A Different Take on "People's History"

When someone (at least my age group) first hears that I'm a history teacher, their most common response is, "That's great!  Do you teach a people's history"?  I start by saying, "Oh yes!  Have you also read Zinn?"  But if they really want to chat about it, I give a longer and more critical answer: "I'm deeply committed to helping students understand oppression.  But honestly, I don't use Zinn.  His painting of history is too black and white, and I'm trying to help my students understand complexity.  My take on "people's history" is not Zinn's.  I don't demonize the powerful or romanticize the people like he does.  I help students think about context, which I think is critical for understanding power, in a way that he fails to do.  To me a true peoples history involves helping students understand why all people have thought, felt, and acted as they have, and Howard Zinn doesn't serve this purpose". 

Michael Kazin, a historian of populism and a leftist, writes that Zinn is "bad history... Zinn reduces the past to a Manichean fable... pitting 99% of the people against a conspiratorial elite of 1% - a premise better suited to a conspiracy mongers website than to a work of scholarship".  A harsh indictment, but the truth is, I agree with Kazin.  I would probably only use Zinn in the same way I use some bad textbooks: I would ask students to compare his version of an event to a more contextualized, less ideologically driven version, ask them to determine which sources are more trustworthy and why, and perhaps have them rewrite some passages.   

Zinn, in seeking to highlight oppression, created a history of good and bad which, in its radical oversimplification and misrepresentation, failed to actually help people understand why oppression existed and how it functioned.  Zinn can tell our students that oppression happened, and that resistance also happened.  But he can't help our students understand what we're trying to help them understand: why and how did historical events occur, including oppression and resistance?  What historical contexts allowed for harmful ethics to evolve?  Where did oppressive ideas come from, and why have they made sense, not only to elites, but to the people as well?  

Zinn's history also homogenizes social groups.  We know from educational psychology that multicultural education for young children leads them to develop stereotypic thinking if the stories they read homogenize groups of people, even if that homogenization is designed to highlight cultural beauty.  Social groups - be they slave owners or abolitionists - need to be portrayed in their complexity not only for the sake of historical accuracy, but for psychological and societal health.  We aren't helping students become good citizens who can meaningfully navigate and contribute to society if they learn to homogenize republicans and democrats, the rich and the poor, or any other group. The stark contrast of good and bad in Zinn is not only bad history, it leads to bad historical thinking, and perhaps even enforces the stereotypic thinking that we're trying to diminish in our students.  

A true peoples history requires rich and realistic portrayals of social heterogeneity rather than homogenization.  It also requires contextualization and providing students with the historical thinking skills to analyze context.  Contextualization is dual: there is the contextualization of the moment - what is happening directly around people that shapes their thoughts and actions - and the deeper contextualization that involves delving into historical causality: what historical contexts have shaped the societies and cultures that produce individuals?  This is the work of historians, but Zinn doesn't provide such work. 

Peter Seixas, a renowned scholar of historical thinking, writes that "Ironically, during the same period of time that Zinn's book went through five printings, academic historiography was undergoing a major shift in North America, to include diverse subaltern populations: women, workers, and ethnic and national minorities".  Academically respected historians today do not write the consensus, nation building history of the 1950's that Zinn heroically and passionately fought to debunk: as Daniel Rodgers writes in his profound Age of Fracture, which documents the radical intellectual shifts during the last quarter of the 20th century, they're more likely to be caught in "the long shadow of Michel Foucault".  (As am I...)

Historians of the United States today routinely write stunning histories of labor.  They write about how historical forces shape sexuality and gender roles.  We have recently seen a revolution on the history of emotion, and of the body.  Since the invasion of Iraq, historians have completely re-evaluated their notions of empire and have reframed the history of the US as one of empire building: this is not the far-leftist work of Hardt and Negri so popular seven years ago, but the trend of scholars at Yale, Princeton, and Harvard.  (See Julian Go's Patterns of Empire; Charles Maier's Among Empires, and the stunning book Comanche Empire, which details the workings of a Native American empire so different from Western empires that until now scholars have had trouble even recognizing it as such).  

As a teacher of history, I am also a student of history.  I am a student of understanding the people - all of them, through a deep analysis of the historical contexts that shaped them.  This is my understanding of a true peoples history, and as a teacher, my task is to provide students with the skills and the content that will allow them to thoughtfully consider the people in their many manifestations.