We Still Need Howard Zinn
lithub.com
lithub.com
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/howard-zinns-history...
At no point have I seen anyone point out a factual error that Zinn has made, only that people don't like the conclusions he draws from those facts. Another commonly repeated point is that there are other historical works that do a better job than A People's History. That is almost certainly true as well, but that claim is no more relevant than pointing out that there are better scientific works that do a better job than Einstein's "Relativity: The Special and General Theory".
Having read A People's History, the very beginning of the book explicitly states that he is biased, that bias is something very hard to escape in almost any social study and is present among almost all historical literature whether the author admits it or not, and that the difference between his book and other historical works is that he makes the conscious decision to be biased from the point of view of the people who were conquered as opposed to writing from the point of view of the people who did the conquering.
Certainly Zinn has likely made some errors, but none of them are in the link you provided (as far as I could tell).
This is not the limit of criticism of history scholarship. Braudel's Civilization and Capitalism isn't considered dated because of factual errors but instead because it over-represents a particular narrative and analysis style that fails to paint a detailed picture of things.
History scholarship is absolutely not a list of facts. It is the construction of a narrative from source material. A text that is 100% truthful to fact can still be entirely bogus scholarship (I'm not saying that Zinn's is).
I happen to disagree with a lot of his political opinions but I think it's very important that APHUS exists.
Come to think about of it actually, it's also similar with the criticism of David Graeber's (RIP) book "Debt", which usually focus on "well, he wrote something really wrong paragraph about Apple, so you can't believe anything he writes really"
Thats now how history works at all man. Pretty much all writing on history goes into the metaphorical dust bin maybe 20-40 years after it is created but the "dust bin" isn't a dead place that no one should ever explore, its the world of historiography, and understanding how people understood their point in time at different points in time. No one should read a history book like its the bible handed down from on high, they should read it knowing the authors biases, the contemporary views on the authors work from other experts in the field, and an understanding of their own knowledge level and context. The reality is that a huge amount of K-12 American history education is propaganda and for someone with a K-12 American history background this book is a very compelling read that provides a useful counter narrative to what they have been taught, the main function of which is not to blindly trust the words in the book, but to understand the practice of history not as a recitation of facts but an analysis of past events with a specific point of view, and how different points of view from authors with different motivations can give different views of the past. IMO, this really brought the field of history to life for me.
GP may have phrased it a bit dismissively but I read that comment as making the same argument you do: no given history book contains the final truth.
As for GP's comment that Zinn has no place today -- you offer a more nuanced take. But we're in a moment replete with valorizing paeans to Zinn (like TFA) and calls for using People's History more widely as a _textbook_. Maybe, given that we are 40 years on from it's writing, that's not the best move.
Zinn decided to bias the viewpoint towards oppressed people, the same way many textbooks bias it in favor of the 'winning' party. While I felt like I got a pretty decent education in high school history, Zinn didn't invalidate what I learned but showed quite clearly how these things affected others.
When I was in school it would have been highly controversial to compare chattel slavery or the conquering of the New World to the holocaust but the reality is the severity is similar, just on a different timeframe.
There is no such thing as history without a political philosophy. Herodotus had one, Thucydides had one and Zinn has one. This is all fine and good. The issue is when people come along and say "He tells the truth, a truth not often told".
It's not the truth. It's a contribution. In the medium-to-long run, parts of Zinn's writings will be accepted and other parts will be rejected. In fact, this has already happened. The problem is people selling Zinn as "the last word," as if we can all stop thinking about history now because Zinn finished the job. In reality, history is a never-ending process. Historical theses can be more right than others but none of them are "the truth".
His memoir is literally titled: "You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train"
The above OP quite literally said, “>the< truth” immediately followed by “>a< truth not often told.”
I find it baffling that the general HN/Reddit sentiment is anti-Zinn given the oft cited ideals of “contrarianism” that much of the community holds.
That doesn’t mean take everything said a face value but rather assign some worth to a work that told the stories of people that were hidden from the usual, “winner writes the tales” style of history writing.
I know, for me personally, Zinn’s work was a lot more engaging to read while balancing scholarly repute. This is certainly something from which other history books could learn.
