we thought you might enjoy this new release: Seven Events That Made America America: And Proved That the Founding Fathers Were Right All Along, available June 1, 2010. Get it at a Borders store near you, or pre-order it now at Borders.com and enjoy it in no time!

It might be worth noting that Schweikart's writing interests me principally because it offers a study in shoddy scholarship, logical and factual errors, distortions, propaganda, ...

Howard Zinn's work offers numerous gaps, omissions, and exaggerations to serve his political ideology. But egregious factual errors and gross misrepresentations of source material are rare. I purchased Schweikart's A Patriot's History of the United States (co-written with Michael Allen) from Borders a few years ago. When I browse in my local store, I look at other works by Schweikart and then re-shelve them and buy something else (or leave without making a purchase).

A Patriot's History of the United States clearly aims to counter Zinn's A People's History of the United States, but the real model adversary for Schweikart is Ward Churchill. Schweikart even says so, "I hope Ward Churchill is on TV every night. Every time he talks we sell another hundred books" (Patriot's History, xiii).

History is the Memory of States

In the opening chapter of A People's History of the United States (1980), Howard Zinn explains his bias. His history examines case studies of the downtrodden—African Americans, laborers, women, anti-war activists—rather than constructing a narrative that covers the breadth of the main events in American history. In a critical paragraph, he marks clearly his disagreement with Henry Kissinger.

"History is the memory of states," wrote Henry Kissinger in his first book, A World Restored, in which he proceeded to tell the history of nineteenth-century Europe from the viewpoint of the leaders of Austria and England, ignoring the millions who suffered from those statesmen's policies. From his standpoint, the "peace" that Europe had before the French Revolution was "restored" by the diplomacy of a few national leaders. But for factory workers in England, farmers in France, colored people in Asia and Africa, women and children everywhere except in the upper classes, it was a world of conquest, violence, hunger, exploitation—a world not restored but disintegrated.
Zinn, A People's History, 9-10

Does Zinn accurately represent the views of those he cites? Does he quote accurately? Out of context? Here are the two paragraphs in which the sentence appears.

A physical law is an explanation and not a description, and history teaches by analogy, not identity. This means that the lessons of history are never automatic, that they can be apprehended only by a standard which admits the significance of a range of experience, that the answers we obtain will never be better than the questions we pose. No profound conclusions were drawn in the natural sciences before the significance of sensory experience was admitted by what was essentially a moral act. No significant conclusions are possible in the study of foreign affairs—the study of states acting as units—without an awareness of the historical context. For societies exist in time more than in space. At any given moment a state is but a collection of individuals, as positivist scholars have never wearied of pointing out. But it achieves identity through the consciousness of a common history. This is the only "experience" nations have, their only possibility of learning from themselves. History is the memory of states.

To be sure, states tend to be forgetful. It is not often that nations learn from the past, even rarer that they draw the correct conclusions from it. For the lessons of historical experience, as of personal experience, are contingent. They teach the consequences of certain actions, but they cannot force a recognition of comparable situations. An individual may have experienced that a hot stove burns but, when confronted with a metallic object of a certain size, he must decide from case to case whether it is in fact a stove before his knowledge will prove useful. A people may be aware of the probable consequences of a revolutionary situation. But its knowledge will be empty if it cannot recognize a revolutionary situation. There is this difference between physical and historical knowledge, however: each generation is permitted only one effort of abstraction; it can attempt only one interpretation and a single experiment, for it is its own subject. This is the challenge of history and its tragedy; it is the shape "destiny" assumes on the earth. And its solution, even its recognition, is perhaps the most difficult task of statesmanship.
Henry A. Kissinger, A World Restored: Europe after Napoleon: The Politics of Conservatism in a Revolutionary Age (1964 [1957]), 331-332 [emphasis added]

From this brief passage, it seems that Kissinger's statement has to do with the nature of diplomatic history, and does not exclude the sort of cultural history Zinn favors. It may be true that Kissinger's text does not address the experiences of the suffering masses, but what does such an orientation do to the subfield of diplomatic history? Kissinger's book, it must be remembered, started as a doctoral dissertation at Harvard. His professors were not expecting a dissertation on social history.

Woodstock Memories

I remember Woodstock. These memories filter through intervening scenes, perspectives, and mentalités. I'm more a child of the Seventies than the Sixties and missed the festival at Max Yasgur's farm forty years ago. I was too young.