Studying history (even as a non-historian) is impossible unless you are constantly revising your views, and that's not possible if you only know one source.
I'm sure there are plenty of people who read Howard Zinn critically, as part of a "balanced diet" of other sources. However, I think that among the type of people who have only read one general history of the U.S. since high school, but are still happy to preach to you from it, A People's History of the United States is probably the most popular selection.
See also: people who watched a Ken Burns documentary
For starters, presumably, the founding documents, but after that (and Zinn) I haven't come across a lot of accessible general histories in general discussion. One could perhaps compensate with the AAA biographies of famous presidents and the like (David McCullough, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Robert Caro etc) but that doesn't really get you an alternate narrative arc.
In Sapiens, Yuval Harari makes the point that one of the most powerful things human society does is make myths.
One of the most powerful myths in American society has been the idea that the United States was based on a belief in human freedom and equality from the beginning.
While, definitely not completely true, it was powerful enough that it actually catalyzed the fight against a lot of the injustices. See for example Abraham Lincoln's speeches or Martin Luther King, Jr's speeches where they are always appealing to people to live up to the ideals of America's founding[0].
Zinn directly attacked that myth in his work. And he attacked it at the point where he could do the most damage, in the early education of American youth.
The loss of this myth has had profound consequences. Before, we had a shared myth that everyone American, across all faiths could appeal to. Now there really isn't one. A significant portion believes that America was never great because it was hopelessly oppressive and all of American success is based on oppression. I am worried we are starting to see the emergence of another faction. One that is proud to be American, but justifies American greatness through "might makes right", and not through any appeal to principles of freedom. Thus this second group would say American became great, because it was oppressive. Both of these views are in contrast to the previous view that America was great, because of the founding principles of freedoms, despite the history of oppression which is to America's shame.
With no appeal to either religion or a founding myth that unites people, I feel American divisions will get even more nasty in the future.
0. "In a sense we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."
> Curious how so many self styled "contrarians" and "free thinkers" dislike his work without reading it.
There is a lot less of this here than you think. I think the name of site is misleading you.
You can readily find left, class-centered histories of the United States that aren't criticized the way Zinn is. You can yourself scorn ideologically-motivated superficial criticism of Zinn from the right, if that's your thing! But you shouldn't dismiss the substantive critiques. Sometimes, being a good read is a tip-off that something's amiss.
> Wineburg, one of the world's top researchers in the field of history education, raises larger issues about how history should be taught. He says that Zinn's desire to cast a light on what he saw as historic injustice was a crusade built on secondary sources of questionable provenance, omission of exculpatory evidence, leading questions and shaky connections between evidence and conclusions.
A similar warning needs to be leveled at the 1619 Project, which likewise focuses more on rhetoric than careful scholarship: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_1619_Project
In particular, the lead essay originally stated that protecting slavery was “one primary reason the colonists fought the American Revolution.”
After extensive criticism from scholars, the Times edited that sentence to read that protecting slavery was “one primary reason some of the colonists fought the American Revolution.”
Of course the “one primary ... some of...” construction dilutes they assertion beyond recognition. The Times defended this as just the addition of “two words” but it undermines the central thesis of the lead essay. Think of the evidence required to support the first assertion, compared to the second assertion. To support the first assertion, you needed evidence that protecting slavery was a primary reason for the colonists as a whole. To support the revised assertion, you need only find some colonists, among millions, with that motivation.
The 1619 articles on the economic importance of slavery, moreover, are not written by an economist and do not represent the consensus views of economists. Here, the Zinnesque aspect really comes out. It is an often overlooked and very important fact that slavery made some politically powerful people very rich, and those people had a major hand in fashioning America. But most people can’t trace any wealth back to that time. Politically, it would be better to convince people that they continue to benefit from slavery having existed. So the essays are forced to make the far more tenuous claim that America traces its exceptional wealth to slavery. But of course it defies basic economics to suggest you can make a society—as opposed to specific oligarchs—richer through non-free, non-market labor. That’s where it helps to have an author write the essays who isn’t an economist! https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-1619-project-tells-a-false-...