My memories of Woodstock are second hand experiences animated through Woodstock: 3 Days of Peace & Music (The Director's Cut) (1997), The '60s (1999), and the study of history. Woodstock and the Sixties first presented themselves in my study of history through Professor Leroy Ashby's lectures in U.S. History, 1941 to present (the course covered a forty year period when I took it).

Ashby's innovative lectures brought history to life. His narratives were supplemented with clips from such music as Jimi Hendrix's Woodstock performance of "The Star-Spangled Banner," Country Joe and the Fish, and maybe Eric Burden and the The Animals or Joan Baez. I lack his song list, but attempted to reproduce his style a few years ago while teaching a course called Recent American History. My list of "protest music" included "Okie from Muskogee" by Merle Haggard, Sam Cooke's "A Change is Gonna Come," and Phil Ochs' "I Ain't Marching Anymore." I should have presented Frank Zappa's "Plastic People" alongside "For What It's Worth" by Buffalo Springfield as springboards for reflection upon the so-called riots on Sunset Strip. Seeing these demonstrations protesting the closing of Pandora's Box through the contrasting lenses of these two songs (one of which was performed in Monterey 1967), students might develop some critical historical questions for exploring the youth movement of the Sixties that Woodstock has come to symbolize.

Woodstock serves as the denouement for the fractured family sub-plot in The '60s. The Herlihy family at the heart of the film includes three typical children. Katie (Julia Stiles) gets pregnant as a teenager and follows her lover to San Francisco, where his feeble, "bummer," is offered when she needs cash in order to buy medicine for their sick baby, cash that he just spent on drugs. Through this film, we see the dark side of the Summer of Love. Michael's (Josh Hamilton) Catholic idealism carries him into the civil rights movement, the Pentagon siege, and into constant struggle with a rival suitor for the heart of a woman. She begins to consider Michael again after the rival dies in a self-created blast as a member of the Weather Underground. Brian (Jerry O'Connell) joins the Marines and goes to Vietnam. Through a deus ex machina (some movie critics use the term flaw) the divergent paths of all three siblings converge upon Woodstock where they find each other after several years apart. They return together to their parents in Chicago and enjoy a happy reunion, and start the process of healing.

Such is the hope found in the memories of Woodstock that many celebrate today.

Last weekend, The New York Times got the scoop on the anniversary and published assessments of Woodstock's legacy from such writers as Ishmael Reed, Rick Perlstein (whose Facebook alert put me onto this article), James Miller, Joan Hoff, and others. Miller called the festival a pseudo-event. Others, too, have been critical.


Freedom from Responsibility

A tone of moral censure underscores the narrative of the Sixties in A Patriot's History of the United States (2004) by Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen.

Rock music reaffirmed the sexual and drug revolutions at every turn. By 1970, although still exceptionally popular, neither the Beatles nor their bad-boy counterparts, the Rolling Stones, had the aura of hipness, having ceded that to rising new and more radical groups whose music carried deeper drug overtones.
Schweikart and Allen, 703

For these authors, hipness was rebellion against authority. The music industry cashed in on this rebellion with the Woodstock festival. The authors of A Patriot's History omit stories of how the mega-concert became free as the crowds overwhelmed any semblance of security, and the promoters took a bath. But, they mention the full-length film--Woodstock (1970)--that followed the event and that continues to bring profits through several anniversary editions.

Schweikart and Allen cite one critical source for their brief discussion of the music festival: David Dalton, "Finally, the Shocking Truth about Woodstock Can Be Told, or Kill It Before It Clones Itself," The Gadfly (August 1999); their citation also mentions conversations with Dalton by one of the two authors, presumably Schweikart as he started his career in a band. From Dalton they offer the observation that at Woodstock drugs "ceased being tools for experience ... and became a means of crowd control" (704).

The authors of A Patriot's History emphasize the drugs and sex, the garbage left behind, and the commercialization of the music. They frame Woodstock between the sexual revolution and the mayhem in Hollywood perpetrated by Charles Manson's followers the week prior to the festival. They do not inquire into the motivations of the organizers nor the experiences of the participants.


People's Histories

Neither A People's History of the United States (1980) by Howard Zinn nor Paul Johnson's A History of the American People (1998) mention the Woodstock Festival. Even so, Zinn's three chapters on the Sixties emphasizing the Civil Rights Movement; protest against the American presence in Vietnam, and the crimes of Richard Nixon; and the emergence of Red Power, Black Power, Chicano nationalism, and woman's liberation all seem to suggest a broadly positive assessment. Even so, Zinn might object to the ways the youth movement was exploited by corporate America. Schweikart and Allen note how "peace, love and rock-n-roll" became an advertising slogan not only for Woodstock, but for other products.

Johnson's one indexed reference to drugs credits popular music with fomenting the spread of drug culture. From 1920s jazz, swing and bop in the 1930s and 1940s, ...

There followed 1950s cool, hard bop, soul jazz, rock in the 1960s, and in the 1970s blends of jazz and rock dominated by electronic instruments. And all the time pop music was crowding in the phantasmagoria of commercial music geared to the taste of countless millions of easily manipulated but increasingly affluent young people. And from the worlds of jazz and pop, the drug habit spread to the masses as the most accelerated form of downward mobility of all.
Johnson, 706

Johnson repeats this theme of downward mobility in his discussion of Gangsta Rap, where he segues into expressing his affinity for the arguments in Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind (1987) and Roger Kimball, Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted our Higher Education (1991). It's clear that his views of Woodstock would not deviate far from those of Schweikart and Allen.


Addendum (24 August 2009):
Earlier this morning, Larry Schweikart posted "Woodstock at 40 ... er, wait, is it 40 already?" on his blog A Patriot's History of the United States. In the second sentence, he calls Rush Limbaugh his mentor, or he imagines Rush Limbaugh as the mentor for his imaginary reader that he is quoting--the syntax of his parenthetical statement lacks some precision on this point. He then suggests that he and Rush share a love of the music of Woodstock, and that he has seen the film something like twenty times. He repeats and emphasizes David Dalton's assertion that at Woodstock drugs became a means for "crowd control".

Flash from the Past

It is with a sense of triumph that I look back on my first year of graduate school and a declaration I made then. I resolved to war against the textbook, and to teach with some other form of writing. This declaration was not a statement against reading. No, I expected and expect students in my history classes to read a lot--too much, they often write in the evaluations. Textbooks are a genre that have no life outside of classrooms. Perhaps that means they should have no life at all.

The alternative to textbooks that I had in mind is described well by Lendol Calder on a syllabus he employs at Augustana College. I'm indebted to Historiann's "Manifesto Against 'Coverage'" and John Fea's comments there, as well as his "Uncoverage" post for bringing Calder's work to my notice. The online version of Calder's 2006 article, "Uncoverage: Toward a Signature Pedagogy for the History Survey" in the Journal of American History has links to his syllabus:

What? No Textbook? In fact, we will read not one but two major histories: one by Howard Zinn, the other by Paul Johnson. These are not traditional “textbooks.” In fact, real people have been known to read them, which one can’t say about textbooks.
Calder, HI 132 Syllabus

There we find an alternative, and a definition of sorts: books read by "real people," as distinct from college students and professors. His texts are Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States and Paul Johnson, A History of the American People. Thus, the students read a liberal view, and a conservative one; they read an American writing about America, and they read the words of a foreigner, too.


My Pledge

I cannot produce solid evidence that I pledged to eschew all textbooks during that first year of graduate school. Moreover, in my comments to Historiann's "Manifesto" I named a textbook that I have assigned, so I've failed at least once to uphold that alleged pledge. Nevertheless, I dug through my files and located a book review I wrote twenty years ago. In my seminar in American Historiography, one of the assignments was to write a book review of a US history survey textbook. The professor assigned which one. Mine was Gary B. Nash, et al., The American People: Creating a Nation and a Society. New York: Harper & Row, 1986.

While most of my peers were busy grappling with texts that had all sorts of gaps, exclusions, and suppressions of the emphasis on race, class, and gender that was then in vogue, I had the leader of the movement to include all these. Even worse, the text reflected the state of the art in its graphics, sidebars, and supplemental apparatus. I spent the obligatory three pages describing the enormously rich features of this text, and managed to highlight one or two small quibbles.