I kind of hated a People's History, but if you take it as a project to show that you can write multiple narratives of American history that are true if you squint at them at just the right angle, it more or less succeeded in its aim. American high school textbooks are just as terrible if not moreso.
> We need Howard Zinn now more than ever. Not for the sake of romance or to construct another hero in history. We need his insights, his politics, and his commitment to the struggle for a better world.
Unless your position is that there is such a thing as an unbiased history or that Zinn presented historical falsehoods (not a usual position even among Zinn's critiques), I don't think the valid points you raise on the 1619 project rebut the thesis of the OP.
Lucas Morels' rebuttal of Nikole Hannah-Jones central essay in the 1619 project is a must read and much better supported by evidence:
https://americanmind.org/essays/america-wasnt-founded-on-whi...
At the time of the American Revolution, the British public has started raising its voice against slavery. At the same time, slavery was the backbone of the future US economy and many of the US founding fathers were slaveholders. I think it's very valuable to know these facts, and the 1619 project does a good job of pointing them out. Whether the perpetuation of slavery was "a primary reason" for the American Revolution or not is IMHO of secondary importance in that context.
As an aside, I think the reason why the 1619 project is being attacked so hard is not because of its supposed sloppiness but because it puts a spotlight on the role of slavery in US history, and apparently that's something that many people cannot accept.
> The 1619 articles on the economic importance of slavery, moreover, are not written by an economist and do not represent the consensus views of economists.
Why does it matter which discipline the expert belongs to? The economic bits were based on analysis by Matthew Desmond, a Princeton University sociologist.
> So the essays are forced to make the far more tenuous claim that America traces its exceptional wealth to slavery.
I think you're setting up a straw man here. The economics part establishes the role of slavery in the early US economy, and it does a good job of doing that. One fascinating bit that I found there is that British financial markets traded bonds backed by slaves as collateral. As a consequence, the dollar value of slavery can be easily established. Here's the precise quote:
State-chartered banks would take this slave-backed mortgage from this plantation owner, and this one, and this one. And they would bundle that debt and make something called a bond. And they would sell those bonds to investors all over the Western world. And so when owners made payments on their mortgages, the investors got a little return. Today, we call this securitizing debt, and it’s really a way to kind of sink global capital into the American slave economy at the time. [...] So at the height of slavery, the combined value of enslaved workers exceeded that of all the railroads and all the factories in the nation.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/30/podcasts/1619-slavery-cot...
True. But keep in mind that Britain didn't abolish slavery in its colonies until 57 years after the American Revolution. The idea that this was a "primary" concern back in 1776 is contrived.
> At the same time, slavery was the backbone of the future US economy
That is wildly overstated, see below.
> and many of the US founding fathers were slaveholders. I think it's very valuable to know these facts, and the 1619 project does a good job of pointing them out.
True, and agreed.
> Whether the perpetuation of slavery was "a primary reason" for the American Revolution or not is IMHO of secondary importance in that context.
If it was presented as an overlooked thread of narrative about the founding, that would be one thing. But the premise behind the lead essay, and calling it the "1619 project" is that protecting slavery was "one primary reason" for the revolution. Also, it's a critical distinction. My home country declared independence in 1971. Yes, "some" people were motivated by self-interest. But the "primary reason" was because we were being oppressed by a far-away Pakistan.
> As an aside, I think the reason why the 1619 project is being attacked so hard is not because of its supposed sloppiness but because it puts a spotlight on the role of slavery in US history, and apparently that's something that many people cannot accept.
Slavery and Indian removal featured prominently in history class even when I was a kid in Virginia in the 1990s. There is a lot more we could teach--we tend to act like slavery just ended with Lincoln, and give short shrift to the end of Reconstruction, Jim Crow, etc. But the reason 1619 Project is getting so much push back is that, in Zinn-esque fashion, it uses history as a pretext to attack the constitution and capitalism.
> I think you're setting up a straw man here. The economics part establishes the role of slavery in the early US economy, and it does a good job of doing that.