Midway through page four, I began my criticism:

...apart from the expensive extras, and underneath the colorful embellishments still lurks the traditional form of a textbook. Whether this form has outlived its usefulness needs to be considered.
The authors expend several sentences in their Preface explaining that an intent of the book is to provoke thought on the part of students. It is precisely this goal, however, that is ill served by textbooks. I think that now matter how balanced and innovative a text may be, it is doubtful that such a form will ever prove adequate to this task--indeed, as I sought to illustrate earlier, it is a text's inadequacies that are more likely to stimulate questioning (the first step in creative thought). A coherent narrative that attempts to present the history of a people generally cannot do more than present a string of conclusions to be memorized. Until writers of instructional materials leave the analysis incomplete (or, at least, stop pretending to have completed it) to force students to struggle to produce coherence, learning history will remain largely passive reception of information. A word that aptly describes such a process is brainwashing.
"Review of Nash," February 1988

I don't think I agree with everything written by that young historian in training, and it's looks as though he might benefit from reading Paulo Friere, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Still, the kid might have a point.

Booker T Washington's White House Dinner

John McCain's Concession Speech

In his warm and honorable concession speech, Presidential candidate John McCain highlighted the historic significance of Barack Obama's victory in the 2008 election. In a nation where many citizens once considered it scandalous for an African American to dine with the President, the President-elect is now an African American.

A century ago, President Theodore Roosevelt's invitation of Booker T. Washington to dine at the White House was taken as an outrage in many quarters. America today is a world away from the cruel bigotry of that time. There is no better evidence of this than the election of an African-American to the presidency of the United States.
Senator John McCain, Concession Speech

Booker T. Washington joined President Theodore Roosevelt at the White House for dinner on 16 October 1901. In Theodore Rex (2001), Edmund Morris notes that dinner "proceeded behind closed doors, under the disapproving gaze of a Negro butler" (52). Southern politics was the central topic of conversation.

News of the dinner traveled along the Associated Press wire throughout the night, and the morning newspapers were generally positive. But the next afternoon, the Memphis Scimitar called the event a "damnable outrage," and Morris notes, used a term that "had not been seen in print for years ... [and now] had the force of an obscenity" (55). Morris quotes the Memphis Scimitar at length:

The most damnable outrage which has ever been perpetrated by any citizen of the United States was committed yesterday by the President, when he invited a nigger to dine with him at the White House. It would not be worth more than a passing notice if Theodore Roosevelt had sat down to dinner in his own home with a Pullman car porter, but Roosevelt the individual and Roosevelt the President are not to be viewed in the same light.

The newspaper went on to criticize Roosevelt's claims that his mother was "a Southern woman," and to assert that Southern women can no longer accept invitations to the White House "with proper self-respect," nor is President Roosevelt welcome in Southern homes.

One week later reports circulated that Washington and Roosevelt were expected to dine together again, this time at Yale University. Security was tightened, the Secret Service did not permit the President to work the crowds (President McKinley had been assassinated the previous month, elevating Vice President Roosevelt to his present office), and Washington was seated far from Roosevelt during the event. There was no mention of dinner.

Booker T. Washington visited Roosevelt's White House again, but only in the morning during regular business hours. Dinner invitations became impossible for both men.

John McCain praised the United States and its people: "We never hide from history. We make history."

Patriots and Peoples

The controversy that erupted in the wake of President Theodore Roosevelt's historic dinner hosting Booker T. Washington occupies the whole of the second chapter in Edmund Morris' Theodore Rex, the sequel to his Pulitzer Prize winning biography The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (1979). The dinner gets only passing mention by Howard Zinn in A People's History of the United States. In a discussion of post-Civil War racism, Zinn writes:

In this atmosphere it was no wonder that those Negro leaders most accepted in white society, like the educator Booker T. Washington, a one-time White House guest of Theodore Roosevelt, urged Negro political passivity.

This note about the 1901 dinner leads a paragraph that focuses upon Washington's 1895 Atlanta Exposition Address, which was soundly criticized by W.E.B. DuBois in The Souls of Black Folks (1903).

Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen offer a full paragraph concerning Washington's dinner and the resulting controversy in A Patriot's History of the United States. They state that "the event showed both how far America had come, and how far it had to go" (483). In the next paragraph, however, they discuss African American soldiers in Brownsville, Texas in 1906 "shooting up the town, killing a civilian, then managing to return to the base unobserved" (483). Roosevelt discharged the soldiers , and they were denied their pensions. Schweikart and Allen note that these soldiers' military honors were restored by Congress in 1972.

The abrupt transition from a dinner regarded as scandalous by some to the narrative concerning African American violence--mistreatment of the soldiers by Brownsville residents is mentioned, but without any detail--hits me with the sort of force effected by the Memphis Scimitar's choice of words. I become immediately suspicious of their intent. This passage is not the only place I have observed an abrupt transition to depredations perpetrated by the victims of racial injustice within the pages of A Patriot's History.

Lee Resolution

The Lee Resolution is the first of “100 Milestone Documents” presented online by the National Archives and Records Administration. This site offers an image of each original document and brief historical notes regarding its significance.

Approved by the Continental Congress, 2 July 1776

Resolved, That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.
Lee Resolution showing congressional vote, July 2, 1776; Papers of the Continental Congress, 1774-1783; Records of the Continental and Confederation Congresses and the Constitutional Convention, 1774-1789, Record Group 360; National Archives.

Richard Henry Lee penned these words per instructions “to declare the United Colonies free and independent states, absolved from all allegiance to or dependence upon the Crown or Parliament of Great Britain” (as quoted in Samuel Eliot Morison, “Prelude to Independence: The Virginia Resolutions of May 15, 1776,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series 8 [1951], 488). Lee introduced his resolution 7 June, which was seconded by John Adams, and Congress adopted the resolution 2 July 1776.

The Virginia Resolutions were read in the Continental Congress 27 June, a Committee formed for drafting the Declaration reported the next day, and the Declaration of Independence itself was adopted 4 July.

Efforts to assess the significance of the Lee Resolution have included assertions that “Independence Day was properly the day on which Congress passed the resolution which actually established our independence; and that day was July 2” (Charles Warren, “Fourth of July Myths,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series 2 [1945], 238). A similar spin was put forth in “July 4, 1776, An Imagi-Holiday” at the blog History Is Elementary. She suggests pedagogy of discovery:

Is elementaryhistoryteacher calling for a change in the date for our independence celebrations? No, I’m not. What I am calling for is greater effort on the part of those who teach social studies to know their content concerning myth versus fact and share that information with students. Throw out some teasers to students, provide them with the materials, and let them discover how we decided the 4th instead of the 2nd would be our “Epoch” or Independence Day.

She also provides a link to the History News Network’s “Top 5 Myths about the Fourth of July.” Myth #1 is that the United States declared its independence on July 4. The HNN staff writers explain, “America's independence was actually declared by the Continental Congress on July 2, 1776.”

A reader of History Is Elementary offered a cautionary note regarding claims that the “wrong” day is celebrated every summer, highlighting the crux of Independence:

Liberty, self-determination, the franchise and the founding of a glorious Republic. That, at least, is what I celebrate on the fourth day of July.
pbuxton, “comment”

Patriots and Peoples

A Patriot’s History of the United States by Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen offers John Adams’ language that “Congress has passed the most important resolution … ever taken in America” (ellipses in original, Schweikart and Allen, 80). The footnote identifies their source for Adams’ words as a secondary source: Page Smith, John Adams, 1735-1784, vol 1 (1962). The previous paragraph mentions that delegates to the Continental Congress were instructed to support independence; it highlights the leadership role of Virginia through the colony establishing a republican government in June.

Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States does not specifically mention the Lee Resolution. There is an allusion to the action where he notes, the Continental Congress “organized a committee to draw up the Declaration of Independence . . . It was adopted by the Congress on July 2, and officially proclaimed on July 4, 1776” (Zinn, 71). The next paragraph discusses precedents in resolutions adopted in North Carolina two months earlier, and quotes from one adopted by Malden, Massachusetts.

Voices of a People’s History, edited by Zinn and Anthony Arnove offers that “[a]t least ninety state and local declarations of independence” were issued in the months leading up to July 1776. This information is part of the headnote to “New York Mechanics Declaration of Independence” proclaimed 29 May 1776 (86-87).

The narrative focus through this section in both A Patriot’s History and A People’s History moves from Thomas Paine’s Common Sense to the Declaration of Independence.

Zinn, Historiography, Weapons of History

At History is a Weapon a brief audit of the role of bias in history begins, "History isn't what happened, but a story of what happened." That much should be obvious, but is worth hearing from time to time. The audit offers quick entry into some of the central questions of historiography, and stands as the welcome page to a website that presents scanned versions of several texts, including A People's History of the United States. History is a Weapon describes itself as "an online Left reader focusing largely on American resistance history." I think that's an accurate assessment for a site that is a terrific resource.

I've added a link under "American History Links."

A People’s History: the Industry

Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States (1980) has spawned an industry of creation. His website recently announced a new comic book, A People’s History of American Empire (April 2008). This collaboration among Zinn, Paul Buhle, and Mike Konopacki tells a story of the author “from his childhood in the Brooklyn slums to his role as one of America’s leading historians” (Macmillan).