Not really. First, the essay relies heavily on a work by Ed Baptist, who is neither an accountant nor an economist and makes numerous grave errors where he double- and triple- counts the contribution of slavery to the economy: http://bradleyahansen.blogspot.com/2019/09/a-guide-to-econom...
http://bradleyahansen.blogspot.com/2016/12/capitalism-and-sl... ("Ultimately, the value of cotton production was equal to about 6% of GDP.").
> One fascinating bit that I found there is that British financial markets traded bonds backed by slaves as collateral. As a consequence, the dollar value of slavery can be easily established... So at the height of slavery, the combined value of enslaved workers exceeded that of all the railroads and all the factories in the nation.
Yes, it is interesting, but ask yourself--why is it presented this way, rather than as a percentage of GDP, as above? The reason is because in what was still a pre-industrial economy, the value of "all the railroads and all the factories in the nation" wasn't very much compared to the whole economy. A free person working on a farm is part of the economy, but isn't a value-producing asset. When most of the economy is self-sustaining farmers, looking at the value of capital assets doesn't tell you much about how important something is to the economy as a whole.
If slavery had been so economically important, ending it should have at least temporarily resulted in an economic catastrophe. But you can't even see on the chart of GDP-per-capita when the U.S. and the U.K. ended slavery. Not even a blip: https://fee.org/media/35711/gdp-per-capita.png. Destroying what was supposedly half the country's "capital stock" didn't result in economic collapse because that was always a legal and financial fiction. It was labor the whole time, and the proper comparison would be to look at the output of free versus non-free labor.
In fact, if you look at the data, America got dramatically richer when it ended slavery--as economic theory would predict: https://www.econlib.org/archives/2014/09/ending_slavery.html
You can't take a free society and make it more prosperous by the institution of slavery, but if you have a thinly-populated continent and eager export markets to play with you can certainly generate great profits, howbeit unevenly distributed and with the slave class excluded completely from per-capita considerations because they are themselves considered property.
This whole post seems like a rather forced and tendentious diversion from the topic.
This is true! But it probably doesn’t support the assertion that “out of slavery — and the anti-black racism it required — grew nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional: it’s economic might, its industrial power...”
The 1619 project makes a ton of very good points. But it also makes a bunch of over-the-top assertions. But it can’t back those up. Ignoring those is a motte-and-bailey defense of the work.
> This whole post seems like a rather forced and tendentious diversion from the topic.
It’s on my mind because I have kids and the 1619 project will be this generation’s People’s History.
Hobsbawm still frequently appears on university reading lists for history majors. I remember the trilogy as engaging and easy to read for an outsider to the field. He is less polemical than Zinn, even if his political sympathies are similar.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Hobsbawm
Favorable mentions of Hobsbawm from AskHistorians:
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5bcvbe/i_am_...
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/efznsq/is_er...
No shade to Howard Zinn, but he, like pretty much every other historian, didn't nearly have that level of respect.
I think you could tie a lot of the "the ends justify the means" attitude of current leftists to Zinn.
As a former history major, I can confirm that Zinn's work, while well intentioned, isn't much respected in academia. He brought a useful new perspective but didn't back up his arguments with strong evidence.
Poor evidence, however, doesn't discredit Zinn's central thesis about American history.
For more rigorous approach American history I would recommend Eric Foner:
http://www.ericfoner.com/books/index.html
Although his focus is more global, Eric Hobsbawm is one of the most influential historians of the twentieth century. His "The Age of..." are worth a read"
https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/eric-hobsbawm-t...
The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848 The Age of Capital: 1848-1875 The Age of Empire: 1875-1914 The Age of Extremes: 1914-1991
Who are current writers like him?
The mirror image of Ayn Rand. I wonder if there is anyone at the intersection of their fandoms.
Equating the two is... super off base. Crucially, you can make any point you want when writing a novel, since you set up the world and the characters and get to choose the reactions of everything. Marx at least wrote about the real world, and our ability to critique that work rests at least in part upon its claims about the real world.
As to writing whatever you want, Marx did write the most insane and damaging things in his work. His work, in fact, led directly to tens of millions of deaths in 20th century, and the way I see it, the damage is not yet over, as some idiot somewhere will always be tempted to live off somebody else's money, just like Marx himself did.