Earlier spin-offs from Zinn’s bestselling A People’s History have included George Kirschner’s collaboration with Zinn, A People's History of the United States: The Wall Charts (1995); a range of partial reproductions, such as The Twentieth Century: From the Author’s A People’s History of the United States (1998); and a children’s version, A Young People's History of the United States (2007), 2 vols., adapted by Rebecca Stefoff.

Voices of a People’s History of the United States (2004), edited by Zinn and Anthony Arnove, is designed as a companion to the main text. I discussed the second document in this text at “Fragments from Bartolomé de Las Casas.” Gayle Olson-Raymer edited a teaching guide, Teaching with Voices of a People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove (2006).

A People’s History of the United States is available as an abridged audiobook, A People's History of the United States CD: Highlights from the 20th Century (2003), read by Matt Damon. Part of a lecture Zinn gave at Reed College is available on CD as A People's History Of The United States: A Lecture at Reed College (1998). James Earl Jones lends his voice to The People Speak CD: American Voices, Some Famous, Some Little Known, from Columbus to the Present (2004). The audiobook Readings from Voices of a People's History of the United States (2006) includes twenty-one selections from the print edition of Voices.

Other People’s Histories

Chris Harmon wrote A People’s History of the World (1999), which has a new edition just out last week. Harmon is editor of the journal International Socialism. A blurb for this book from Howard Zinn has such prominence on the cover that a casual browser might mistake him for coauthor.

Zinn wrote the forward to A People's History of the Supreme Court (1999) by Peter Irons. A People's History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence (2001) by Ray Raphael is part of a New Press series edited by Zinn. This series also includes A People's History of the Vietnam War (2003) by Jonathan Neale, A People's History of the Civil War (2006) by David Williams, A People’s History of Sports in the United States (2008) by Dave Zirin, The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World (2008) by Vijay Prashad, and the forthcoming A People’s Art History of the United States (2009) by Nicolas Lampert and John Couture.

Zinn’s Influence?

Quite a number of histories offer the phrase “a people’s history” as part of the title, but that phrase neither guarantees Zinn’s influence, nor his imprimatur. Nor have I found reasons to believe that he has objections to any of these texts.

The title of Michael Parenti’s The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People's History of Ancient Rome (2003) may reflect the popularity of Zinn’s book, but the author’s Democracy for the Few (1974), now in its eighth edition, was already popular when A People’s History of the United States first appeared.

Denis R. Janz, General Editor of A People’s History of Christianity, 7 vols, does not mention Zinn in “What is People’s History.” Nor do I know Howard Zinn’s relationship to:

The Congo: From Leopold to Kabila: A People's History (2002) by Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja.
A People's History of Science: Miners, Midwives, and “Low Mechaniks” (2005) by Clifford D. Conner.
The Blood Never Dried: A People's History of the British Empire (2006) by John Newsinger.

Predecessors

A People's History of England (1938) by A. L. Morton was out before Howard Zinn came of age. Page Smith’s eight volume People’s History also precedes Zinn’s entry into this stream of titles. It began with Smith’s A New Age Now Begins: A People's History of the American Revolution in 1976 and concluded with Redeeming the Time: A People’s History of the 1920s and the New Deal (1987).

Fragments from Bartolomé de Las Casas

I have remarked previously that Voices of a People’s History of the United States (2004) by Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove offers a generous selection from the writings of Bartolomé de Las Casas. There are extracts from The Devastation of the Indies: A Brief Account (1542) and In Defense of the Indians (1550). These are placed in company with extracts from the diary of Columbus and a brief passage from Eduardo Galeano’s Memory of Fire (1982) in a chapter designed to correspond with chapter one of A People’s History. Both Voices of a People’s History and A People’s History have twenty-four chapters.

Zinn and Arnove’s assertion that Columbus “is universally portrayed as a heroic figure” (29) is much harder to swallow now than when Zinn wrote the first edition of A People’s History (1980). But they are describing his portrayal for generations of Americans up through the time they were in school. Several pages later, in the headnote to the selections from Las Casas, they observe that “the idealized, romanticized picture of Columbus has begun to be reconsidered” (35).

Estimating the Dead

The passage they offer from The Devastation of the Indies focuses upon depopulation and Spanish cruelties. Bartolomé de Las Casas depicts the islands of the Caribbean as a paradise formerly heavily populated by peoples that were “docile and open to doctrine, very apt to receive our Holy Catholic faith” (36). Las Casas arrived in Hispaniola in his eighteenth year in 1502, and claims to recall such a population of Indians that “it is as though God had crowded into these lands the great majority of mankind” (36). He offers general estimates of the aboriginal population of three million on Hispaniola (36), as many as one million on San Juan and Jamaica (40), and “a countless number” on the island of Cuba (42).

We can estimate very surely and truthfully that in the forty years that have passed, with the infernal actions of the Christians, there have been unjustly slain more than twelve million men, women, and children. In truth, I believe without trying to deceive myself that the number of the slain is more like fifteen million.
Las Casas, in Voices of A People’s History, 37.

Few scholars today accept these numbers, although Zinn advances them in A People’s History with minimal discussion and argument, as noted in “Howard Zinn on Depopulation.” Las Casas’s tendency toward hyperbole should give us pause. When Las Casas declares that Hispaniola “was perhaps the most densely populated place in the world” (35), we might take it as an effort towards census. But we find more exceptionalism on the next page: “of all the infinite universe of humanity, these people are the most guileless, the most devoid of wickedness and duplicity, the most obedient and faithful” (36). They lack only the gospel, or “they would be the most fortunate people in the world” (36). The Spanish, on the other hand, are the world’s most vile sinners: “their insatiable greed and ambition [is] the greatest ever seen in the world” (37). The most people, who are the most innocent, were abused by those with the most greed. Did Las Casas have enough experience throughout the world to render such judgment? Such comparisons come not from his breadth of knowledge, but from the ethnocentrism and cultural arrogance that he both advances and critiques.

Spanish Cruelties

Las Casas blames the killing and cruelty on the Spanish motives, and the opportunities for wealth out of proportion to individual merit.

Their reason for killing and destroying such an infinite number of souls is that the Christians have an ultimate aim, which is to acquire gold, and to swell themselves with riches in a very brief time and thus rise to a high estate disproportionate to their merits.
Las Casas, in Voices of A People’s History, 37.

He illuminates Spanish greed through a story of Hatuey who fled to Cuba from Hispaniola with many of his people in hopes of escaping the cruelties. Upon learning that the Spanish were coming to Cuba, he conducted a ceremony designed to appeal to the European god.

He had a basket full of gold and jewels and he said: “You see their God here, the God of the Christians. If you agree to it, let us dance for this God, who knows, it may please the God of the Christians and then they will do us no harm.” And his followers said, all together, “Yes, that is good, that is good!” And they danced round the basket of gold until they fell down exhausted. Then their chief, the cacique Hatuey, said to them: “See there, if we keep this basket of gold they will take it from us and will end up killing us. So let us cast away the basket into the river.” They all agreed to do this, and they flung the basket of gold into the river that was nearby.
Las Casas, in Voices of A People’s History, 40-41.

Later Hatuey was burned at the stake, but was given the opportunity to convert to Catholicism when he was “tied to the stake.” When told that Heaven was populated by Christians, he declared a preference for Hell. Las Casas comments, “Such is the fame and honor that God and our Faith have earned through the Christians who have gone out of the Indies” (41). Las Casas is clear. His concern was to save the souls of the Indians. This mission was rendered more difficult by the rapid depopulation of the aboriginals at the hands of Spanish who should have been model Christians, but appeared rather to be servants of their own greed.

Reader Response, Polls, Goals

Patriots and Peoples has been online nearly four months. Initially I thought to create a public notebook along the lines of the notebooks I’ve filled much of the past twenty years. These are the simple spiral bound sort in which I take notes on my reading, write drafts of future articles, create bibliographies of books and articles to read, and even pen the occasional poem. Sometimes the writing is of a personal nature, sometimes it takes an objective tone. I conceived Patriots and Peoples as a focused continuation of this practice in a new format, one that is readily shared.

I quickly realized that the nature of a public blog discourages writing that is too rough—and much of that in my stack of spiral bound notebooks is terribly unpolished. It became clear that Patriots and Peoples could adopt a flexible, often informal tone, but that some of the standards for published scholarship would apply, including laborious grammar, syntax, and spell checking. Such practices as noting authorship and publication information for texts and ideas taken from others is second nature. Information without a source is none such; it is rumor, hearsay, propaganda.