Oh well. :(
Marx, for all intents and purposes, created what we today would consider "communism". That is, from a academic perspective, and not whatever goes as "communism" in American pop culture.
> the damage is not yet over, as some idiot somewhere will always be tempted to live off somebody else's money
The above is a terribly ironic criticism, considering how Ayn Rand lived out her life living off of the dime of the government.
> His work, in fact, led directly to tens of millions of deaths in 20th century
If we presuppose that any death, as a result of the actions of a state claiming to be using a given economic system, is attributed to said economic system we should be counting honestly. Every death caused by Capitalist countries, both domestically and abroad, should also be counted.
Every person that has ever starved to death under capitalism should be counted. Whether there's a direct shortage of food, or the person can't afford the food available, doesn't really matter. A person isn't receiving food when acting inside the system and thus died.
Then consider the imperialism carried out by these capitalist states. Millions upon millions of native inhabitants of Africa, South-East Asia, Southern America, and North America have been all but wiped out by capitalism.
What about WWII? Because in the of-cited number of "100 million killed by Communism" several wars are counted. In WWII a major contributor was the failure of the capitalistic system in Europe after WWI.
I could go on, but I think the point has been made.
You can count, but I can tell you right now, you wouldn't like the comparison. :-)
* Just to take a single point: 72k/deaths per year in just the US because of lack of access to health care.
Socialist of today want to extend democracy into the economic sphere - which today are totally undemocratic. That is, to actually give the workers control of the means of production, not to just change the bosses from capitalists to state bureaucrats.
Today, under capitalism, we already have democracy in the economic sphere. Each of us already has single-use votes proportional to our means (i.e. money). If you want more votes to use, do something valuable so that others vote for you (i.e. pay you). If a worker wants durable rights to the means of production, they can trade some votes for stock.
Now, one might cry foul that not everyone has the same voice under this system. Not everyone has the same voice in the US legislative branch on account of the Senate's design. So it goes. Least bad solution. Etc.
Sincerely, please point me somewhere that I might read about why this socialism you profess won't degenerate into sclerotic totalitarianism within two generations. What has changed about people's hearts so that the noble experiment you want to run (with other people's resources) won't cause the same calamities that it has before? As folks often quip, insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results.
I have no idea how you can write such a thing with a straight face. This is not democratic in any way shape or form.
> funny way to describe theft by the majority.
The concept of private-property is not ordained by God, it's a social construct upheld by force in favour of the propertied.
> Sincerely, please point me somewhere that I might read about why this socialism you profess won't degenerate into sclerotic totalitarianism within two generations.
Well you are making the suggestion so I think it would be more appropriate for you to supply some basis to it. Please don't be lazy and point to states like the USSR that was never ever democratic to begin with.
What I can do however is link to the critics, who were socialists, of the totalitarian regimes when it happened, like for example Bertrand Russell's "The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism" that was published in 1920, only 3 years after the October revolution.
http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/17350/pg17350.txt
You can just read the preface and skim the first few pages (in Russell's famous easy-to-read writing style) to get an idea of the scathing criticism he delivered.
e.g:
"But the method by which Moscow aims at establishing Communism is a pioneer method, rough and dangerous, too heroic to count the cost of the opposition it arouses. I do not believe that by this method a stable or desirable form of Communism can be established. Three issues seem to me possible from the present situation. The first is the ultimate defeat of Bolshevism by the forces of capitalism. The second is the victory of the Bolshevists accompanied by a complete loss of their ideals and a régime of Napoleonic imperialism. The third is a prolonged world-war, in which civilization will go under, and all its manifestations (including Communism) will be forgotten."
Sure!
What word do you see over and over and over again on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_totalitarian_regimes ?
Of the current countries listed at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_socialist_states half are places where I am glad that I do not live.
> What I can do however is link to the critics...
That socialist intellectuals condemn totalitarianism when it arises from socialist roots is irrelevant. Those victims remain dead and those societies stay shackled no matter how sternly the intellectual writes.
And to be clear, I'm not a Stalinist or want to excuse that regime in any way shape or form, but this hypocrisy regarding "communist/socialist deaths" is a very annoying propaganda tool to dismiss progressive movements.
Progressive movements can be distinct from socialist ones.
Both Marx and Rand have very easy vulnerabilities to critique. Just saying there on equal and opposite ends of some imaginary scale where the truth must lie in the middle and those on the extremes are irrational advocates who write "screeds" is not rational, although it can look like it if you're in a friendly room or say it quickly enough.
– Corey Robin in "The Reactionary Mind"
Doesn't sound like a "deeply pessimistic interpretation of history" to me.
[0]: You Can't be Neutral on a Moving Train, Howard Zinn
As for "pessimistic", well, I'd just say that the facts don't care about your feelings. Powerful institutions are (generally speaking) violent and uncaring towards those without power; ignoring that fact does us all a disservice.
From that moment on, I was no longer a liberal, a believer in the self-correcting character of American democracy. I was a radical, believing that something fundamental was wrong in this country . . . something rotten at the root. The situation required not just a new president or new laws, but an uprooting of the old order, the introduction of a new kind of society—cooperative, peaceful, egalitarian.
I was no longer a liberal, a believer in the self-correcting character of American democracy
Yeah, and he believes that this has to happen through a revolution, because the democratic system can't fix itself _even if the people vote and try to change laws to do so_.
>That's not the same as saying it can't be fixed.
Maybe you call tearing down a system and replacing it wither another 'fixing', but I (and likely most others) certainly don't. At the very least, it's a hell of a lot more pessimistic than reformism.
Reformist and revolutionist actions aren't contradictory, but reform and revolution absolutely are. People who advocate for revolution (which Zinn does in the above quote) fundamentally reject the idea that peaceful, incremental legislative reform could be used to transform the democratic system.
>Social movements and popular unrest effect the electoral process significantly
Sure, but Zinn isn't advocating for that. This bit
>The situation required not just a new president or new laws, but an uprooting of the old order, the introduction of a new kind of society
makes it pretty damn clear that he thinks real change won't come through the electoral process.
Yeah, and that's where I break with Zinn, (because it requires a silly definition of "real" change) but you're wrong if you think he's advocating violent overthrow. He was in favor of civil disobedience. His contemporary Chomsky has been quite clear on this, especially recently, when he's even criticized leftists for defending violence at protests.
To the far-right, everything looks like far-left.
“Objectivity is impossible,” Zinn once remarked, “and it is also undesirable. That is, if it were possible it would be undesirable, because if you have any kind of a social aim, if you think history should serve society in some way; should serve the progress of the human race; should serve justice in some way, then it requires that you make your selection on the basis of what you think will advance causes of humanity.
Reshaping American society may be a fine goal. And, Zinn certainly has been successful at that, but it does not sound like history to me.
It's definitely undesirable to admit the concept is meaningless, then to strive for it. That's just producing propaganda. You know the standards you're going to strive for are arbitrary and just made up of a combination of things you haven't questioned the importance of and things you've decided the importance of, but not only do you cleave to them anyway, but you criticize those who deviate from them as dangerous propagandists.
He thought his job was to create a more rational, more just society, and the narrative he used to connect the events described in his sources was a servant to that. That's the same thing that people who claim objectivity claim to be doing, while they write history as the conflicts between the wealthy and royal.
Claiming "objectivity" is just claiming that someone would be insane or seditious for daring to question the claimant's premises. Claims that objectivity is real inevitably ends in journalists and writers having to be licensed and approved by the government.
I mean, his autobiography is titled "You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train", so I had the impression that Zinn cautioned against attempts at objectivity/neutrality because it often serves the status quo, and actually hides the truth, not because "he believes he serves a higher value than truth," as you say.
At a high level, this seems pretty uncontroversial to me, blind pursuit of "objectivity/neutrality" is not uncommon, and often leads to false equivalences, perpetuates misinformation, and results in real societal harm. For example, see the framing of "the climate change debate" in popular media for decades. Furthermore, in such cases, some parties may passively benefit from such "neutrality", or even actively play a part in creating such a framing in bad faith.