After attracting one or two readers, I hungered for more. I have had modest success attracting a few. According to Technorati, this blog climbed into the top million in just over two months of existence. Then Reuters picked up my story "Origins of Malaria," bringing a few new readers while offering future prospects of many more.

Poll Results

Within a few days of starting Patriots and Peoples, I set up two reader polls. These asked whether the respondents had read Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen's A Patriot's History of the United States, in one poll, and Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States in the other. The answer selections revealed the underlying questions was one of evaluation. Identical possible answers were offered to participants: no; yes, and I think it is terrific; yes, and I think it is okay; yes, and I disagree with its slant; yes, and I think it is terrible. Do readers of these books like them, and how strongly?

The raw data is tabulated in the table below.

Text	Respondents	Terrific	Okay	Disagreeable	Terrible	Not Read
Patriot’s	36	3	2	3	2	26
People’s	42	16	7	2	8	9

The data suggest that nearly half (48.5%) of those that have read Zinn’s A People’s History think it is terrific. Alternately, it suggests that my blog is more successful attracting readers that like Zinn than attracting those that dislike his work. The latter appears consistent with the overwhelming proportion of respondents that have not read A Patriot’s History (72.2%). Readers of A Patriot’s History, on the other hand, appear evenly split between those that like it and those that do not. But, ten responses are too few to warrant any conclusions.

We might say that these two polls show that readers of Zinn that also read this blog generally consider A Patriot’s History a book of merit, while there are very few readers of Schweikart and Allen that are also readers of this blog.

Blog Focus and Goals

More than half of my posts so far have addressed Schweikart and Allen’s text, while approximately one quarter have concerned Zinn. I have been critical of both texts, but my criticism of A Patriot’s History has been more extensive and detailed. Still, twice I have dealt with both books together on a particular topic and found Schweikart and Allen a little better than Zinn either in accuracy (“Sixteenth Century Spain: Contrasting Images”) or in attention to a topic that I believe merits attention (“November 29: This Day in History”).

Although I’ve assigned Zinn’s text in a college history course, I bought Schweikart and Allen only when I examined it closely enough in the bookstore to observe apparent distortions of a field in which I have at least minimal competence (a subject upon which I lecture several times per year): depopulation of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. As should be clear to regular readers by this point, my initial sense that A Patriot’s History evinced serious and significant flaws in its representation of this scholarship has proven an accurate assessment. Nevertheless, Schweikart and Allen’s text has facilitated the augmentation of my knowledge in this field. Zinn has much less to say on this topic, presenting debatable figures with minimal discussion.

I am not predisposed to accept the perspectives in A Patriot’s History without the full measure of skepticism. But I am no less skeptical of Zinn's claims. I make clear to students reading Zinn for my classes that I think of it as a readable text with which they could find much to disagree. In the discussion of Zinn's insights and distortions, both consequences of his biases, history students develop critical perspectives both on the past itself and upon the processes of attempting to represent it accurately. Both books merit extensive criticism, unless one would prefer to ignore them altogether—an approach that more than likely goes hand in hand with ignoring this blog as well. Both books also have their merits and their enthusiastic readers.

Both A Patriot's History and A People's History contrast markedly with the standard textbooks that pretend to be neutral or objective are which are generally unreadable. Few such textbooks ever appear on the shelves of a bookstore that is not either a college bookstore where the customers are driven with minimal choice, or used bookstores that lack standards for rejection in their buying practices. Big Box bookstores and smaller local ones readily stock Zinn's People's History, as well as some of his other texts, and they readily stock Schweikart and Allen's Patriot's History too.

I am disappointed that I have attracted to Patriots and Peoples so few readers of A Patriot’s History. Hopefully more will come in time. Of course, A People’s History was first published in 1980, while A Patriot’s History was released in 2004. Zinn’s text has had far longer to attract readers. From a modest effort to keep a public notebook, my writing here has provoked the hope of stimulating conversation among and between conservatives and liberals. Those that see in either book an antidote to prevailing biases in history and public discourse are my ideal readers.

The Problem of Inconsistency

I managed to sustain a steady output of two to three articles per week from mid-November to the beginning of February, and then had an unproductive gap. I hope the productivity is returning, but knowing my patterns, I can be assured that dry spells will come again. These are not planned vacations, but times when certain forms of writing elude me. Sometimes I cannot write at all. Call it writer’s block if you will; it can be an infuriating malady.