Therefore, if you believe that you exist at a point in time when the oppressed have not had their side of history told, and your aim is to reach "the truth", whether for the sake of greater understanding or for the benefit of society, then it follows that you would need to counterbalance existing biases and even strategize against bad actors to reach the "truth".
It's entirely understandable then, that Zinn's attempts at bottom-up history would be valuable in their time, but if successful they would lose their significance, and their flaws would be more apparent, as new works would build upon, correct, and challenge them.
In that sense, I find Zinn similar to figures like Rachel Carson, who's work was revolutionary in her time, but today would be easy to find flaws in, dissect, and dismiss, but only because we have a better understanding of environmental issues and phenomena.
Anyway, my point is just that it doesn't seem fair to me to say that Zinn believed he served a "higher value than truth," it's not so simple.
" I was not going to be an objective historian, because I didn’t really believe objectivity was possible, nor was it desirable—unless objectivity meant telling the truth as you saw it, not lying, not distorting, not omitting information, and not omitting arguments because they don’t conform to some idea that you have. But if objectivity meant not taking a stand, if objectivity meant presenting data without caring about the social effect of the kind of data you present, at that—I didn’t want that kind of objectivity."
So, the beginning of the quote, which was the basis of the comment I answered, was an excerpt which suggested that he didn't believe in truth. The full quote shows that he was attempting to redefine the word 'objectivity' in order to make himself sound like an iconoclast, and in doing so declare that the general group of historians are shills. So, in a sense, his description of the historians of human history is like the one you've mentioned about Carson in your penultimate paragraph: he finds them easy to attack from his convenient position of hindsight.
Consider an event that created some gain for a country at the expense of a specific group of people. A history book that claims "This event helped the country through so and so" would be biased because it chose to include some piece of history while excluding the other. Similarly, a textbook including the latter part but not the former would also be biased.
Now you may argue that including both consequences of the event would make the textbook unbiased but it actually suffers from the same problem. The very inclusion of any one piece of history is biased because you're making an explicit decision to include some event but not everything else.
I agree with you that we can and should strive to be more objective, while accepting that true objectivity is not possible. However, it's important to understand that at the time of Zinn's writings, history was heavily biased towards one end of the spectrum. The intention of his own biased history was not to balance the scale, but to introduce the overlooked and erased aspects of history into the conversation.
Zinn was basically saying "Look, we can't fit every little aspect of history into what we teach our kids. So if we're going to pick and choose the narratives and lessons that go in their books, we need to choose the ones that will help us avoid the mistakes of the past and shape a more just society. If history is going to influence the world, it should be for the better".
Of course, but that shouldn't be an argument to completely dismiss attempts to be less biased.
You achieve lesser bias by constantly doubting and questioning your priors.
You establish authority and trust by actively communicating to your reader or interlocutor legitimate doubts people should have of even the position you're offering. There is no greater smell that you should be concerned about someone's biases than when they present nothing but certainty and when they craft arguments that deliberately elide contradictory or exculpatory evidence.
I agree, and I explicitly took this position in my initial reply.
> You achieve lesser bias by constantly doubting and questioning your priors.
This is what Zinn was trying to achieve by introducing the parts of history that don't make it into the textbooks.
> You establish authority and trust by actively communicating to your reader or interlocutor legitimate doubts people should have of even the position you're offering.
I'm not a Zinn or a history expert by any means so this is a bit above my pay grade. All I can say is that from some of Zinn's essays I've read, one of his main points was that you need to be critical of the history you're exposed to and try to understand what the text is trying to accomplish. In Zinn's texts he makes what he's trying to accomplish very clear.
> There is no greater smell that you should be concerned about someone's biases than when they present nothing but certainty and when they craft arguments that deliberately elide contradictory or exculpatory evidence.
You're absolutely right. This was the major idea Zinn introduced to history in academia.
It honestly seems to me like you agree with the central thesis of Zinn's writings. A lot of the criticism I've been reading in this post mirrors the same criticism Zinn had of academic history when he first began writing.